Re:coded

The Sora Who Wasn't

Back at Disney Castle, reorganizing his own journal, Jiminy found a line he had not written. "We must return to free them from their torment."

He could not account for it, and brought it to Mickey.

To find out where it had come from, Mickey digitized the journal's own contents and, inside it, made a Sora out of data.

This Sora woke on a data version of Destiny Islands, cleared the corruption spreading across it, and followed a cloaked figure who kept vanishing just ahead of him, world after world, never close enough to catch.

Cornered at last, the figure gave himself up. He was not a stranger. He was the journal itself, alive, wearing Riku's own shape and voice.

Sora asked him outright whether either of them was anything more than data. "Oh, yeah. There was something I wanted to ask you, Riku. You said that you and I are 'data', right?"

The Journal told him it did not matter, so long as it helped their friends, and the answer put his heart at ease.

Heartless broke into Disney Castle itself. Mickey fought them off, but he, Donald, Goofy, and Jiminy found the castle sealed around them, and were pulled bodily through the same breach the Journal's own corruption had already opened, into the data world alongside him.

Mickey understood at once what this meant for the Journal, held there in Riku's own borrowed shape.

"Riku's body was taken over by the bugs. So that means. Oh! If we don't get rid of these bugs, Riku might never wake up!"

Maleficent and Pete, tracking the same disturbance under Maleficent's own orders, forced their own way into the data world too, and where Mickey saw danger to a friend, they saw a weapon. Corruption of their own making bound the Journal to their side.

"I turned him into my Puppet, that's what! I got those bugs inside of him."

The True Hurt

In the fight that followed, Sora's own Keyblade was destroyed outright. Without it, he made his way on foot through a data version of Hollow Bastion, and there, at last, found Donald and Goofy again.

"Even if I don't have my Keyblade, there's gotta be something I can do. At the very least, I've got to help Riku."

Pete caught up to the three of them and mocked him for it, data and nothing more, no heart of his own to speak of. Donald and Goofy would not hear it.

"He's not artificial! In every kind of world, Sora is still Sora!"

"He even said he'd fight with us! His feelings, they're so deep, and so happy! That's how, that's how we know for sure! Sora has a heart, and it's inside of us!"

The Keyblade answered them, and returned to his hand real this time, tied to his own heart rather than to whatever had assembled him. He beat Pete, and after him the Journal himself, corruption and all, and set him free.

To recover what the ordeal had cost him, Sora went further still, into the Journal's own data directly. Inside, the Journal showed him a memory kept apart from the rest, calling it a hidden truth.

"Darkness had taken ahold of my heart, and Kairi had lost hers completely. But at the end of your journey, Sora, you would have saved us. Now, what did me and Kairi have in common? When you watched-what did you feel? It was 'hurt'. We had both lost ourselves, and we were hurting. So what would you have done?"

None of it was new. Not to the one hearing it for the first time from inside a memory not his own, and not to anyone who had already lived through Castle Oblivion in full.

With the Journal whole again, he said his own goodbye.

"I just wanted you to see you always make the right choices. On the road ahead, more than one truth will come to light. You'll forget things, lose things that you care about, and it won't always make sense. It may hurt so bad you'll feel like you're about to lose yourself. But you won't. Not you. You're like a sponge. No matter how much pain they throw at you, you'll suck it up, squeeze it out, and leave things a little better. Just follow your heart, and you can change lives. You don't do anything special. Just do what you do."

The cloaked figure from the very start found him again, across every world he had already set right, handing over a card each time without a word of explanation. Once the last of them had passed between them, the figure finally spoke, mocking what he had cost Sora to remember.

"The sadness of knowing you forgot someone who matters, that'll gnaw at you forever. And you believe carrying around that kind of hurt will bring back the memories you lost? Really, Sora?"

Sora refused him. He would rather keep the hurt than set down the people it belonged to. "You, accept it? Heh! Don't make me laugh! It's time you learned what real hurt feels like!"

Beaten, the figure gave himself up in turn. "Come on, Sora. Do it! Finish me off. What are you. Ah! Hmm. I guess you've seen through the last illusion. Me. I'm data, just like the rest. Not even worth the effort, right? No point in destroying what never really existed."

He was a data version of Roxas. "My role was to see if you were ready to take ownership of the hurt inside you. And now that role is done. Nothing left for me to do but, go away."

As he began to merge back into Sora, Sora asked him whether he had anywhere of his own to go back to. "I don't know if I have one, but, there's a place I'd like to be."

His own last words, before he was gone entirely.

"Summer vacation."

The Truth Behind the Keyblade

A woman made of the same data met them next, introduced by no one but herself.

"Nice to meet you. My name is Naminé. You don't know me, but I know you."

She did not wait to be asked what she meant.

"No, you really don't. It's true I put your scattered memories back together, but I'm also the one who took them apart in the first place. Not only that, the bugs that appeared in Jiminy's journal, those were my fault, too."

Every world's own corruption, she told them, had been meant to teach exactly what it had taught: that hurt faced is not the same as hurt erased.

Then she went further, surfacing memories that were never Sora's own to begin with. Roxas first, and Axel. Then three names spoken plainly, for the first time, to anyone still living who could hear them.

"Mickey, maybe you know how much they're hurting. These three were keys, too. They were connected to the truth behind the Keyblade."

"And, they're still connected, Sora, somewhere way down deep inside of you."

She let that settle before she went further still.

"Yes, two of them, you have met. As for the third, I never realized it, but you and he share a very special connection."

"I can't say for sure. But I do know a day will come when they must rise from their sleep. And then, the only one who can save them, will be Sora."

There was one promise left unpaid, from further back than any of this, and Sora paid it now, on the promise's own behalf. "Oh, and. There's one more thing I have to tell you, Naminé. Thank you."

She answered him, and let herself go.

"I'm really just data made to pass along a message. I shouldn't exist right now in this journal at all. And now, the record of me will disappear. But when you pass my message on to the other Sora, just remember to tell him the things that you've seen and that you've felt. If you do that, then we'll be at rest, her, and me too."

Before the journal closed for good and Mickey went home, he said his own goodbye to the Sora who would remember none of it.

"No, Sora. That's how it feels to say goodbye. Since meeting you here in the data world, I've come to remember a lot of things. Things about the first time I left home to go on an adventure. About the first time I made friends, long ago. This all brought back so many memories. And now I understand. The notebook didn't only contain the record of your journey. It also held everything that each of us felt. Our hearts. I promise you. We will tell everything that happened here to Sora and Riku. That way, we can all remember this adventure, together. Memories link hearts to each other. They link us to each other. So, we'll be friends forever."

Back in the real world, Mickey put what he had learned into a letter, sealed it in a bottle, and sent it out to find Sora, Riku, and Kairi together.

Then he went to Yen Sid with what the data world had given him. "Yen Sid, I think we're finally close to figuring out where Ven's heart is."

Talk turned to Xehanort, both of his known halves already gone. "Xehanort? But his two halves are gone. There was Ansem, who commanded the Heartless, and Xemnas, who commanded the Nobodies. Didn't Sora defeat them both?"

Whatever answer Yen Sid gave him, Mickey's own mind was already made up.

"Well, it doesn't matter what he cooks up. Me and Sora, we'll be ready, and Riku, too!"

Yen Sid sent for them both.