"Do you know why yet?" Xilepphi stopped playing with one of his lighters long enough to mime confusion to the asker. The glow of Kingdom Hearts behind them illuminating their forms.

"Why what?"

"There's a lot of things. Why are you still alive? Why your element? Why keep existing...? There's a lot of questions you haven't asked." The red head shrugged and resumed his habit-formed flicking, although the small flame barely even shed a circle of light on the shadowy concrete building.

"Most questions are unnecessary."

"Oh, come now! Some of them can be enlightening. For example, what do you remember?" The tiny flare flickered on and off, giving the questioner colored snapshots of the man's blank face, like a portrait on a black wall. The silence of the World-That-Never-Was crushed over them suffocatingly.

"I remember...huge fields, pitted with craters...and ruins." Xilepphi spoke haltingly, tilting his head now to stare fixedly at the sky. "They were overgrown, older than me but not by much. I was visiting there...and I don't remember why." A taint of confusion and awe entered his voice, almost as though he was experiencing his memories for the first time. "I remember a desk," He continued, slightly more animated. "Covered in books on wars and weapons. I was reading them for fun..." His voice trailed off into the emptiness, swallowed by the shadows. Eventually he shrugged, stowing the lighter and pulling out a packet of gunpowder that he began loading into a empty shell.

"Is that all?"

"It's all I can remember." He remarked easily, as he immersed himself in leveling the powder. His companion's charms jingled as the leather coat rustled.

"There must be more than that. Do you know why you still exist?" Xilepphi glared over venemously at the traces of amused mockery in the question. But there was no sign of scorn on the questioner's face, or it was too well hidden, and the red head leaned back as he combed the space in his heart for a purpose. The black gunpowder glimmered in its shell like the dark sky above them. His amberite eyes narrowed in concentration, his red leather boots stopped swinging and he became an old monument, decked in full war gear but now broken and forgotten. Then he shook his head, burgandy braid swinging like the pendulum of a great clock.

"I don't know."

"You don't know or you can't find it?" The interrogater's voice cut back and Xilepphi's face flushed in remembered shame and indignation. "You have it in you; otherwise you wouldn't be here. Let's take a look inside your head then." Quick bootfalls and fingertips crowning his head and he was suddenly launched into a wide, open field. Verdent green flooded his vision and he recognized the ruins from his memories. He felt himself moving over the grass as it brushed against his skin trhough his sandals and the sun beamed brightly down on him. He was holding a map and glancing excitedly from it to his surroundings as he strided among the tall grass and crumbling concrete walls and twisted metal frames and bundles of flowers laid as if on a grave-

Suddenly he was standing before his interrogater, a fistful of coat in his hand as the lifted the other nobody bodily into the air; siloutted against the blackness of the World-That-Never-Was.

"Stop that." Xilepphi growled, brutally aware of the the feeling of sharp and brightly aching pain in his head. "It hurts."

"Emotionally or physically?" His tormentor asked calmly, midnight blue eyes peering out at him from behind his curtain of frosty navy and violet hair. "You cannot hurt emotionally and physical pain will fade."

"Don't," The arsonist emphasized with a ferocious shake, "Push it." Then he disappeared into this air, leaving the nobody to drop suddenly to his feet. Brushing the imaginary dust off his coat, the young scientist looked around his casually, noting the spilled gunpowder on the concrete like black stars in a sky.