Hollow Bastion, Second Visit:
Interlude VII: Donald and Goofy
Donald's first, somewhat irritable thought was that his neck hurt.
He stretched, trying to fix it, and ran into what felt like cold glass. On both sides.
Slowly, Donald Duck opened his eyes. Then rubbed them, and tried again, just to make sure he wasn't seeing things. It didn't help. The cold glass still surrounded him on all sides, curved, like a pea pod. Where was he?
How had he gotten here?
And why was it so quiet? Donald liked to think of himself as a pretty sensible duck -- cool in a crisis, not prone to jumping at shadows or whistling in the dark -- but it was really much too quiet. The sound of his own breathing, his own heart beating, was almost--
"G'morning!"
"Bwaa!" Donald cried out, flattening himself back against the inside of the pod instinctively. Damn it, Goofy! Now his heart was really pounding.
Goofy just looked puzzled, and then amused. "Hey, what're you doin' that for? A'yuk." He reached inside, grabbed hold, and peeled Donald away from the curved glass wall. "Not the most comfortable bed I've ever seen, but we musta slept okay anyhow."
He set Donald down, and Donald shook him off, brushing past his very strange friend to get a better look at their... very strange surroundings. "Bed," he repeated skeptically.
They were standing in a narrow space, angled in a sharp L and really more of a corridor than a normal room. More pods just like his lined both walls, evenly-spaced in a way that made Donald think of a hive. Except for the pod he'd emerged from and another open one nearby that must have been Goofy's, they were all sealed shut -- and empty.
The effect was creepy, and it didn't help anything that he still couldn't remember why they were here.
"Gawrsh," Goofy said, scratching his head. "I just sorta assumed, I guess. We were sleepin' in 'em, and there're so many others here -- they just gotta be beds. I bet they save the people o' this world loads'a space," he added admiringly. "Maybe this is one o' their inns. I hope we didn't already have breakfast through tubes or somethin'."
The idea that they might have spent munny to stay here brought Donald up short, banishing his unease and replacing it with annoyance. How many times had he said it? They had perfectly good tents to sleep in! What little munny they could scrounge up was better saved for Potions, or new pieces of armor. Goofy understood. Donald certainly understood. And the keyblade master should have understood, too, but no, he had to be a dumb little kid named--
For an instant Donald almost thought he'd forgotten, but then Goofy was saying somberly, "I guess we should get a move on, Sora must be pretty impatient for us to wake up," and everything snapped back into place so naturally that it was hard to believe he really hadn't known.
Sora must be impatient. As if they weren't just as eager to find their king as he was to find his friend! That was why they had all taken off like shots, chasing after Pluto and the letter he'd had in his mouth...
Donald frowned. He knew something else had happened after that -- something important, he was sure -- but he couldn't quite remember. Everything after catching up to Pluto was... hazy and distant. Like a dream.
He moved for the nearer of the corridor's two doors, and pushed it open thoughtfully. Maybe Goofy was right, and they really had spent the night in what passed for an inn on this world. He'd definitely seen stranger, and Clarabelle insisted that sleeping on your feet was actually pretty comfortable, once you got used to--
--it.
The door had opened on an enormous white room, and in the center of it was another pod, much larger than either of theirs and the only pod like it in the otherwise-empty room, but although this pod was also open and empty, Sora was nowhere to be seen.
"Gawrsh," Goofy repeated softly, and for the first time he actually sounded a little bit worried.
Donald ignored him, approaching the pod slowly. Inn or no inn, there was no reason, really, to think that Sora had slept in this pod -- and even less reason to think that he hadn't just gone off to scrounge up breakfast. But intuition told Donald otherwise, and he had always trusted his intuition.
Sora had been here, and now he was gone.
But, Donald realized as he came closer, that didn't mean the pod was completely empty. If he squinted, he could just make out something tiny, brown, and square on the glass floor. Curious, he reached down to pick it up, and noticed familiar writing carved into its cover.
Jiminy's journal.
"That's funny," Goofy said from just over his shoulder, and Donald jumped. Big palooka. "I mean, Jiminy's real careful with his journal. He's been keepin' careful track of everythin' we've seen and done. Why would he just leave lyin' around?"
Donald could think of at least one way to find out.
The handwriting inside the journal was unbelievably small and cramped, but after staring at the first page for a long moment, Donald was still pretty sure there were only two words on it. He rolled them around in his head for a long moment before deciding to try reading them out loud and see if they made any more sense that way. "Thank Namine," he said.
"Well, sure," Goofy replied cheerfully. "What're we thankin' her for? I didn't even know we knew a Namine. Is she a friend o' yours?" Then he screwed up his face in thought. "...Is it a she?"
"How should I know?" Donald snapped. It hadn't helped. The words still meant nothing to him. Screwy little cricket. He turned the page, then the next, and finally grit his teeth.
They were all blank.
What the heck did Jiminy think he was doing? The queen had sent him along to chronicle their journey in an official capacity, and so far all he'd bothered to write down were those two words, probably just some personal note?!
Goofy seemed to sense his growing agitation, and leaned in over his shoulder to peer at the tiny blank pages. "Now, Donald, don't get too worked up. Maybe Jiminy wrote everything down in some of that indivisible ink. The first bit is probably just to throw our enemies off the scent."
"Invisible," Donald corrected him wearily, and opened his mouth to ask why the Heartless would want a journal, since they had never really seemed able to talk, let alone read. But as if anyone could really expect logic from someone like Goofy. "...I'll keep trying," Donald said instead.
He was so busy unobtrusively rolling his eyes a little more with every turned page (there was no real point in being unobtrusive, because Goofy would never notice, but he did it anyway) that Donald very nearly didn't notice when, after more than twenty pages of nothing, one page was suddenly covered with ink.
"Hey, look," Goofy said brightly, "I was half right!"
And more than half ridiculous, Donald thought, but vaguely; the words on this page were much more interesting.
It was written like a letter.
Dear Donald and Goofy,
I can imagine how you two are feeling right now, and I do apologize abut the state of my journal; I have no idea what happened to it. It seems we've been asleep for quite a while, almost a whole year, and the rest of the world has gone by without us.
Donald stopped there, staring at the words uncertainly. What? No. That couldn't have been right.
The journal continued as if its author had anticipated his response:
I know, it doesn't seem possible, but this is what has happened, and the sooner we accept that much, the better. We've got more important things to worry about right now.
"More important?" Goofy repeated, and as quick as he had been to pretend that waking up in weird white pods was perfectly normal, even he was frowning now. "Does that mean he knows where Sora's gone?"
"I don't know," Donald muttered, and scanned his eyes further down the page, looking for the boy's name. He almost didn't notice an equally-important reference in the sentences that followed.
It seems there's a new threat in the multiverse now, the letter continued, something even more dangerous than the Heartless. His Majesty wasn't very forthcoming with all of the details, but--
Donald stopped, and stared. Behind him, a moment later, he heard his friend gasp as the slower reader came to the same surprising passage. The king had been here?
--but he was quite clear on this much: we're all in terrible danger. So much so that he had to come out of hiding to wake us up, so that we could help him fight it. And His Majesty has one very important favor to ask of you two, though he knows it might be hard.
"Hard?" Donald snorted derisively. He'd been feeling tired a few minutes ago, but no longer. Now he felt energized, ready to fight. Hard had been leaving his home a year (two years) ago. Hard had been leaving Daisy behind, and wandering unfamiliar worlds, with no idea what was coming and only a vague word to guide them. Hard had been choosing between a new friend and his loyalty to the crown.
A quick glance at Goofy told him that they were in complete agreement on this much. How could anything His Majesty wanted from them now possibly be hard?
So he took a deep breath, and kept reading.
Please return to Disney Castle at once.
It felt like the world they were on, whatever world it was, had stopped spinning.
"What?" Goofy whispered beside him.
Donald could only shake his head mutely. He wet his bill, and began to read the remainder of the letter aloud, no longer certain he could bear the waiting while Goofy caught up with him. "'Don't worry about us, and try not to worry about Sora. His Majesty says he's... gone home. His part in this is over, at least for now, and so is yours. See Daisy, and the Queen. Reassure them that everything will be all right. And bolster the Castle's protection. We've always been almost invulnerable to darkness, but His Majesty seems to think this new threat might be a little trickier. You'll find your gummi ship in the small garden, outside this mansion. We will have already left this world by other means...'"
The letter seemed to trail away there; scanning it, Donald saw the words faithfully yours, and a signature at the bottom that must have been Jiminy's own. He thought there had probably been another apology in there somewhere.
"Is that it?"
He started to say that it must have been, when he noticed a very small scribble at the bottom of the page. The letters P.S. and a short arrow pointing down.
Donald turned the page, and stared some more.
Please don't tell him I said so, but if you ask me... His Majesty seems worried.
And that was all.
"Worried," Goofy said, frown deepening when Donald turned to look at him. "Gawrsh."
He sounded almost bewildered by the idea, and Donald knew why. Their king had never seemed worried by anything, as long as they'd known him. Wherever he was, they knew he would have faced down the Heartless with, at most, a grim smile. It was this quality -- among others, of course -- that made him such a strong leader. He had his fears, he must have, but he faced them squarely, and he never let anxiety overwhelm him.
Sora was gone, "gone home" somewhere, and he hadn't even said goodbye, but the king wouldn't have let that bother him. He would have kept his focus, no matter what, and done what he had to.
--Only that wasn't true at all, Donald realized slowly. King Mickey had never been much for doing the necessary thing. He seemed to prefer doing the right thing.
Which, if you put any stock in the words of a cricket, meant following your heart.
His friend said, "What d'you think we should do, Donald?"
Donald smiled, and thought it might have been slightly grim. Carefully, he set the journal down in the base of the pod -- exactly where he'd found it -- and stepped back. He was thinking hard, turning things over in his head, but he knew he wasn't trying to figure out what to do so much as how to do it. "I think," he said, "we should go to Disney Castle."
"Oh." Goofy bit his lip. "But--"
"It's the logical thing to do," Donald went on firmly, "because we don't know how long we've been asleep for. It could have been weeks, or even months." At this point, Goofy opened his mouth, looking confused, but Donald was too quick for him, and much louder: "Once we get there, of course we'll work to fortify the defenses. What else would we do? We still won't know who put us to sleep, or why." Again he wondered who Namine was, but pushed the thought out of his mind. "So, we fortify. But obviously there's no reason for us to just hang around the castle after we're done."
"Um, but Donald, the king--"
"And by that point," Donald continued relentlessly, "we'll probably be wondering where Sora is. We might even think of checking Destiny Islands for him, to--" say goodbye ask him why he left make sure he's okay "--see if he knows anything about His Majesty."
Goofy had stopped looking confused by this point. "You know," he said slowly, "we just might do that. If we didn't know better."
"Jiminy's journal was very small," Donald agreed. "We couldn't have been expected to see it, really. And after all, it's not like we were ordered directly to do anything."
They were splitting the hair very fine, but an argument could be made at their hearing, should it come to that; the king had not actually written the request. He hadn't even thought to stamp it with his official seal. In fact, it was even possible that an enemy had forged the letter, hoping to lead them off track.
It had been more than a year since Donald had sided with Riku, believing him the keyblade's true master and blindly determined to follow the only instruction His Majesty had left behind, but it felt like so much less than that. He had already disobeyed the king once for Sora's sake, and Donald hadn't regretted it.
Would this time be different? He didn't have any real reason to think their friend was in danger, and yet...
His Majesty seems worried.
No, Donald couldn't believe they were doing the wrong thing, even if it was -- technically -- treason.
He had never been the bravest duck; that was Goofy's virtue. But there was the possibility, however slim, that Sora needed them -- that King Mickey needed them. It made the decision a little easier.
"Let's go," he said to Goofy, and the other smiled at him, obviously much more cheerful now. Donald smiled back at him, but he knew it was still slightly grim.
In a way, he found himself thinking wistfully as they headed for the door, it would have been so nice to go back home and just -- stay there this time.
He wondered if Sora, supposedly safe and sound on his island world, felt the same way.
NEXT >>> Hollow Bastion, Second Visit (Part 3)