Game: Kingdom Hearts - Chain of Memories
Title: Broken Truth
Style: Spiritual Oneshot

Synopsis: Castle Oblivion. The girl who never existed at last meets Sora, but he will die to the Replica fighting for a promise never made. These are the thoughts of Namine before the end of the Chain of Memories.

BROKEN TRUTH

What if a shooting star hits our island?
If a shooting star comes this way, I will protect you.

The meteor falls, so the Replica suffers the strike for a fake promise. As the Replica aims to protect Namine by raising his shadow keyblade to end Sora, the witch cries out for him instead to stop -and so purges his mind with a flare of starlight. Starlight: a dying light within eternal darkness. In the death of that burst of brightness, the Replica collapses for the memory witch destroying the fantasy so to save the reality of Sora.

The same promise that ended the Replica will lead Sora to the ruler of Castle Oblivion. Sora smiles that he can't get mad at Namine about his false memories, for despite his mind, his heart knows his feelings are real. He will save Namine. The witch has seen that smile before, in her drawing of Sora standing hand-in-hand with Kairi, not the nobody. Sora's feelings are true, because that is how Namine sought to make them for her lie.

In listening, Namine stands with her back to the Replica, and only turns once Sora is lost from sight. It would not have mattered if she instead stared to the Replica, for he cannot see her through the glassiness of his eyes no longer reflecting the faded starlight. The still body was thrown to the side by the nobody that called him a toy and who has now faded away. Yet, while alone, Namine picks up and reorders the fragmented non-life so the Replica instead lies in a position of peace.

The peace is another beautiful lie that the witch has drawn the Replica into so to lessen her pure loneliness in Castle Oblivion. The endless whiteness is a clean slate rendering the nobody with naught but nothingness -unless those blank pages are alight with the spectrum for a drawing: Namine dreams of scripting the entire world onto the walls, a chain of illustrations with colour, definition and depth, until whiteness only remains as the contrast of darkness and light.

Namine would draw the whole world to repair the Replica; to heal herself, so to no longer see the doll she has shattered. She is free to imprison the Replica with inception, to sketch scars across their shared non-existence. However, Namine closes his eyes, thus sees the Replica as sleeping, as if so to escape the dreams of the life that they would never have had together.

Without ever waking, the Replica will never again fall for the witch's lies, while Namine, the nobody, will once more be alone. Without the lie, the Replica is without life. There is no strength in the body that has been made to lie tranquilly by the witch. In contrast, Sora is following his feelings for the falsity, so to overcome the only real danger to Namine. Sora is empowered by the lie as surely as any truth, for believing his inner dream of actuality is not only artfulness.

However: as Namine raises her fingertips to the Replica's sleeping face, she traces the truth of how if the lie breaks, so will that strength, severing the chains that bind you to the dream of life. Truly, reality is in the emptied eyes of the beholder. So, when the hand of a nobody, who did not exist to actually reach out to the fake boy, is instead grasped by the copy of the ruler of Oblivion… only nothing and no one really cares that her non-existence will come to an end.

That nothingness will end the nobody deceiver: Sora aims his Keyblade to the lost heart of Namine's abductor, for his feelings for false memories. They are the feelings that the castle's King lied to create within Sora, in a deception that will not break, despite him trying to disconnect the chains by which the nobody and the somebody are both imprisoned. He claims that belief is the weakness of the heart, yet it is Sora who lives on, while the King of Oblivion is thus the cause of his own end.

Sora did not stand alone: to rescue Namine, the castle's ruler was ended by the Replica. The Replica chose to awaken to his feelings for a falsity, wielding the strength granted by the fake memory of their promise. Now however, at last, the meteor shower is free to fall from the pages of the witch's drawings, as the Replica releases the luck charm of a shooting star to the earth before Namine. The star alone lies as lifeless, while the Replica turns away to leave the white eternity and choose his own world.

The Replica does not need to be real to see the truth of Sora's feelings, which he dictates to be good enough. If the Replica is thus the same as Sora, then even while his mind dismisses their memories as only her dreams and falsities, he cannot escape the power of his feelings. In remembering Namine… that lie can sustain the Replica until he finds a truth to save him instead. The nobody hopes for that with all of her heart.

The chain of memories is broken to ensure a broken promise is not kept by… a broken truth.

Author's Note: This oneshot was unintentionally inspried, with the idea coming at me from, well, nowhere as I viewed the cutsene events of KH Chain of Memories. Without recent viewing of the scenes yourself, some of the text may be confusing -but this is a spiritual style fic, so I thought that a requirement.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.