Happily Ever After
Everything started with stories.
Tales of fairy godmothers and evil queens and magic and princesses in high towers, each story rolling into the other until everything was one giant tale of its own.
His parents told them to him every night, without fail, and as he listened, he started to wonder.
Once upon a time, he was a normal boy. An almost frighteningly intelligent boy, but normal nonetheless.
He played and he smiled and he had a family who loved him and there was nothing wrong in the world.
So, in the way people do when there is nothing else to think about, he wondered about stories. He wondered why was the evil witch wicked and what had she actually done. What made the princess so good and pure and wonderful - was it simply just because she was beautiful? What force was this true love kiss the stories always spoke of? Surely a mere pressing of lips together could not hold such power?
He would wonder these things and his parents would shake their heads and laugh at their child's unending curiousity. They would tease him and tell him a new story and laughingly marvel at the hypothesis he would propose with each one.
It was all in good fun, nothing mocking; his parents were proud of their little genius.
He thought about stories all day long, sometimes writing his own in the privacy of his mind.
(Secretly, he always liked the stories with the happy endings. All of his own ended out nicely, eventually.)
He always was quiet, was Ienzo, but he was happy.
Then, his parents died. An accident, they told him.
They didn't need to lie. He knows what happened. He watched it all.
He watched his mother kill his father and then hang herself.
He knows what happened… he just wished he knew why.
Nobody would tell him though. It was the one thing he never managed to find out, for all his genius. Maybe it's because he doesn't really want to know.
Whichever it was, the end result was that he went back to his stories; except he didn't, not really. He stopped enjoying them for stories and started pulling them apart for the reasons.
He started to wonder, even more than he used to, about the darkness and the light that were always the cores of the fairy tales.
He wondered what made darkness bad and light good.
He wondered about the darkness in people's hearts.
He wondered about everything.
Eventually, he came under the notice of Ansem the Wise, who had heard of Ienzo's precociousness and unfortunate orphaning.
He went to meet the boy and was impressed with the child's maturity and intelligence.
So, he decided to take in the young boy as his newest apprentice.
Suddenly, there was a whole new world for Ienzo to explore. Sciences – medical and chemical and biological and physical - and numbers – algebra and calculus and trigonometry – and magic – illusions and space and wind and ice - everything was all shiny and new and right there, ready to be learnt. It was almost paradise, at least as close to it as he could get, now that his parents were gone.
Everything was so interesting.
He forgot about stories for a little while.
He learned how to do the new figures and how to calculate things faster than most people could blink. He learned how to cast the basic magics and found he had a natural talent for illusions. He found that he could distinguish people's scents from across the room.
He learned that he wasn't so much learning these things as discovering them, as if they were lying in a corner of his brain waiting to be opened.
Of the things he did learn though, as in really truly learn, was that Master Ansem and his apprentices were nice, if a little condescending towards him because of his age. He learned that they would take him out for sea-salt ice cream if he wanted. He learned that he could maybe learn to be happy again.
Even then, he stayed mute. Somewhere in his heart, the darkness had taken his voice.
But he was happy enough – or if not happy at least content.
Then Master Ansem had found Xehanort. Ienzo clearly remembers, even more clearly than he remembers all the formulas he read last night, meeting Xehanort for the first time.
There was something… almost compelling about the strange amnesiac man. The mysteries of his circumstances simply served to arouse Ienzo's curiousity even more. He felt drawn to this older man with the amber eyes and endless theories. He wanted to know more.
Xehanort spoke of the darkness and hearts and memories and somewhere a great truth of it all…
He spoke of evil and good and a thing called Kingdom Hearts…
As he listened, Ienzo remembered his stories again.
He found that by falling Xehanort, he could find the answers to his long asked questions.
He wanted to find more stories.
And really, that was the beginning of the end.
-0-0-0-
Somewhere, sometime, Ienzo had been a child fascinated by stories. A normal boy, who laughed and played; who enjoyed fairy tales and savoured sweet endings.
Somewhere a little farther down the road, a time after Xehanort arrived, Ienzo learned that fairy tales didn't always come true.
You don't always have a happily ever after.
He certainly didn't.