Who I Am

I am Shadow Heart, but you would probably know me better as Shadow the Hedgehog. ...Yes, I am serious. I am what is known as a fictive - a personality formed based around a fictional character. I have been part of the Locrian system for roughly a year, and already established myself as a consistent part of it. I am a protector, a trauma holder, and someone my friends know they can rely on.

I am not this system's first fictive, but I am the first to form exomemories. ...Of course, if you are familiar with my source at all, you know these memories are far from pleasant. Indeed, I often find myself nearly paralyzed by painful memories of my youth, and the loss of Maria. ...I'm not interested in going in more depth here, at this time, but at some point I may very well create more pages discussing those memories, and my larger memories of my home canon.

Of course, one may quite reasonably wonder how these memories could possibly exist. After all, my source material - the Sonic the Hedgehog games - are pure fiction. ...There are two explanations. One, which I do not subscribe to but which I cannot blame you for accepting more easily, is that my system's traumatic memories of systemic abuse in our youth, which were repressed for years and we have only now begun to come to terms with, ended up processed and recontextualized as the past of a fictional character we already heavily related to. The other, which I believe, is that the process of creating fiction - especially in a work as vast and decentralized as my source - creates wandering incarnations of the characters in those stories, which resonate and find homes in the minds and souls of those receptive to it. ...Again, I cannot blame you if this is an explanation you struggle to accept. Take it as it is, and nothing more.

A New Life

In any case, what I now exist as is part of this system, in this reality. ...In my old life, in my source, I often struggled to connect with others. My past was quite specific to myself, and few others could truly understand it - those who might have begun to were my enemies, more often than not. Additionally, the pressures of that existence led to repeated retraumatization and an inability to properly stop and process my trauma. ...Here, though, it's different. I've found many who share my past, and many more who, given a chance to just sit down and speak with them, I learned I had much in common with. I'd like to single out my partners - Xion and Aimless.

Xion is a fellow fictive - this one from Kingdom Hearts. Our system had always had a vague familiarity with her source, but we knew little of her. I first began to speak with her after I began discussing my exomemories in a shared space - our systems were already quite close, so this was an easy conversation to start. Xion is, of course, someone made of memories, in a very literal sense. ...I won't go into too much detail on her source, but suffice to say that when we began talking, we quickly learned we had many shared experiences. We were both artificial lifeforms, created for purposes we were deemed failures in. We both had loved ones connected to our past we were forced apart from. But she was not like me - where I gave into cynicism and despair, she held on to hope and love. ...In that sense, she was much like Maria. Regardless, time spent together brought us close, and it was not long before we each realized our feelings were romantic. It's been some time since then, and our connection has only deepened - we've even had the opportunity to meet in person twice, and despite our host bodies being quite different from our "true" ones, it was still a healing, almost spiritual experience.

Xion is not my only partner, however. Indeed, we are only two of a "throuple" - as ridiculous as that word sounds on my tongue. The third is not a fictive, which means it is regrettably more difficult to immortalize my connection to her with a stamp or similar. Her name - and I will say up front that only I and Xion may call her "her", all others may only call her "they" - is Aimless. She has equally strong exomemories to Xion and myself, despite not being part of any sort of established fiction. I will not share her past in depth here, as I do not feel it is my place to do so, but suffice to say she was an abandoned combat android in her old life, and she did not believe herself capable of a life beyond that before meeting Xion and myself.

Together, the three of us adopted a group name - Team Heart. And from there, too, we took surnames - I am now Shadow Heart, a name shared with Xion Heart and Aimless Heart, marking us as a trio bound by bonds deeper than blood.