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Xion EARLIER, Xion had been preoccupied with her thoughts. Normally she was simply occupied with them, being her own thoughts, a complex mess of wants and desires and urges and a pasiche of those floating around her.

For many people, Castle Oblivion was constantly eroding their memory, nibbling away at the back of their psyche. For Xion, surrounded by people who expected her 'a specific way', she found herself most grounded and most 'Herself' there.

Then again, she was 'born' there. It only made sense she'd be comfortable in that sort of atmosphere.

But nobody in Castle Oblivion, save the comatose newcomer maybe possibly probably, could answer her questions. And she was...

Well, beyond a very very strong heart even completely comatose, Xion couldn't get a read on her beyond the fact that she was 'like touching a hot pan'. Asking Larxene for advice was always helpful but rarely free, and Namine was caring, but busy. Xion longed (A feeling tingling at the edge of her skin, an itch on her palms and the arches of her feet that could be scratched only by doing something) for someone else to speak to. Someone who knew things! Someone who could explain things.

Someone who would listen, too. A curious mix.

"Oh, I know!" Xion jumps up with a start, moving to her bleached white closet to select some of her new clothes. "I'll go see Lilian. I bet she's not busy."

NOW...

The Corridors of Darkness aren't subtle eminations or usefully accurate without any sort of idea of where you were going before. The tenebrous realm of dark creatures merely 'skimmed' as a pathway between places, like a horror movie monster stepping out of the shadows or a closet. Sympathetically close places were easiest, but surely Lilian lived in a wonderfully posh place, gentle and serene, its inhabitants kind. Surely she doens't live in a castlevania ninja death mansion.

Front-flipping into realspace, Xion cups her fingers around her mouth to shout, thinks better, and merely 'stage whispers'. "Lilian? Are you awake? I'm here for a talk!"
Lilian Rook     Xion appears somewhere that, immediately, strikes her as 'old'. Not 'ancient'. Old. Somehow, the whole place has the air of a venerable heirloom grandfather clock --an expensive relic from another time, aged gracefully, carefully maintained, and worth more now than it was then. Almost antique, save for the steady, functional heartbeat at its core.

    It's a house though. A mansion, obviously. Not the four story McMansions that quasi-suburbanites pay millions for. Something built for an entire extended family to live under one roof. Probably not incredibly well insulated, given a slight, niggling chill in any given spot, but baroque, glass and silver braziers and chandeliers are at least electric. For whatever reason, though, they're all turned to the absolute lowest setting, filling halls and rooms with a dim, shadowy, dying-fire orange glow. Enough to see by, but not enough to see Well.

    She appears to be on a third storey landing, going by how she can lean over the central bannister and see multiple flights of stairs curving back and forth to another one below, and then to an entrance hall below, barely visible at all. Deep reddish walls around her almost glow under the low light, with the mahogany doors and accents almost disappearing into the dark. The circular landing splits off into multiple narrow halls, with the best sense of direction to be found coming from the ornaments arranged on tables between them. A crystal vase filled with a number of strange and unfamiliar flowers in shades of ultraviolet and iridescent, where little shadowed things swim in the water. An unfathomably complicated open assembly of gears and pins and rings studded with gems like the interior of a pocket watch, revolving slowly on its own on twelve different axis. A trio of pewtwer busts arranged with their own silver plates and red candles. A painting of . . . a forest. Somewhere. Dark. Winter. The trees don't look quite right. A single tiny figure in the middle is the only real colour. He looks hopelessly lost, and trees loom over him as colossi. Staring at it long enough makes one increasingly feel like they share the tiny, nameless wanderer's perspective, and the painting is larger than it should be. One picks up on details in the shadows. E-

    'Xion you . . . you can't be in my house'.

    Even if she didn't end up right with Lilian, it seems the person she intended figured it out. A brief exchange over the radio ends with 'Don't talk to anyone but me'. Despite that though, Xion doesn't see anyone at all. She hears the occasional tapping of footsteps. The creaking of old wood. The swing and clack of a door. Distant, unintelligible murmuring. It's a big house though.

    Lilian does eventually come to pick her up. She's almost dressed for bed, looking like she had to pull some socks on before coming here, and didn't bother putting her hair back up. She wordlessly gestures Xion to follow along, down a hallway where soft piano music can be heard emanating from.

    "What on Earth are you doing here?" she gets out once they're away from the landing. She sounds a little tired, honestly. It's an odd change from her usual range of tones; it sounds very normal, in the sense that 'even Lilian sleeps sometimes'. "Couldn't you have just used the phone or something? What could possibly be this urgent?" She stops right before the door where the piano music is coming out of, waits to see if something will happen, then continues past it.
Xion When Lilian approaches, Xion is perched almost impossibly not 'against' the bannister railing on the third floor, but walking like a tightrope walker along it, having left two of the designer shoes that Lilian had chosen for her stacked neatly against the side, and walking besocked back and forth, feigning balance-maintenance with each absolutely certain step. She moves to a skip, a jump, a twirl, and a landing like a figure skater, just as Lilian rolls up.

It's... probably entirely surreal.

"Lilian! Hello! I'm so glad you came to meet me. You're..."

Xion stops, dropping onto the bannister lightly with her bottom, and then using her hands to slide herself back onto the floor, next to her shoes. Her bright blue eyes stare at Lilian for an extra-long moment, and then she nods. "It *is* you. Alright. Thanks for seeing me. I was... I had some questions, and I don't think it'd..." She holds up her phone. "It'd work, over the phone? For the stuff I want to talk about, I want to be close. I can't... 'feel' it otherwise."

She follows along quietly after that, waiting when indicated, and practically blending in with the surroundings, carrying her shoes in her hand to soften her footsteps.

When they reach a more secure - or at least quieter - location, Xion looks about, draws in a breath, and steadies. "I had two questions, Lilian, and nobody in Organization XIII can answer. How did you get so strong? And..."

"What does love feel like?"
Lilian Rook     Lilian mostly takes Xion's tightrope walking absurdity in stride. By 'in stride', of course it means 'too tired and preoccupied to bother'. It's Xion, and it's harmless enough.

    A couple of doors down reaches an interior library. Not a 'personal' one, but rather, a space built to house a large number of books back when they were tremendously inconvenient to print and a minority of people could read, thus they should be carefully preserved for many generations and the collection would naturally grow over time. It isn't a third floor library because it goes down the other two floors as well, having its own stairs up and down. Here, the piano can just barely be heard, seeping through the walls, but it's otherwise perfectly quiet, without the hum of a lamp or the ticking of a clock to be heard.

    Lilian has a space of her own simultaneously cleared out and set up to one side of the top floor, where several study desks have been pushed together and books heaped up in organized piles, with a borrowed flux light creating a little island of reading glow. There's several sheets of paper covered in complicated designs, some still with fresh ink, and two reference tomes are open to one side of them, with an uncollected empty mug on the opposite side. The familiar Book of Prophecy is atop one of the piles, but not opened.

    Lilian diverts a little to pull up an armchair with incredibly plush upholstery, carved with intertwining vines all the way around, and sets it out for Xion. She expects whatever she's here about will probably take a while, and stretches as she sits down herself, almost planting her elbows in the inked designs when she leans forward over the desk.

    She looks at Xion a little boredly with the first question. Her eyes glaze over as she starts to formulate the checklist response. The second question causes her to suddenly triple blink and then cough loudly, suddenly covering her mouth to stifle it down before she makes too much noise. There's the sound of a carefully sliding book off in a corner.

    "What a . . . pair of questions. What do either of those have to do with the other?"
Xion A big, big-big library. So much library! So many books!

Xion is practically skipping as she enters the library, gaining an eager and tangible surge of energy as she entered into a place of such slow-simmered knowledge.

"It's like Zexion's deepest dreams... A whole house just for books. I'm sure... well, I'm sure that everyone would really like being here. Even Roxas! Everyone reads and reads, but I'm not really one for it. It's... so much sitting, so much not-doing. I get nervous and itchy and so... empty-feeling if I just sit there and read.

Lilian proffers a chair, and Xion tumbles into it like a piece of laundry, flopping into a draped and relaxed posture.

"It's something I lack, Lilian. Something everyone like me - like Roxas, too - lack."

"Power... Vergil had power, but the sort of thing he is - it's like a demigod. They're beings of incredible power of the Heart. I have power, too, but I'm missing something. Did you ever... Look it up, in the book?"

Xion reaches for the Book of Prophecy, a finger flipping open the cover. "Maybe you didn't know what to look for. I don't know what to look for either, about what I asked."

Her smile is a quiet, empty thing. "About gaining the power of the heart. About love, or any other feeling. I know them by how they make me 'feel', physically. I wanted to know if Love was a power, too. There's so much about it I don't understand. But everyone I've talked to that knows says love is one of the most powerful emotions."
Lilian Rook     "Mmm. Those people did strike me as readers." Lilian replies to Xion, letting her eyes finally fall downwards and to the first and fourth pages of a spread while she flips the second/third back and forth absently with one finger. "Reading all day isn't good for you either. Rather, sitting in one spot. Remember the thing about too much ice cream? A little like that. Moving and doing is good for you, but then when you've done too much of that, reading is another way of occupying your sitting and recovering time."

    She sighs, the exhalation causing the page to finally fall backward under the little puff of air. "I was wondering if you'd bring him up. I was going to tell you that that time doesn't really count. That you and the other two seem plenty strong to me. I'm not sure that the kind of power you're talking about and . . . 'love', are the same thing though." Lilian rubs at her cheek. "Do you really think that man loves anyone? Did he come across to you as the kind of guy who has a heart full of love to give?"

    "What I mean to say is that emotions aren't what your looking for, if Vergil is still bothering you. Strong feelings like love can motivate you a great deal more than anything else, and when people are the most motivated, they obviously get the best results. The point of having different feelings is to motivate the people who have them to do different things, though."

    At this point, she sounds slightly glad to be explaining this rather than 'how to tell if you're in love. "Love as an emotion is only something powerful in pursuit of that love. Chasing after it or defending it or whatever. If there's someone you really love, you might 'get stronger' --fight harder-- if Vergil were out to k- hurt them, but would you really want that?"

    "Besides, even then, feelings can push you to limits you don't ever reach without them, and a lot of the time they're beyond where you'd previously assumed your limits probably were, but all in all, they're still that --your limits. Looking for a cause, like love, isn't a way to get stronger. It's something that motivates you to improve. To take that desire to get stronger from a want to something you're taking seriously, every day."

    "People can find a lot of strength in love, but love isn't what you want to beat someone like that. The opposite, even. It'll make you more reluctant to put things, maybe even yourself, in harm's way."

    The next expression teeters gently back and forth on alternating corners of Lilian's lips, slowly weighed on and off, until she gives up and drops back in her chair with a much bigger sigh this time. "Those limits . . . to begin with, you have to be born special. He was. I am. I think you are. After that, it's a lot of hard work. But you can't just work hard. You have to put that work in the right ways, otherwise you'll waste huge portions of your efforts inefficiently. You have to temper training with practical experience. You have to try new things, and take what knowledge you can get from people better than you --that's something books are good for, by the way. You have to look at each opportunity that comes your way, and think 'how can I make this benefit me?'."

    "It's complicated to plan out, and it's rough to keep that up all the time. The process of getting stronger is 'work'. It consumes energy and willpower, and takes up time maybe you'd like to do other things with. Feeling very strongly about it is how you push on with it anyways. I can't say love has been one of mine. That's certainly not what I have in mind when I think of him. It has nothing to do with what I've . . . planned out, for the immediate future."

    A heavy book drops open on a table below, with a spine-startling thump as if it'd loudly fallen off a shelf. Lilian doesn't pay it the slightest mind, despite the jarring interruption to the quiet. "Is it really that you're out to beat him? Is it something else?"
Xion Xion listens for Lilian's points. She Listens, but at the same time, 'listens' with all the nervous energy of a cooped up child. She fidgits and adjusts constantly, crossing and uncrossing her legs, playing with the zipper on her jacket, rolling a page between thumb and forefinger, a constant low grade buzz of activity. "I have... urges, but..." Xion nods. "Vergil wasn't what I was thinking of, really. I was worried he was strong, and was strong in ways I wasn't, but it didn't really bother me to lose a battle. When I think about it, I still feel a little sick, but it's not the same as what I felt at the time. I let myself forget, ate some pudding, and was alright again. The way he moved, I tried to copy it, but it didn't feel right, so I let it go. What he is, though... He's got a lot of Heart. He's 'motivated'."

Xion lays a hand, splay-fingered, over her heart. "Everyone like me is born special. To even exist, we have to be special. I don't have urges like a 'human'. I don't feel like I 'want this' or 'want that'. I want things, but it's like a checklist that every time I think about it, nothing's checked off, and there's a whole universe of things I've not done, not tried."

"I don't feel unfulfilled, or sad, or even regretful. I don't 'feel' bad or good about it. I don't feel anything. I can't."

"I don't have a Heart."

"I was born like... this." She gestures at heself, dark-haired and blue-eyed, and is serenely expressionless. Dropping this bombshell doesn't move the needle for her at all. Like bagging groceries.

"You take me seriously, Lilian, so I know I had to ask you. Larxene can't tell me, and a lot of other people wouldn't... 'get' me. I think you do. Love and joy, hate and spite, they're just physical feelings to me. I think it's why I couldn't turn the... the thing on. During the test."

Her eyes fall, her hair hiding the open sullenness in her eyes that her voice still betrays. "I don't know how Roxas overcame it. Maybe he's not telling me a secret. Maybe I'm more broken than a normal Nobody."
Lilian Rook     Lilian folds her thumbs together and lays her hands very seriously on her collection of improperly placed desks, straightening her spine and rolling her eyes slightly to the side to think of the right words. When Xion follows 'I have urges' with something depressing rather than something incredibly ominous though, those eyes wander back to her with less stiff reservation in them.

    "I think they just call that depression in usual people." she says, but sort of sighs at herself for that being the first icebreaker that came to mind. Her thumbtips twiddle together for a couple of seconds, as if impatient at their owner for not coming up with something smooth instantly. "So, you're thinking, maybe, that the lack of feeling driving anything you're doing is making you half-ass them? That you can't keep up with people who're really driven and motivated by them, or like you're just 'experiencing' them rather than taking away something you need. Is that about right?"

    "That's . . . difficult to tackle. Especially for someone like me. Like us, really. That kind of duality of 'me' and 'external experiences' is a critical thing to be able to process in this sort of . . . everything." she slowly, verbally feels out. "Some people embrace that kind of thing out of sour grapes or pseudointellectualism, and will give you all sorts of pathetic rubbish about how it's all just absurd chemicals being injected into your brain, getting in the way, but intellectual motivation alone is a poor substitute for living. Without an intrinsic desire someone inside you, you won't go very far. That's something I have to unfortunately inform you is true."

    "I don't think that's something you 'overcome'. I think that's something you find. Not necessarily 'out in the world', I mean something you feel out inside yourself. Like those little muscles you have but you don't ever use independently, and don't have a qualia for trying to use them. A raison d'etre like that is always something vague and unfocused, lying around in the dark, and you have to feel around it, touch it all over, get some idea of its shape, and try to collect it together and build it up."

    "Strong emotions help you a lot in identifying it; when you feel happy and furious and jealous and wistful map out the contours for you. Most people with plenty of feelings still don't get far with it. They're more content to be blown around by however they feel at the moment, as much as you wander around filling out that 'checklist'. Don't start worrying about being 'broken' just yet."

    After so much life advice-giving, Lilian pauses to rub her eyes. "It's hard to put into words. For a long time, all I ever did was do whatever made me feel best at the time. It's . . . gratifying to do that, but not entirely fulfilling. You don't feel like you're going anywhere, and you're not sure what going somewhere feels like. There are things you want, and you get them, but once you start thinking too hard, you arrive at 'is this all there is to it?' I'd probably call it 'desire' that motivated me out of it. Some pride, too. More than a little spite. Quite probably just a little fear, too, of being like that for the rest of my life."

    The sound of the piano, as a sort of noise long faded into the background, briefly stops, calling attention to it by its absence. It seems to give Lilian the flicker of some kind of idea. "Even still, you have some reason to want to try all those things about there. That's not a question or a prompt, by the way; you do. Otherwise, you'd have decided life is too much of a bother, and stopped living. Human beings that too, when there's nothing that motivates them enough to put up with how hard it is to live."
Lilian Rook     "The feelings you experience exist to tell you when you're close to or far from that thing that keeps pulling you back. The thing that sounds more appealing than not existing. Figuring out that thing, and defining it in your head, has the biggest impact out of anything on you. Maybe what you've been doing so far wasn't as helpful as the others. Maybe you've been too distracted to listen for those cues. That's what people mean all the time when they say trite trash like 'listen to your heart'."

    "Yeah, I like that actually." Lilian settles on, as if she'd been trying to TED talk herself at the same time. "Your heart is the thing that makes you want to keep going rather come to a stop. It's not easy to hear at first, but you develop that ability too. You train your ear for it."
Xion "Depression." Xion repeats, eyes flicking away and up thoughtfully. "I don't think Nobodies get depressed, but that's a chemical thing, so, maybe..." Taking Lilian's ill icebreaker entirely seriously. It's just that kind of night.

Xion's just that kind of girl.

"There are things the Heart helps that are more attributed to the Will." She drops more Clearly Capitalized terms, though at least these are easy to follow. "Love is hard. Very, very hard to do without a Heart. I 'like' a lot of things, though. I can enjoy them, feel them, explore all the little things about them, and even feel good after doing them well. It's little things, like a fizziness in the head, or a warmth in my core, or a lightness in my step. Things feel good and bad. But feel-ings..."

Xions hands try to emphasize this, until Lilian quiets her with a wave of Life Advice, droppig words like 'qualia' (which she has to get her phone out and look up, thumbtyping away to figure out what the word even means, having a small moment of enlightenment when she does, and then banishing her phone with a curl of her wrist).

"A complete person - a 'normal human' has something that I don't. Even someone who has an entirely deadened Heart, or an absent Will, or a ravaged Body, they still have them. That's not what a Nobody is. What I am, or Roxas, or Axel, Larxene, or Demyx, or all the others. We are missing something, and to exist, we had to want to with all of our beings."

"That's why I think there can't be a depressed Nobody. It's why I'm sure. All the parts of Me that were depressed, or didn't want to live, or were anything less than determined to continue existing went 'away'."

Xion brings her head up, her eyes seeking -- something. Understanding, or more. The glimmer of hidden knowledge, the 'Answer' locked away.

"Lilian." Comes Xion's quiet voice. Pleading, but not insistent.

"I'm trying to... tell you."

"I can't listen to my Heart. I do not have a Heart. I am a being called a 'Nobody'. There are three forces - the Heart, the Body, and the Will - that make up a person. When you remove one, but the rest manages to hold together, you get something like me. Heart and Body but no Will... Actually those don't exist, except as 'monsters' or demons. Heart and Will but no Body, and you get a ghost. Will and Body, but no Heart - and you get a Nobody. Heartless are..." A confused look crosses her face. "Actually, I'm turned around. But there's something missing. I don't feel emotions. The chemicals, like you said, the pseudointellectual ones - I experience those."

"The cues, or feeling it out, the qualia, it's not there at all. I was 'born' in Castle Oblivion. I used to be a 'we', a chorus of voices that were forced into a shape. I had a choice, to exist, or to not exist. Most Nobodies are just people with incredible wills. I'll... I'll show you."

Holding up her cupped hands, she conjures a few simple spheres of magic - a pale white, a roiling purple, and a dull red. With a slow clap - more a meeting of the hands - and pulling the resulting brown like taffy, she forms a simple person-shape. "A complete person has all three. Heart." The simple magic doll pulses red. "Will." Pale white. "Body." Purple.

"The, uh, colors don't matter. I have a hard time doing the others. Green's especially hard, but Namine can do blue and green so easily. Roxas..."

A little wan smile, despite the topic. "He can do all of them, but they're all washed out. His whites are so pretty, though. So..." She blinks. "Well, they're very white."

She manipulates the image with some difficulty. "When you pull the Heart out of someone..." She reaches into her model, and plucks out a little red heart, tossing it aside. The model loses cohesion and fades away. "The person loses what holds them together. Almost all people need a unity of Heart and Will, acting together, to retain who someone is."
Xion "A Nobody is..."

Xion repeats the motions - Heart, Will, and Body, clapping, and forming a person. This time, when she reaches in and plucks the Heart piece out of the model person, the white fills the roiling purple, and stabilizes. A solid, frayed-edged pink. "A Will strong enough to maintain a person on its own, remaining in the body, or seizing the body as it fades away. That's what a Nobody is. Broken. Something was taken out, and they're a new 'them', but they still persist. Still live. Every Nobody is the sort of person who with the entirety of their being declined to cease when they should have. A Will that strong means every Nobody, even 'weak' ones, have magic powers. So when I say I'm broken, that I don't feel things, that I've just got lists and urges and dreams about doing things..."

Xion closes her hands around the 'stable Nobody', and the magic puffs in her hands. The two dark-red hearts she had pull out beat softly on the floor over her shoulder, discarded but unbanished. They throb, pulsing out in silent heartbeats like surreal cartoons. "It's because I mean I do not feel. I do not feel love, or sadness, or joy, or anything else. The chemicals are still there, though. I experience 'feeling bad' and 'feeling good', but complex things, like love... they just feel like being sick, usually. Even through all that, I Want things. I want to exist, but more than that, being here, sitting with you, I want to know what's in every book of this library. I want to know what that piano is doing. I want and want and want, and it's a desperate thing. If I sit still too long, don't meet new people, I start feeling sick. I feel want like a magnetic pull, always dragging me around. But every Nobody is different."

"Which makes it strange that of all the Nobodies, only Roxas and I have a Keyblade."

For a moment, Xion's eyes lose there almost glassy serenity, aflame with a serious, obsessive light. "But it's mine. I have it. I woke up with it, which means even if I'm broken, and even if I don't understand, even someone like me can have the power of the Heart."

With a soft 'shiiiing!', it appears in her hand, as she sits in the chair, as light as a feather in her hand. Long, and simple, like a piece of pipe with a star-crest at the end rather than the teeth of a key. "This is my Starlight. See? Just like Roxas'. Does..."

Xion places the weapon gently in her lap. "Does that make sense now? I'm sorry, Lilian, I... I just can't agree that the heart is the thing that makes you want to keep going. It's just not true. It's your Will. It's not a whim: it's a decision that keeps you going. 'I want to live'. A choice you make every second of every day."
Lilian Rook     Lilian watches the little magic display with equal parts 'visual learner' and 'it's magic so it's more worth watching' of paying attention. The relatively mentally concluded look behind her eyes slowly starts separate in two different ways as she watches, as if dragged by a pair of opposite forces. She leans forward in her chair, lacing her fingers, unblinkingly absorbing the display, and yet at the same time, starts to slouch a little, rubbing her eyes, and tilting her head. By the end of it, what she settles on for the moment.

    "Oh, we're talking in capital letters. Metaspiritual 'hearts' and . . . yeah, okay." she says, with just a little of the wind taken out of her sails. "That's . . . more complicated. Well, less complicated, actually, but harder to get my head around without all of the background. I've only seen any of those things on one or two occasions so far, and they mostly just wanted to kill me. It's not a lot of great insight to go off of."

    Seemingly without really noticing it herself, Lilian is flipping a silver pen over her fingers like a coin, back and forth while she thinks. "So it's something more like you 'feel things', and you 'want things', but the two aren't related. The feelings are a thing that happen, but they don't really motivate you. Conversely, you have this desire to do absolutely anything and everything, because wanting to see and do everything out there is the reason you exist at all. All the parts of you that are you self-selected for 'wanting' things out of living. You feel like your only motivation is 'to do' --to experience-- instead of being directed or driven by a greater emotion or direction."

    Lilain sort of waves Xion down when she stands up with the Keyblade, obviously not wanting to make a lot of noise in the library. "Mmm . . . An existence that only continues because the will to do something outweighs the void. Have you thought about . . ."

    Lilian snaps her fingers, standing abruptly enough to push out her chair. "Would you like to see the piano, then?"
Xion AN ETERNITY AGO, AN UNREALIZED DREAM, A FORGOTTEN TIME

Lilian, at home, finds Xion there. The pair speak, about the power of the Heart. The proof of it, the Keyblade. It is there, in that unformed half-moment, that Xion explains what she is: A Nobody.

This memory, half formed and existing in the liminal space, is where Xion's anxious desire lives. To be understood. To understand. Of her many manifold selves, this anxious and hesitating Xion at the threshold never found her realization.

She existed, hoping and waiting.

Xion, all her selves at once, all her component parts singularly and sum, existed in this place.

And waited to be shown the piano. Waited and waited and waited and waited and wait. We exist here. In this moment.

THIS MOMENT:

Lilian walks through the halls of her own house, a stillness fallen over the place. Unbothered, unbothering, the habitual autopilot of moving through spaces that the human brain gets up to. The motion of the normal halls and the normal feeling of time standing absolutely still.

But she's not exerting any pressure on it. It simply stands unmoving, a single moment into eternity, an unobserved point. Her target, the piano room, changes in character, in dream-logic target, to the place she *must* go. She is not leading, she is expected. A terrible feeling consumes the urge to turn and look. She knows Nothing is there, a more sure nothing than the space between spaces, the issues of a moment before or after - not this one. Not this dream. Not this going.

She enters the door to the piano room, and it is white on the inside, from the fall-away emptiness of the floor - present but eerily nonreflective like a glass-bottomed balcony looking out into solid color - to the cieling and all around. A dozen paces inside, the shockingly black coated Xion lays on the ground, staring up into whitespace. If observed for more than a few heartbeats, she eventually blinks, but doesn't notice any disturbance of the door yet.
Lilian Rook     This would not be the first time Lilian has walked through her own family home and suddenly felt something ominously --in the most classical sense-- amiss. It would not be the first time, either, that a door would open to a liminal space it should not have ever connected to. It's not even the first time when discounting Tamamo moving in. Considering that every single time it has, something incredibly important has happened though, it'd be a flat out lie to say that it doesn't faze her.

    She remembers, perfectly, why she was headed to see the piano. She remembers because her desire to show it hasn't changed, or rather, hasn't left her. She has, also, seen this whiteness, somehow more barrenly empty than any black void, precisely once before. Without the trepidation she feels, she says to Xion.

    "I told you that I'd come and get you if you stayed still."
Xion Xion practically jumps out of her skin, spooked from a timelessly cold stop into momentum. Sitting up in a fumble, Starlight slides off her chest and clatters against the too-white unfloor, having rested against her side just prior. Emotions light up across her face - terror, first, then a physical discomfort that makes her clutch her stomach with both ungloved hands, bare wrists sliding out of her sleeves to peek from open sleeves that seem comedically void-like.

The only blessing to the eyes is that the white isn't reflective -- it simply Is. The lack of definition on Xion's clothes is due to the utter reflective lack about her, causing the strange lack of patterns and shading on her clothes the eye expects and the brain tries and fails to fill in.

The brightest thing in the room is her smile, when it finally blooms, real in the moment (that keeps on extending) with nothing and nobody in the entire universe but the pair.

"I couldn't wait anywhere else, Lilian. I'm..."

Her head tilts. Her smile fades. "... sorry. I didn't know what the piano looked like. Or the piano room. I couldn't make it here, but I kind of liked it. The hallway's nice! All the paintings and woodwork, I could slide down the railings for hours. I tried to read all your books and be very cool-!"

She sighs, another sad shake of her head. "I didn't open them before I was here, never looked inside. So I don't know what's in them either. They stay Unread. I had fun cracking the covers anyway. I looked at the pages and imagined the stories happening in them. Some of the covers gave me great ideas! And then..."

Xion stretches out her hand, extending it forward, fingertips curling back just a bit as she pushes. Hanging there, before her palm, is an even blacker ring, an unbroken and empty circle that hovers in the air. Lilian knows what it is, even in the form of a simple and flat ring.

"If I keep it at arm's length, I can stay here forever. Just before touching, we can stay in a world where nothing bad happens, and I can dream of everyone getting what they want and being happy. This house, this quiet house where the clocks don't tick. That's your power, isn't it? When we talked, I drew your power towards me, because I couldn't think of what to do, and told you something I..."

Her held-out fingers tremble. "... was terrified of. I know that now. I was terrified of it, because I couldn't tell what I wanted, but I knew you had to know."

From her position, Xion drops her hand, and the ring follows her palm like a linked model, rotating to avoid her bicep as she crosses both arms in a thoughtful tightness.

"I know you know the me that touched this thing. Is she... okay?"
Lilian Rook     Lilian feels the urge to react to Xion's evident discomfort right away. To say . . . something. Probably something reassuring? Her posture tenses up to make . . . some kind of movement. She'd expected Xion to take her hand and leave this creepy anomaly behind as soon as possible. Seeing her freak out like that feels wrong. This is supposed to be a positive moment, right? She's pretty sure it is. It feels like it should be. As much as she can make out the shape of one, at least.

    But Lilian also remembers exactly what Xion had told her, that time after the Adachi incident. About how she'd felt when she caught her. About how she normally knows how to act. How it's easier to be human around everyone else but her. And so, she lets it play. And thus lets it pass. She is rewarded with a smile for letting it be.

    "Yeah." Lilian replies, a casual as can be, with one relieved breath. "As long as nothing moves, nothing bad can happen to you. Nothing can change without your permission. For a while, you get to have that thing everyone wants, but they can only have inside a tiny bit of their own heads. It's easy to get used to, right? Or at least, it's easy to like."

    Lilian thinks for a moment more --really visibly thinks, for a *real* moment-- and decides simply to repeat herself. "Yeah." She slowly approaches the ring, and then sits herself down across from it, watching it as somewhere to place her eyes. "She's a little different, but then Xion is someone who is a little different every day. Do you feel that way? That there's a 'Xion-ness' to it all, even though it seems the contents can be anything? I wondered a few times. But she's doing well. Enough that I think it's a shame you don't know what she knows. That you and I haven't had the talks and shared the time that she and I have."

    Lilian leans back on her hands, and makes a thoughtful sound. "I won't say change itself is good, and you can't keep things the same way. Change is change. A face we put on chaos so that it can share the room with what we bring about ourselves. I think it's fine to take a break. It's fine to be scared, not know, not want to do. Stopping what you're doing, until you're, at least, as ready as you're going to be, is a good thing. We'd all like it if we could just put the world off and make it wait for when you feel good and ready. But as you've no doubt realized, there's a limit to it. Not a moral or philosophical one. Just a point of . . . entropy. And I think once you've plateaud into white noise, you might as well move on."

    Finally, she looks Xion in the eye while speaking again. "Do you feel ready? Or do you feel like you still need more time? I was rather looking forward to theatrically revealing that little secret, but I can understand."
Xion "I can't read faces like I can read hearts. When I can touch a heart and feel the way the whole face melts down into sadness, or brightens into many points of light, at the cheeks, the spot between the brow, a warm strain along the edge of the lip. I know what those mean, but people can make those faces without feeling it. People can feel one way, and act another."

Struggling through something, a concentrated twitch-and-furrow of her brow, Lilian watches the deep conviction towards understanding play a battle across her face.

"The stillness is nice for a while. I sorted out everything, made lists, played games, made up stories, and just about made up a whole universe to live in, between the strikes of the clock."

Nodding, now, she looks up at Lilian, past her at the door outside. 'Out'.

"I told you. Just before I came here. Just before you left, and I stayed." Her words aren't judgemental, but fact-stating and confirmatory. The way things went. "We all chose to live. We all chose to be. There's no part of me that wants to die."

And then, like a string snapping inside her, Xion's head falls, and her eyes shadow over. "But that's why I'm stuck, too. If I go with you, I don't exist any more. She does. We do. But I don't. Not the me that stayed here. We were both trying to be very brave, she and I, when she went on and did incredible things, and I stayed here and tried to make sense of everything."

She nods, head still hanging, bobbing there with her bangs swaying. "A clock that's stopped is broken. Even if broken things are still valid, it's not telling time any more. So I listened. To what it was telling me."

Lifting her chin, reveals the thin tears working their way down her face. "I think I'm stuck because I'm scared. And Nobodies don't get scared. Only when we're about to stop... um, for real."
Lilian Rook     "Getting to think and act two different ways is one of the few privileges --small mercies, really-- we mortals get in this world." Lilian replies, all too airily. "Like most things human beings are given, many choose to misuse it. Some grievously so."

    And just like that, Lilian is saying something one way, and speaking it in a very different way. "You know, I'd be a liar if I said I've never thought of this. Of your exact situation. Not for the same reasons, but the same dilemma. After all, it could happen to me one day. Theoretically. I know it never will, but the thought occured to me eventually, and then it wouldn't leave my head. Nobody knows that but me. And now you do."

    "Of course, it's not exactly the same. I've never liked the question of non-existence. If it's death. If it's sleep. If it's possible. If you can experience it. If you die whenever you go to bed and a new person wakes up in the morning. If everyone is deluded into thinking they've existed for more than eighteen hours, or if a state of non-being isn't possible to be an observer within, so you shunt right on to the next. I've thought about it; I just hate thinking about it. I can't imagine how much time you've had, and I can't get what conclusion you've arrived at so far, or even what you'd want to believe."

    Lilian slowly blows out a long, chest-deflating sigh. "I have my own reasons, to think that someone can 'not be' and then 'be', but not 'be, and then 'not be'. No world works entirely in reversibles. Not everything that's done can be undone. Not everything that happens can be taken back. You can ring a bell, and the sound goes away, but you can't un-ring it. If you think about it, 'everything not happening, but then something already happened' doesn't even make any sense conceptually. But I suppose that's neither here nor there, and isn't such a logical question for yourself besides. I don't feel qualified-- No, I don't feel as if it's right to tell you what to do."

    "But I don't blame you for being scared. There's no way I wouldn't be in your position. I'd feel awful saying some kind of shitty platitude about how nothing lasts forever and you should move on, or whatever. In the first place, this is a house full of ghosts. And I'm someone who's so terribly selfish that I want every single thing to last longer, just for me; as long as I want. And it makes me feel awful to have to see Xion like this. This sad, and scared. Any Xion. Any . . . pattern, or permutation, or waveform, or whatever it is. I can't believe that what you're afraid of is . . . how it works. Even for Nobodies. But that doesn't change how you feel, and so it doesn't change how I feel. Does that make sense? I'm really, terribly no good at trying to explain what I think you'd normally feel."

    "So all I can ask right now is if there's something you'd like me to do. If there's something I can do with any of . . . this. I'd like to bring you back to the other Xion. Not, you know, by the hand. We're both aware of that concept being silly. I mean in the ways that matter. How can I convey your heart to hers? I can't be certain I'm already absolutely right-- or, well, I suppose I can, but it wouldn't matter if I was."

    Lilian smiles. There's too much effort in it, and a little wince in her eyes. "I don't plan on charging rent. You can live here as long as you want. But it'd hurt me a little, to think of you being trapped and sad like this."
Xion Lilian speaks, and Xion listens. Xion is good at listening. She can just sit there and nod and absorb, and like a tired yet understimulated child, pick up the pieces and start putting them together. Over and over, she has done this, look at Lilian and try, and fail, and try, and think, and try to understand the person in front of her.

The Xion that carried on, into the matters of the Oda, was a different person.

The Xion that carried on, and asked for help, was the same.

"I mostly thought I'd get a cool new sword." Xion admits, a quick huff of breath following in a tired laugh-approximate sound. "I reached out, just as you turned. Tick. I draw something out, and you disappear before I round the bend. Tock. She wakes up the next day. People are constellations of potentials and consistencies. But each tick and tock we move a little. Sometimes forward, or back, or side to side. Sometimes we grow, sometimes we shrink. Each stroke of the hand is a new moment for us to live in."

Xion's sad smile, her teary cheeks, breaks into an honest, sniffling grin. "You just met the me of a single moment. She won't ever be the same, but you get it. I think. Pretty sure."

A breath. "I'd like you to."

Xion moves the ring-bearing hand into her lap, where the loop of the Other hangs without touching.

"I'm the different one, because I became a fixed point. I'm seperate, because I don't leave. I'm seperate, because..."

'I'm not Xion any more' echoes like a whisper through the room. For a moment - just a moment - it is unclear if the subject 'Xion' speaks it.

Then she just smiles again. "Is it Lilian's selfishness that brought her here? I won't know. And..."

"That's okay. I'm the Xion that became a point of light. It's not so bad. But it's very..."

Her fist closes and works, just under the ring, working the air like a stress ball. "Still."

Then, with her 'free' and ringless hand Xion leans in and forward, reaching to brush Lilian's cheek with the backs of her slightly-curled fingers. Her pinky traces along her opposite's jaw, and then stops. "I made myself a promise. It's how I passed the moment. You can't know until you go, but you can still make a decision before. And so I decided... If someone came for me, then it just proves something."

"Even stars in the sky, the sun, the moon, twinkle and shine. Even points of light aren't static. They shift, and move. The lights we see are ancient snapshots of beauty sent from far, far away."

Lilian's too-much smile makes Xion laugh again, and this time her hurt becomes her face, a reddening of unexpected emotion that she takes a moment to process through before cooling down.

"I've been here so long, I had a plan for just about everything you'd say. That's what I thought. And then you asked me that, said that, and I don't know any more! I'm supposed to be the one who's had all the time to figure it out and I'm..."

Xion brings her hands to her lap, and gingerly holds the outside of the ring between left thumb and forefinger. The ring emits a strained hum, like it had been rotating at speed and now was being arrested.

"You can hold onto this. I reached, but never grasped it. Something I never felt, here, I can't have. Like the books and the piano."

The ring drips but does not overflow, filling in the center with the too-black arrested by two fingers, the face recessing with a blood red. A roiling pattern-texture of feathers characterizes itself at the edges, and then--

A medallion, with an uncertain and smoke-shrouded face, is the result. Xion closes her hand around the medal, and it blooms into a stylized basket-hilt reminiscent of upraised crow-wings. The blade-length, rather than silver or black, is a dark red that exudes the same smoke upon the length as the face of the medallion, with the 'tooth', an uncertain concentration nearing the tip, shown more in silhouette than reality.
Xion It is unmistakeably 'Lilian's' in a way that all of Xion's other medallion-items were unmistakeably 'Someone's', despite the ring-band being what the Xion behind Lilian, through the door, had come into contact with.

"If we're... both being selfish, though." Xion begins, rotating the sword to offer it hilt-first to Lilian. "The me that sent you to save me... You must really love her. You must really love me."

"Please, show her the piano, and the books, and..."

Distantly, Lilian hears something she had known her whole life was an elective sound - the first bell of a grandfather clock's chime. The anxiety comes rushing back to Xion's features, but she puts on a brave face. "Tell her too. About the things you feel. If that's not too much to ask."

Inside the house is the sound of water, as a rushing wave of Moments crashes through the front door and pour into the foyer, filling up the house-between-clockstrokes in a tide of time. Lilian can hold it back, of course. She always could.

But this Xion can't maintain the house-between-moments without Lilian's power. And she just handed it over.

So she smiles, and in the tiniest heart, clenches her teeth and closes her eyes and thinks very hard about what she is doing.

'I'm the Hero of Everyone's Heart. Including Lilian's.'
'And Xion's.'
Lilian Rook     For the third time, even with the words 'tick' and 'tock', Lilian thinks to say "Yeah." As strange as it sounds out in her accent, this time she meant to say it from the start. "Everything exists in shapes we can't see. Even people. A big, complicated one, with one point being the moment they were born, and it sketches itself out from there. All we ever get to see are the slides. Like a medical scan. Strange little thin-slice pictures that we struggle to interpret, all part of something bigger and more complex than you'd be able to tell, and all you can do is keep watching them as they come until you figure it out. Whether it's beautiful or hideous. And just like you can't have a whole human body with just one slide, I suppose you can't have a full life, a full person even, with just one moment."

    She only half-forces the single beat laugh that follows. "I don't blame you for trying. Swords are cool, I agree."

    "But if I had to assign volition to my selfishness, which I frequently do mind you, I'd have to think I selfishly swept Xion along to see *my* next slide, and the next one, and all the ones after that, without waiting. Being able to stop and examine every single one of them gets you a better idea of all the ins and outs, the nuances and errors of what you're looking at, but you'll never comprehend the whole thing with just the one. And one day, I'd like her to see enough to figure it out. To me I'm still printing out that full shape, a micron-thin layer at a time, but I'm hoping someone can eventually say it's a good one."

    And against all odds, Lilian doesn't seem as if she even has to 'manage' to stay still, when Xion reaches out to touch her. There's a little less force in her smile instead. "I'm surprised, you know. How much easier it is to talk to people 'like this'. Even if it's broken, or it doesn't count, it's something that matters to me; to know it. Maybe that can be the tip tail of the little detail that starts appearing in this frame and develops as it goes, hm?"

    "And I don't blame you for not predicting any of the silly things I'm saying now, of course. After all, there isn't enough time to say them in one moment. If I make the time, then nobody can hear them. And if I try to get through them all in order, the moment changes and they all come out different. That's how it always is for me."

    Lilian takes the offered sword, laying her fingers upon its hilt, without thinking, but her other hand lays its fingers on the back of Xion's instead. She tests to see if she can get out another laugh. It sounds more like a hoarse cough. "That's why the one thing I'm not any good at is telling people how I feel. The more I want to, the worse I am at it. But I think it'd be just too sad to keep this moment all to myself, where Xion never sees it, so I'll do my very best. I think it's unfitting of Xion to not get to experience something. And, I'm far too fond of Xion to leave any part of her behind."

    ". . . Yeah. You are."

. . . . .
. . . .
. . .

    It is a reasonable hour. Lilian has to make a phone call. Pick a day where nobody, not even Tamamo, will be home. One she can take off. She has Xion's number in hand.