Jim grabbed Kairi's arm.
    "Are you nuts?" he cried. "He's gonna kill you!"
    "Give me a bit of credit, mate," Jack cooed, pressing a palm to his chest. "A pirate has honor, whether the world appreciates it or not. Now, lass," he said to Kairi. "The las' sea urchin what came up to me an' offered me a keyblade, he 'ad a few tricks up 'is sleeve, and I'd rather not we make usselves redundant."
    Kairi pried Jim's hand off. "So you've met Sora, huh?"
    "Sora!" the pirate declared, snapping his fingers. "That was the name I kept forgetting! Oh, an' 'e mentioned you, oh yes. The girl o' his dreams, on the wild pursuit o' youth's true love. Riku, hey?"
    Kairi's hold of the keyblade faltered for a moment.
    "No. And anyway," she said, louder, "if Sora left you empty-handed you're definitely not getting this off of me either!"
    ~Are you completely sure about this?~ Namine whispered.
    Totally not, Kairi replied.
    ~Just checking!~

    "So you see," Violet carried on, arms still looped around Cloud's neck as he climbed. "These monsters? Are terrorizing the city. It's an obvious call to arms for the Supers of the world. We're not going out of our way; they came to us."
    "You both came to each other," Cloud corrected, mostly a grunt. The ledges were spacing farther and farther apart now, up here near the peak of the building. The turrets and parapets of castle walls were solidifying in shape through the mist.
    "That still makes them the bad guys," the girl insisted. "What about my mom and dad, huh? Why would they take them if they weren't--"
    "Quiet!"
    Above them, there was a sharp crash of thunder, a blossom of angry violet light. The building stone shook under Cloud's fingers.
    "No time," he muttered. "Get off, kid."

    The battle scene must have been glorious, in that hovering arc of timelessness where everything was power and grace. The blue streak of a weapon, the flap of wings, the shift of muscles under leathered skin. There must have been that moment, when it was all light and a study of lines. But the truth is that to a participant, a battle's poetry ends quite quickly, and then it's nothing but raw.
    Blood poured out into the cold night air, bitter like the ocean storm Riku had just left. Breath strained, eyes shot back and forth, reflexes forgotten or neglected shot to life or didn't. And Riku knew in the space of a heartbeat that he hadn't picked this battle too carefully. They were on him in an instant, all teeth and claws and glowing hollow eyes, one breath from meeting his end--
    He heard the shout first. Saw the glint of the enormous blade under the starlight, rising to the zenith of its arc and descending, almost in slow motion, impossible and surreal-- It struck the castle rock and pared it right in half, lanced through it as easily as though it were cutting through a puff of cloud.
    The next thing Riku felt was falling. Tipping back, feeling that moment of weightlessness wash over him, that lag inside the body as blood shifted too slowly for inertia. He felt his arms spread out to either side, a split second when it seemed he might even fly.
    And then a hand caught him by the wrist. Rough and strong, pulling hard at the joints of the arm as gravity took hold again, banging Riku's body hard against the cascading stone.
    He looked up into an unknown set of eyes and watched as they grew wide in terror.
    The hand let go.

    "Shit."
    This was really turning out to be his day. Marooned in a dirty city, stuck with a pubescent superhero off making war with a bunch of overgrown iguanas, and now he had just dropped the keybearer off the side of a building. Leon was going to kill him.
    Mind that it hadn't looked a thing like Sora, but the aura Cloud felt off his body was more trustworthy than his senses now. It had to be, or Cloud would have to confront that sudden instinct of fright that had made him randomly release his grip. But momentary flight instinct aside, reality was telling him that the boy he had just let go of, as well as the eight tons of medieval stone he had just lopped off with his sword, was now quickly and fatally falling to the ground.
    There was no time to think. No time to gauge distances and relative windforce and likelihood that he would come up with something before hitting pavement. He rushed to the edge of the parapet, swung his arms up into a dive--
    A sharp rush of air just in front of his nose disturbed the current and his balance. He wobbled back, windmilling, stumbling on the uneven castle stone in time to see a long, powerful tail zip out of view, along with a pair of massive black wings.
    Cloud darted back to the edge to see the gargoyle descending sharply, folding his wings in close to his body like a rocket, and then fanning them out, catching the air like a kite with the current, arms tight around the silver-haired boy's waist. There was a hard flap, a struggled turn in the air, angling on the rising draft-- not flying but gliding-- at once frightening and coolly majestic.
    The gargoyle landed gently on the turret stone, the boy's body held carefully in his massive arms.
    Cloud, on instinct, hitched his hand up on the guard of his sword.
    "We have no business with you," said the creature. "You are not among their kind. Leave now."
    "They aren't your enemies either," Cloud pointed out.
    "We can respond only to the face that is shown us. Depart before you show us something you will regret."
    He took the kid. Hoisted him up on one shoulder and went sprinting in the other direction, fire and shouts of men and beast booming overhead.
    "Mom! Dad!"
    "Violet! Where have you been?!"
    "I thought you were kidnapped!"
    "You thought we were-- Bob! I keep telling you, this is why we need to set up a beeper system."
    "Honey, it was Dash's turn for look-out--"
    It seemed that Violet kid had found her parents. By the sound of it, they deserved one another.
    "Violet sweetie, did Dash tell you we were off on covert-ops?"
    "Dash was in the park scaring pigeons!"
    "You see, Bob?! We. Need. Beepers. We should finally get off our tushes and get the kids some decent gadgetry."
    "Helen, what do you think I am, head of a multinational conglomerate corporation?"
    "Bob, for God's sake, it's the Space Age! Do you want our family to be the only Supers on the block without even a basic command center?"
    Things like this only illustrated why heroing shouldn't be a cottage industry.
    A voice much closer to hand drifted up from below. "Cloud! Cloud!" something squeaked. "Bless me whiskers, it's ol' Mista Strife in the flesh!"
    Cloud, ex-Chaser that he was, knew he should recognize the voice. He had a suspicion, however, that at the moment it was better to pretend he didn't. He ran instead, ducking a shrapnel blast as one of the gargoyle's wings took out a decent chunk of wall. Cloud dodged into a side archway looking for stairs, an elevator, something that went down. The voice by his feet chirruped again and tugged at his pantsleg.
    "Me fairy whiskers!" Cait Sith meowed, spreading paws wide. "How have ye been, lad?"
    Cloud grimaced. "Reeve..?"
    "O' all the unsightly mugs tae run into again! Give yer ol' king a kiss on his bonny nose!"
    "Reeve."
    Cait Sith's tail twitched agitatedly.
    "I've been out here alone too long," he confessed to the old soldier, in a very different voice. "Tell you the truth, I think I've gone a bit off. You know. Like an egg."
    "You don't say."
    Slung over Cloud's shoulder, the silver-haired keyblade master moaned and started to stir. Cloud sought out a pair of pressure points on the boys back and pushed them.
    "He's what I think he is, isn't he," said the stuffed cat, following by the hem of Cloud's definitely-not-a-skirt. "Something terrible's happened to three-fourteen, hasn't it? Oh dear; they fall like gumballs these days... Cloud! We simply must catch up! It's been ages! When are you stopping by?"
    "Never," Cloud muttered.
    "Why can't you foolish humans leave us in peace?"
    "Hey, you guys are the ones invading Metroville; you want us to just sit back and take it?"
    "You're the schmucks coming in and ruining our Manhattan!"
    "Aww!" the cat cried. "A pity! You know I don't hold it against you, anything back then. I wasn't even involved. I didn't even know about the Project until my reassignment. And then they ship me out for long-haul remote recon like this and give me a Canis class cruiser, and we know how those power cores fare in oh-three atmospheres."
    Funny, Cloud had to think, that was just about the only thing Fenrir had left intact...
    ...Wait a moment.
    "Reeve," he said, stopping in his tracks. "Is your ship still around here?"

    "Chin up. Good. Hold still..."
    Sora clenched his teeth tight as Elena forced his nose back into joint. Violet fireworks burst behind his eyes. He cried out, eyes watering.
    "Just a moment, hold tight," the medic assured, pressing her bare palm over the bridge of his nose, green light ebbing out from the pads of her fingers. It spread and seeped into his skin, running over nerves and cartilage. Mending and balming and numbing, sanding away the pain layer by layer.
    "There you are," she said proudly, crouching down eye-level with Sora, seated on the same medbay bed he'd woken up on. Someone had taken care of his mess on the floor, anyway. "We caught just early enough. Shouldn't be any swelling. How are you feeling otherwise?"
    "Uh. Fine," Sora said awkwardly, rubbing at the side of his nose.
    "No nausea or cravings? Disturbances?"
    "Look, I told you. My parents just went nuts."
    "Can he go yet?" Reno complained by the door.
    Elena scowled at him. And at the cowboy brother-in-arms that was tagging along with him. "A few more minutes outside your company might do him some good," she told the older boys. She returned to Sora with the same placid nurse-smile on her face as before. "Well, your dependency is down eighty-seven percent, if it helps," she informed him happily. "Stomach lining is regenerating nicely. Kidney and liver damage I'm afraid is pretty much irreversible, so watch out with alcohol in the future, okay?"
    "Like I'm really going out there on huge drinking binges," said Sora.
    "Hang around those two long enough and you will," said Elena, eyebrow-gesturing toward the doorway. The boys, for their part, grinned loud enough to startle a person out of sleep. "Take it from me, lord, you don't want these overgrown class clowns for friends. Don't let them lure you into anything unsavory while you're here with us."
    Sora looked at his knees.
    Elena peered at him. "Don't worry, my lord; I'm sure your friends are doing just fine," she said to him, like she were addressing a child and not someone actually a year her senior. "We'll come back for them, after this little mess is cleaned up."
    The keyblade master looked up. He had such intense blue eyes. It hardly seemed human.
    "Really?" he asked her, with a shy smile.
    "Absolutely," she told him without hesitation.
    Sora nodded.
    "You're an awful liar," he said.
    Elena flinched and took that one as more than due. She pressed her smile harder and gave him a little space, standing upright. "He's all yours," she told the boys by the door.
    Less than a minute later, the three boys walked astride through the personnel corridors, Reno and Irvine joking and dragging the younger boy up alongside him when he started to lag behind.
    "Don't let her tight ass get to you," Reno told the keybearer, mussing his hair. Sora ducked away from his hand and combed it back into place. "She's all tough shit white mage now, but she wouldn't know a good time if it sat on her face."
    "She's all right," said Sora the Reasonable. "She reminds me of a girl I know, actually. Did know, anyway."
    Neither of the other boys acknowledged the remark. Sora supposed he seemed so silly to them both, hung up on a pair, well, almost four friends that might just be lost forever. After all, they were the few and the brave, rough and tough soldiers. They probably had to kill their own mothers to go up a pay grade.
    It may have interested Sora to know to the contrary, that Reno and Irvine had both suffered losses, some far more brutal than Sora had had to experience. But Chasers weren't adept at talking about their pasts. And they were far less inclined to divulge those secret, guilty traces of hope they clung onto, that Reno's brother was still out there and Irvine could someday find his childhood friends, because they knew those were infantile things to hope for-- far more childish than Sora at his most wishful.
    But he had no way of knowing any of that.
    Irvine shuffled his deck of cards and presented it to Sora for inspection. The keybearer drew the top card.
    "King of Hearts," Sora murmured, looking at it under the corridor lights. Reno and Irvine cheered. "What's it mean?"
    "That's your card. Officially now," Reno told him, slapping him on the shoulder, as Irvine returned it to the deck and shuffled it again. "Any time you draw. It's your lucky charm."
    Irvine offered up the deck again. Sora, eyeing him, forwent the top card and slid one out from the bottom quarter of the stack. King of Hearts.
    "Reno here's Jack of Clubs," Irvine said, shuffling again and letting Sora cut this time. "I'm Six of Diamonds. The suit of money and the number of love, hombre. It's why I always beat bottlebrush-head over here at poker."
    "Hey."
    They were so light about it, Sora thought. Like it was something they could switch on and off like a lamp, like their years of military service had no bearing on them unless they wanted it to. He guessed that they had just adapted to functioning that way. As far as the sergeant was concerned, they had only to get back to where they belonged now. They were alive, they had the boy they'd been searching for in their hands, and somehow he was going to make it better. Never mind that he was a weakling who probably couldn't outbox his shadow at the moment.
    Irvine and Reno were halfway to wrassling on the floor over the bottlebrush comment when something caught Reno's attention down the hall. He released the cowpoke's collar mid-throttle, mumbled something out, and sprinted off.
    "Rude! Ruderuderuderuderude!" He all but bounced around the tall bruiser of a man. "Look, look, take a look at this--"
    "That's his bunkmate," Irvine explained to Sora, who hadn't managed to hide his bafflement. The redhead was crawling all over the guy, babbling something about motorcycle magazines. "Kinna look funny together, don't they? But they've got an understanding."
    "His name is Rude?"
    "Rudolfo de la Cal Fernández Esperanto Delgado Galván Sanz," said Irvine, needing to close his eyes at one point to finish off the list. He grinned. "Even the sarge doesn't have patience for formalities on that one."
    "Oh," said Sora. He watched while the bruiser gave monosyllabic replies to some of Reno's prattling, but made no effort to detach him from his arm. It was kind of cute, in a patently disturbing and almost obscene way.
    Roxas ruffled irritably. Sora reminded him he had no real justification to feel jealous.
    "It's not what you might call orthodox, what they do. Not exactly endorsed," the cowboy went on. He hesitated and backtread, "I mean, it's approved of, sure, modern man's army and all that. It's actually part of the health regimen. You should see us during trench ops; they give us porn mags in our rations."
    Sora was vaguely aware his face was flushing. "King Mickey supports this?"
    "Thing about being an Empire's dirty secret, it can be as dirty as it has to be. The reading material's the least of His Majesty's problems." The sniper looked on at the pair with a placid sort of contentment on his face. "Y'know, there's an old Chaser saying: 'The greater the light--'"
    "'The longer your shadow,'" Sora sighed, ducking his head.
    Irvine looked over approvingly. "See, the fuzz ball was wrong about you," he said warmly. "You know plenty of Chaser stuff."
    He held out his hand, deck of cards sitting in his palm teasing and inviting.
    Sora arched an eyebrow at him, but shook himself of it and smirked. Sometimes there was nothing to do but play with what you were dealt.
    He reached out with a hand, sliding the top card face-down off the stack...

    Jack Sparrow grinned toothily. "You've got steel to ya, miss, I'll give ye that," he said, spinning the pistol around his finger and holstering it. He came back with a cutlass. "But are ye quite sure tha's wise, crossin' blades wit a pirate?"
    "See, there's something you should know," Kairi told him, going into a tighter fighting stance, or what passed for a fighting stance when one only has movies and a semester of fencing club to fall back on. "Sora and Riku? They're both wimps compared to me."
    ~You're gonna die!~ Namine wailed, in a way that made it quite clear there were other lives the Nobody was slightly more concerned about, purely in interests of self-preservation.
    Have a vote of confidence for me!
    ~Your life isn't worth your ego!~
    I didn't get to have an ego! I've been a girl!
    The pirate's grin graduated to a smirk, then stayed around for the post-graduate slight snicker course.
    "We'll see, then, won't we, lass?" he said, and sprung forward.

    There was no track of time now. Images flashed in and out of the darkness like bursts of jungle fire, melding and colliding, twisting in upon themselves and fading into threads of nothing. Sounds came sluggish, broken, unrecognizable. His eyes burned. His throat clenched. His whole body was stuck with cold sweat, shivering and creeping like the skin was peeling right off of him.
    He had been aware of weightlessness, and then a vise around his torso, spittle and acid in his throat, and then nothing. When light returned his body was shuddering, convulsing, veins gnawing with awful, poisonous need, back searing on a hot metal floor with stale air blowing in his ears.
    "....hit division in about five minutes. Gosh. Was Manhattan always in the Down stratum?"
    "It must have shifted. Collision with Metroville may have done it. Raxip worlds always were unstable..."
    Riku struggled to turn his head. His neck felt as though it was locked, muscles strained and paralyzed. He couldn't breathe. His stomach clawed and twisted but he couldn't throw up, only lay there coughing flecks of bile and wheezing and streaming tears for the pain.
    Pathetic. You're so pathetic.
    His thought or the ghost's, there was no way or reason to know now.
    An eternity may have been minutes or it may have been the other way round. He saw a pair of eyes staring at him, sharp crystalline blue, hard and cold and terrified.
    He felt a hand wrap around his neck and squeeze.

    ...And then the card left his grasp, and the deck fell away. Spiraled and tumbled through the air like leaves, blurring as the grating under Sora's feet shook and the Uncle Remus convulsed and pitched hard to port.
    He fell against Irvine, who managed to catch him and hook his spare hand around the light fixture, kept them upright. Rude and Reno, down the hall, didn't make it quite so quickly, winding up a crumpled heap on the port wall, dazed like a pair of startled kittens.
    "What the hell was that?" Reno tried to say, before the hull shook again, and the lights flickered out.
    It was like someone had pulled a hood over Sora's eyes. He couldn't see anything; he blinked out at nothing. His breath began to sharpen and Irvine Kinneas's heart thudded against his shoulder bone.
    "It's okay," Irvine was telling him, oddly close to his ear. "Don't panic. Just--"
    The ship pitched again, arresting the air with a great boom of thunder. Irvine lost his grip on the overhead rail and fell, the both of them yelping as they hit the deck. There was a grinding, splintering sound, echoing and reverberating, a steady pound of a hammer or a drill right against the hull.
    Emergency infrared lights burned on. Sora stared at the floor grating under his nose, bathed in red light. He saw monochromatic figures rising up from the deck below, their eyes shadowed, faces blank, as the sirens began to wail.
    "Hull breach," said Rude, climbing up and dragging Reno along with him.
    "All hands to armory," Corporal Irvine Kinneas called down to them, brushing the hair out of his face. "We're under attack."
    "The monster?" Sora asked, wildly, clinging to the wall for support.
    "If we're lucky. Move! Move, move!" Irvine shouted to the other Chasers, running after them bent low and charging, bracing by the railing as the ship rocked around them.
    Sora, without a clue what else to do, followed after, stumbling and falling with every tremor, ears going numb with the noise. His heart was thundering, the red light painting still-new surroundings into completely alien lines and pathways. The other boys ran farther and farther ahead.
    There was a sound, like a gasp or a howl, wet and lurching like a tar-blackened lung. It came from everywhere, overhead and behind, a sickly cold spider-like trace in the air as it guttered, in and out, further in and less out, as if consuming--
    "Wait!" Sora shouted after the other boys, own voice lost under the noise. "Wait! Please!"
    ~Get after them,~ Roxas was urging frantically. ~Get to him. I won't let you lose him. He needs to know!~

    Kairi had spent her entire life lagging behind. She had run the slowest, taken the longest and fallen the hardest, for all the years she had known her two best friends. She had always, in almost every way, felt tertiary. A stupid annoying third wheel. A silly wimpy little girl.
    She had no training with the keyblade. She had fought with it all of once in her life, at least in a situation when her opponent was armed. She had no experience with any of the things Sora or Riku had seen and done, the enemies they had faced, the troubles they had surpassed with grace and hard-won finesse. Her only contribution to any of their adventures had been getting repeatedly kidnapped, occasionally by totally inept but despairingly strong older people, who likely saw her as the same MacGuffin that her friends did. It was annoying and stupid and she refused to let it happen anymore.
    Kairi would swear forever afterwards that it was the rush of her life, the first time she blocked Jack Sparrow's attack. It was as though something coiled in her bones had sprung out and wrapped around her, made her move in ways she could imagine, widened her eyes to a flood of color. And then she saw the way.
    It was her turn to charge.

    Numbness. Shadows ebbing in, blotting out the light, blotting out tight emotionless lips and cool glass-like eyes, cottoning sound down to a slowing, fading pulse. Red and black and black.
    Wait. I don't. What's--
    ~Foolish child.~
    From the back corners of Riku's mind, a strong hand extended itself and curled its fingers around his heart.
    ~You have wasted this form enough.~
    The body thrashed, resistant, a dying impulse of defiance. No, it said; stop. Don't you dare.
    ~It's my turn.~
    It fought. It lashed out, reared back, spine arched so tight it might just snapped, every synapse alive and on fire; a bucking, untamed animal cornered and struggling, biting and snarling and clawing at anything that approached.
    It clawed the darkness away. Tore the darkness off the shell of Riku's heart like a coil of blackened vines and forced the boy's eyes open wide.
    The blue eyes started, alarmed. The unknown face split open in shock.
    Riku's muscles were burning. Coiling and tensing tight, forcing up his arm, digging fingers into the hand that locked itself around his throat and pulling it free.
    "What the hell are you," the stranger murmured.
    "Someone it isn't nice to mess with," Riku grunted, and swung out both feet in an arc to connect squarely with the man's side.
    The blond rolled, braked himself with his hands on the plated floor and was on his feet the moment Riku was, sword in hand and springing forward with just the briefest grunts qualifying for a battle cry.
    The Way to the Dawn materialized in Riku's hands the moment it was been summoned. It blocked the swordsman's blow at the last possible moment, braced over Riku's head by both hands, vibrating and alive and pulsing with the same beat as his heart.
    "And you know what?" Riku breathed, silver hair hanging in long bands over his face. "I'm tired of this being a really shitty day."

    Tseng tapped the Uncle Remus through her emergency protocol set from the helm, fingers darting by instinct or intuition as even the emergency lights began to fail them.
    "Status report," he barked at Wedge at the diagnostics console. "I know I'm not going to like it."
    "We've lost power and cabin pressure to the port stern habitation corridor," Wedge shouted back over the thunder of the assault. "Hull breach in sectors five, six and eight, aft fuel supply damaged, we're losing the gravitation regulators--"
    "Counting nine unidentified craft on the port side, more on the incoming," Biggs read off his scanners. "Detachments, counting six, no, ten, attempting to dock-- Sir, it's them! Those... those things!"
    "Which direction? Where did they come from?"
    "Unknown, sir! They have heavy Down strata residue. They might have warped, but, I'm not getting any exhaust readings-- They're coming in hard off stern, sir--!"
    "Rear shields. Do we have them?"
    "Barely, sir!"
    "Barely's going to have to be enough. Wedge, comms!"
    "Aye, sarge!"
    Tseng switched open the comm mic hooked to his ear. "All hands, give me your status."
    "Sir!" Biggs cried. "Sir, they've hooked a docking ramp. They're in, sir!"
    "Work on those goddamn shields! All hands, report! Croissouix, Kinneas, Saratine, Rude, Conway! I want a status report now!"
    The comm lines hissed to life, breaking into fuzz and static.
    "We've reached the armory." It was Kinneas's voice. Strained. "Rude, Reno and I are suiting up. Elena and Croissouix still unaccounted for. Sir-- We've lost Sora. We lost him in the hallway. It was too dark, sir, I thought he kept up--"
    "Do what you need to do now," said Tseng, staring at nothing. "They're coming up on C level; you can head them off at the sector seven corridor."
    "We can't just leave him!"
    "He's the keyblade master, and he'll need oxygen to breathe. Your orders are to save this goddamn ship, Corporal!"

    He was running in darkness. No ethereal abyss, no inside of his own mind; a completely terrestrial darkness, a floor under his feet that he couldn't see and sirens that screamed over his head.
    He hit a wall. Grappled at its rivets, palming for some sort of handle or switch or latch. Nothing. He slammed his hand against the metal in frustration, the sound dead and lost under the alarms.
    "Irvine! Reno!" he shouted against the metal. "Anyone?!"
    There it was again, that other sound. Like a rush of breath through a mask, like the gasp before a tuberculous cough, rasping and dragging at the base of hearing. Sora felt the air run cold around him and then drift past, slinking down the corridor from which he had come. Some silent presence exciting the very edge of senses, and then fading away.
    Something was aboard the ship. Something that was not supposed to be here.
    Something that wasn't even supposed to exist.
    He felt his breath quickening and forced himself to steady it out. Pathetic and weak as he was right now, he was still the keyblade master. A keyblade master. He'd managed to keep a handle on the thing for two years now. Just think how much Riku and Kairi would laugh at him if he lost his cool just because of the dark.
    ...If they were alive to laugh at him.
    ~At the risk of sounding trite,~ said Roxas, ~shut the fuck up, emo kid.~
    Sora gritted his teeth. If you think this is 'sposed to help--
    ~No, it's supposed to get you off your ass. Boohoo, my friends might be dead, because obviously they fall over like a house of sticks every time something bad happens, because our lives are just so sunny and uneventful like that. They're alive. They're alive, they're doing everything they can to reach you, and Kairi will gladly fuck you when they do. Hell, Riku will fuck you too.~
    That's not helping much either!
    ~You risked life and limb for these guys and they did the same for you! It was one stupid shipwreck; a scratch. And I told you, I'm not letting you die until I get to tell Reno.~
    Get to tell him what, that he totally made a joke of my first kiss?
    ~You big baby! He didn't even start biting you.~
    Oh, I guess it's easy not to have any appreciation for personal space when you don't have a body! Just because you want to screw anything in the universe that'll spread its legs--
    ~He's Axel's brother.~
    ...What?
    ~God! Are you really that dense?~

    Every part of her body was aching. Even her breasts ached, although that was mostly the result of Sparrow copping a feel at one point when he'd gotten her pinned. To be fair, she was quite sure she'd knocked a few of his teeth loose for that one.
    They were at opposite ends of the dining hall, circling with weapons raised, panting and grinning, but mostly panting. Jack was appearing increasingly frustrated about the whole affair. He spat a bloody wad of saliva onto the floorboards and switched the cutlass to his right hand, flexing and shaking out the joints of his left.
    "Yer not half-bad with that fing, I'll give ye that," Jack leered, chuckling. He tapped the side of his leg with the dull edge of his blade. "But 'ow's yer footwork?" He broke their circling. "If I step 'ere..." he began, moving to the left.
    Kairi darted quickly and matched the movement, keyblade poised.
    Jack's grin was bloody too. "Very good," he said. "And if I step 'ere--"
    He advanced. She matched it. The neck of her keyblade barred a leftward swing. A thick clang resonated through the entire hall.
    "Excellent form, my dear; my sincerest compliments."
    They were close enough that she could smell the salt off his skin. Kairi's eyes narrowed. He was playing her for something again. He was going to move, he was going to strike--
    A quick left, a jabbing right, advance and left..!
    ~How in the world are you doing this?~ Namine had to ask, and would soon wish she hadn't.
    Locked in a bind, Jack swooped forward with his leg and caught Kairi by the shin. She pitched forward, unbalanced. Jack blanched her temple with the cutlass's guard and sent her tumbling. She stabbed the floorboards with the butt of the keyblade and braked herself, used the neck for leverage to get back onto her feet. She pulled her weapon back aloft to charge--
    And then her bare heels scraped against the wood as she screeched to a sudden halt, and the keyblade froze in the middle of its upswing.
    Jack smiled and pressed the barrel of his pistol just a little harder against Jim's temple.

    "Seal off A deck," Irvine heard Tseng say over the comm channel. One of the bridge operatives replied to him. "Kinneas," he added to the corporal: "status?"
    Irvine took a hand from his rifle and tapped open the mic link. "We're in position, sarge, but there ain't nobody here."
    "Impossible. We're picking up half a dozen energy signatures right on your location."
    "Then you're off by about half a dozen," Reno muttered, loading his pistol. His quarterstaff couldn't get the clearance in these hallways, something he announced he was definitely taking up with R&D when they got back. "We're wasting our time, sarge! We should be going back for the keybearer--"
    "Hold your ground," Tseng snapped. "The reading is right! If you lose this position, you'll compromise the entire ship!"
    "But there's nothing fucking ther--"

    Sora's fingers hesitated on the metal.
    He... what? How can you be sure of that?
    ~Have you looked at him? Listened to him talk?~
    But Axel was a Nobody--
    ~And before that, a real person. With a life and friends and family. Sound familiar at all?~
    The air moved behind him. A breath of cold licked his bare neck and made him shiver. He was reminded how much he needed to get out of here.
    He palmed over the doorway again, padding it inch by inch even as the metal burned freezing cold under his touch. His fingers tracked the line of a catch and found the door latch, snug and locked from the inside. He groaned.
    ~...Just checking here. Are you trying to be absolutely retarded?~
    Gimme a break! It's not like I've-- oh yeah.
    He stuck out a hand and focused himself. It was easier to do now than it had been first waking up, feeling the warmth collect under his palm, the hum of light at the edge of vision.
    Now that was much better.
    He wrapped his fingers around the leather of the keyblade's handle, tapped the door latch with the broadside of its teeth, and waited. He heard nothing to suggest a bolt sliding back, but pursed his lips and tried the handle anyway. It still wouldn't budge.
    So much for not panicking.

    Tseng tapped his comm link urgently. He switched channels. Nothing.
    "Emergency lights stable, but the power supply is going." Wedge's reports swam up through the wail of console alerts. "Detecting hull breach on port sector four, three, one, starboard four through eight. They're chewing us up."
    "Scanners detecting a massive structure forty metakliks off starboard bow," said Biggs. "Negative charge residue. Impossible. Nothing that size could warp past four strata--"
    "Saratine! Croissouix! Now would be a hell of a good time to report in. Do we have visual?" Tseng added to his bridge operative.
    "Punching her up--" Biggs tapped his way across the console and flipped the A/V switch. "There--"
    And there was nothing. Blank, empty space and the glow of infant stars.
    "...I don't understand," Biggs muttered, recalling the input coordinates on his screen. "This... This is right. It's giving off enough energy to power a city. It's... It's huge! I don't--"

    Reno was firing without looking now. Nothing to look at, nothing to see, nothing there, but that nothing had taken out Rude with a clean swipe to the side. He was bleeding all over the deck, puking it out of his mouth; Irvine dragged him by the neck guard of his chainmail across the floor as the group made their retreat. Irvine shouted into the comm link, every channel, any channel, begging and pleading Wedge to section off the fucking deck, but there was nothing, not even static, dead air the way they had nothing but dead air from Disney Castle for the past eight months, and now he was seeing why.
    "What the fuck," Reno was screaming at the air. Backing up and firing and backing up and firing. He was hitting something, because the squeal of air ducts and cadaver flesh was all around them. "What the fuck--"
    He felt it in the air. Felt it rush past his side, felt it graze his skin straight through the armor, burning acid cold. Beside him. On him. Above him and descending--

    Sora struck the handle again, this time with the edge of the blade. No response. He hit it longside, with the edge of the guard, and finally took a step back and shot at the thing, spear of light spinning like a dart from the keyblade's tip and hitting the flat of the door.
    And then it rebounded.
    It bounced against the ceiling and the adjacent walls, ricocheting like a shot until it raced outward just the way it had come. Sora yelped and hit the deck just in time for the beam to pass overhead, hitting nothing just a few feet down the corridor and exploding into a rain of stardust, shimmering and blooming like hot ash from a fire as it fell.
    The lights grew in the air, outlining shaped in the darkness. Shoulders and gaunt chests, coiled metal and vinelike wires weaving through skin, and vacant, sunken eyes.
    They were wearing something over their faces. Contorted metal gas masks, branching into tubing that ran all over their body, that shuddered like entrails when they breathed, that low, wet, dragging gasp. Breathing, and staring with their eyeless sockets, and advancing, clammy many-fingered hands outstretched.
    Sora screamed.

    The bridge of the Uncle Remus looked on in silence as the main screen lit up before their eyes.
    It was the size of a moon. Raw hard-gummi blocks hewn out of jet black rock assembled together as an ugly aggregate of rough metal, streaks of heart-light outlining its shape against the metaspace aurora. Pilot ships as large as a battalion drop-ship circled its draft like gnats along its hull.
    It wore no emblem. It had no need for an emblem. There was only one thing it could be.
    Unknown and unseen, the reports from Disney Castle had said. In numbers you couldn't even imagine.

    He's too fast!
    Riku dragged the keyblade up at the last moment, barely in time to block the swordman's blade. His arms shook under the force of the impact, whole body crying with the strain. That rush that had come with summoning his weapon had dwindled down to nothing and now there was only a few last threads of consciousness to cling to. Everything hurt. His lungs shuddered. Sweat streamed down his face and stung his eyes. And the guy kept coming.
    'Make you regret it'... He was sure as hell eating those words now. He was getting his ass raped by this guy. Who the hell was he?!
    Xehanort was far too amused.
    ~Someone you should know.~
    Riku charged again in anger. Anything to get the voice to stop.
    The stranger dodged easily, bringing up his massive sword to guard when Riku struck again, and again, waiting for a pause in the boy's swings to launch a counter-attack, bringing the blunt side sharp against Riku's side.
    The youth fell, wheezing, clutching at his ribs with his off hand. He had felt the break, heard the bones crack inside his chest as the sword connected, the pain spreading like a forest fire through his entire body, such awful pain like he hadn't experienced since the darkness had swallowed him, when his eyes and ears had bled and thought had voided straight out of his skull--
    --No--
    He picked himself back up. Pulled his body into motion, found purchase on the floor and pushed himself onto his knees and then onto his feet, every inch an uphill battle. His heart thudded hard and painful in his chest.
    The swordsman knocked him down before he could breathe. No quarter, no pity, no expression on his face.
    Riku fell hard onto his back and felt the air leave him, lungs flatten and collapse. The ceiling swam through rivulets of blood-tinged sweat.
    Over him, the swordsman readied his blade again.

    They had no eyes. They had no eyes and they were looking at him and their voices rasped behind their metal masks, hands outstretched and clawing toward him, all the stench of disease and rot and refuse, howling like dying animals, gasping with sick hunger, and he screamed, he kept screaming, the cold swirling around his body and closing in and the freezing door to his back and they were getting closer and their hands were nearly on him clammy rotting skin--
    "--Boy--!"
    The wall flew out from behind him. He fell, weightless, and then there were arms around him, dragging him back into the darkness. The door swung shut behind them.
    Beatrix lit a match and cupped it in her hand. She knelt beside Sora on the floor.
    "Are you all right, my liege?"
    She had lost her eyepatch. The sunken pit where her right eye should be was a pocket of shadow under the firelight. Hollowed out and empty. A bit too much like what he had just left.
    "They-- They were ghosts-- It-- came out of nowhere and--"
    "Sire, be still," she said firmly, laying a hand on his shoulder. Such a strong grip. "It's all right, my lord. You're safe with us."
    She caught the direction of his gaze and angled her head so that her hair fell over the eye. She tried to smile at him, but the effect was lost. He averted his own eyes instead, to another sound, the cringing shape crouched by the wall.
    It was Elena. Crying in gasps, fitfully trying to stopper the flow of blood from the stump that remained of her right arm. Her entire nurse frock was stained red, left arm smeared up to the elbow, shaking and pale.
    She noticed him watching and choked the tears down, forcing on a smile. "It... It's all right, young master..." she got out, voice breaking through all her efforts. "It... doesn't hurt... that much..."
    Beatrix lit the stub of a candle with the last of her match and left Sora's side to help Elena with her tourniquet. He could see, even from the floor, that it was in vain. There was too much blood loss, the arm had been torn so roughly, the remaining flesh was in shreds. Something had ripped it clear off her shoulder.
    "Lord," Corporal de la Croissouix was saying, her back to him as she worked. "Do you know the layout of this ship?"
    Sora, who had begun pulling himself off the floor, hesitated. "N-no."
    "Listen carefully, then," Beatrix said: "you are going to take this corridor down to the stairwell. Take it three flights down, onto E deck. From there take a right, then an immediate left, then--"
    "You can show me yourself when we get there," he insisted, standing.
    Beatrix ducked her head. He had the feeling she was smiling to herself. A wry, terrible smile.
    "I'm sure that optimism was a great trait of yours as a child," she said to him. "But there's no time to be a child anymore, sire."
    On the other side of the door, the hiss of the phantoms grew louder, evolved into ghostly wails. Sora shrank at the noise.
    Elena beamed up at him, tears streaming outside of her control.
    "We'll be fine," she said. "Beatrix and I wi-will hold them off here. It's you who needs to get to safety."
    "You mean too much, sire." Beatrix still wasn't looking at him. "We are little people. It is you who are the hope of worlds. You are the one who will open the Door to the Light."
    It was like a prayer. A mantra of belief, an assurance. Something, Sora saw from the look on Elena's face, that both soldiers were prepared to let suffice.
    "Stairwell to E deck," Beatrix said, as the first gnarled ghostly fingers clawed their way through the porthole. "Right, then left, then follow the back-up lights to the cargo bay. Hurry."

    Wedge's console was a carnival of warning lights. A thousand little alerts. Oxygen supplies. Electrical failure. A breach of Zero Deck, where the bridge lay.
    There were energy signals swarming through the corridors by the dozens. Going through the vents, through the plasteel hull itself.
    The signals from the crew were gone. The power dimmed and the final back-up lights blacked out over their heads.
    "Sir," Biggs said in the darkness, cold air seeping in through the bridge doors. "Sir, what do we..."
    Tseng said nothing. He took the comm link from his ear and laid it on the surface of the helm console. And closed his eyes.

    B deck to C... C deck to D... D deck to E... Door. A left. A right.
    Sora ran, the keyblade held tight at his side. The blinking haze of dying LED lights over his head were the only guide now at all.
    He heard them all around him. Breathing. Clawing towards them with their dead frost and smell of rot, closing in no matter how fast he sprinted. How did you fight ghosts? How could you fight something that wasn't there?

    Reno's trigger clicked on an empty chamber.
    He had exhausted his own pistol ages ago, and had taken up Irvine's rifle to hold back the advance while their party made its retreat. Except now they were trapped, at the end of a T corridor in the belly of the ship, the cargo doors held off by another set of those... things, that were slowly inching their way toward them.
    They had form now, for some reason, but it made no difference. Nothing Reno did was having an affect. He could empty an entire cartridge into them and they still walked. If he took out their legs they crawled. If he got a head shot in it made no difference at all. They were like zombies, or pure ectoplasm, screaming when the bullets lanced through them but still advancing, never stopping, clawing out with their greedy gnarled fingers for food, whatever food was to them, and the three didn't want to find out.
    Rude was still hanging in there, barely. Irvine had gotten him propped up by the wall and pulled off his chestplate to start bandaging him up, but it wasn't a pretty sight. And now Reno had no way of holding the creatures back.
    They had seen those things drag a hand straight through Rude's body. They had heard the screams decks above them when they'd breached the medbay and found Elena. They had heard Sora calling out to them unanswered. And then all the voices had silenced, except for the low groaning that came from behind the creatures' masks.
    Reno dropped the rifle and reached around for the collapsed quarterstaff strapped to the back of his armor. It was good for a whole load of nothing, but he didn't have many other options.
    He had wanted so badly to make something of his life. To at least outlive his brother. Age into an old crotchety son of a bitch who yelled at punks to get off his lawn. He wanted the death to be a memory, to be the past, not future hanging in the air threatening to come down and freeze the world down to a single, final moment. He wanted to make it okay that Lae didn't forgive him, because he was gonna make him proud instead.
    But he was a Chaser. And Chasers didn't have a right to want.

    Kairi stopped dead in her tracks, panting hard.
    "You... cheater..."
    "Pirate," Jack reminded, thumbing back the pistol's hammer. Jim cringed and shut his eyes.
    The room felt a million miles wide. It was like she was standing in the center of a field, of the coliseum. She could feel Mrs. Hawkins and Doctor Doppler's eyes on her; she could hear Archimedes fluttering in distress from the rafters, Annamaria snickering from the doorway.
    And in her mind, clearest of all, she could see Riku and Sora. Smiling kindly, the look they had always given, for every lost race and failed match and broken promise.
    She was too weak. She was always going to be too weak.

    ~Weak,~ Xehanort whispered in his ear. ~You're weak.~

    No, Sora decided.

    It doesn't have to be that way.

    Sora heard him before seeing him, followed his shouts down the blood-lit corridors. And when he had arrived, at the edge of the last hall, in a final pool of light between him and a swarm of phantoms, he saw his figure standing out amongst the darkness, and the keyblade decided the rest.
    "RENO!"
    The firecat shot his head up in time to see the sharp arc of light racing toward him. His hands left the quarterstaff, let it clatter to the floor while his whole body coiled and sprung up, arm outreached. He felt the leather hilt hit his palm and his fingers curl around its girth, felt the weight of the blade against the strength of his arm, marveled in that eternal split second how heavy it was--
    And, landing, stabbed the floor with its edge.
    And then, there was nothing but light.

    "Now, ye see," Jack Sparrow said with unmasked smugness, releasing the boy as Kairi held the keyblade out at arm's length, "there're some matters y'just don't press, lass."
    Kairi said nothing. The blade remained stationary.
    Kairi knew she was no one special. There was that whole business about being a princess, but really, that had had no bearing on her life whatsoever, apart from getting kidnapped on roughly a weekly basis. She was a normal islander. She was a schoolgirl. She had a worthless half-semester of fencing club and two guyfriends to her credit, and none of that did her much good.
    What she did have, however, was five years of baton club.
    Jack's hand went for the keyblade's hilt. Kairi's arm, obedient to the defeat, remained stationary. But her fingers moved.
    They spun the keyblade out of the pirate's reach and sent it flying. By the time Jack could react, he was busy dealing with a teenage girl kicking him square to the stomach instead.
    The keyblade spiraled in a perfect ten-for-ten circle in the air and descended in a sharp line, right into the girl's waiting hand.
    Now the fun was really going to begin.

    "Cloud! Cloud!" a shrill, chirping voice cried. "Cloud, what in god's name are ye doin' to tha poor brat?!"
    Riku didn't see the swordsman's hesitation. His eyes were focused on the edge of his blade, an inch from his chest. Riku saw the twitch of unsteadiness pass through its length, and he needed no further cue.

    Sora took the keyblade back for himself and gripped Reno's hand tightly, sharing a grin. Reno swayed and wondered if he was going to faint.
    The corridor that had laid between them was burned clean. There was nothing. The light had expanded and dissolved everything in a single instant, in the same moment that a strange feeling had flooded through Reno's body.
    And then it was vanished, and the things were howling and retreating down the adjacent hall, and Irvine was on the comms trying to reach someone, anyone, as the lights fell down around them.
    "It's no good," said Irvine, running to the cargo bay doors with his empty rifle over a shoulder. "The hull's been seriously compromised. She's going down."
    "Those things're getting their bearings too," Reno said grimly, seeing the traces of their outlines further down, where they had started to shrink back. He collected his quarterstaff and tri-folded it back into its strap.
    "We're not gonna hold 'em back for long," he said. He looked to Sora. "Help me carry him."
    They went to Rude's side. Sora crouched down opposite Reno and got Rude's arm over his head to hoist him up. He sagged under the weight; Reno wasn't faring much better.
    "We have to wait for Beatrix and Elena," Sora protested, dragging the prone soldier through the cargo bay doors. The interior wasn't faring much better than the rest of the ship, overloaded wiring sparking and whole sheets of hard-gummi block falling from the infrastructure, tearing right through the deck as it crashed.
    "There's no time."
    "And Tseng and Biggs and Wedge--"
    "There's no time!" Reno shouted at him, collapsing under the weight of his buddy soldier. "Fuck! I just-- Rude! Rude, c'mon, guy! We're nearly there!"
    Irvine had the hatch open to Waver 6 by the time the two arrived with Rude, easing him down as gently as they could against the gunner's hull. Reno knelt by his side and clapped his cheek, trying to get him to stir.
    "C'mon, Rude, wake up for me, will ya--"
    Irvine paused at the controls and went to them. He looked over Rude's face and felt his pulse, took a look at the wound. "He's not gonna make it," he said.
    Reno pushed him aside. "Shut the fuck up! Just go get us ready!"
    "Reno!"
    "If we can just get him aboard," Sora began. "There's-- there's a medkit or something, right? Or magic, or--"
    "Rude? Rude, come on! Come on!" Reno pleaded, framing his friend's face in his hands, not getting more than a dim, glazed-over look. "Come on, you son of a bitch! Rude!"
    Behind them, the cargo bay doors strained in protest. The first tendrils of clawlike fingers streamed through.
    Irvine hissed something in a language Sora had never heard. He reached for the console and switched open the command window, tapping her through the protocols as fast as his fingers would let him. Beyond them, the inner airlock door unwound its latch and separated, peeling open a series of hard-gummi doors to the docking runway.
    Sora was the first to see it.
    "Look!"
    The things, the phantoms, were coming in from above, just above the runway. Dozens of them, streaming and crawling through the walls, sunken eyes black pits of shadow under the dying emergency lights.
    Irvine's hands left the console and stared. He pulled his hat off his head.
    "We can't make that," he said. "They'll go right through it. They. They'll..."
    A sound by his feet. A wet, bloody cough.
    "Get going," Rude gruffed, voice barely a rasp.
    "Not without you, you cocksucker," Reno told him fiercely.
    Rude's chest shuddered. He laughed hoarsely. "You always were... awful with insults."
    "Fuck you. You're getting into the ship."
    Rude shook his head. He coughed again. "Got a better idea," he said. "Gun. Get me a... It'll hold 'em off long enough..."
    Reno swallowed, eyes wet. He shook his head. Slow, then faster, refusing and denying. "No. No, no, no, no--"
    Sora looked at the floor, chest too heavy now to handle. When he looked up, it was to see Irvine ducking his own head, indescribable emotions going through his eyes.
    "It's our best shot."
    "I don't care," Reno said, crawling into his friend's lap, holding him by the shoulders. "Rude? Rude, come on, buddy. Don't do this to me..."
    Rude shook his head. He bowed it forward, to look at his friend over the rim of his glasses. He was smiling.
    It was a look Sora couldn't understand or ever begin to read. It was something between them, something from years of being together, of sharing their lives. It was something there were no words to.
    Reno conceded, eyes darkened and pained. He bowed his head and their foreheads touched.
    "Fue bueno conecerte," said Reno, and nothing else.
    Sora helped Reno get Rude him propped up on the nose of Waver 4 with the ship's mounted assault cannon charged and ready. Reno's hand lingered on his bunkmate's shoulder until Irvine shouted urgently from their ship. They were out of time.
    Rude slipped the glasses off his nose and passed them down to Reno. "Time to go," he said.
    "Reno?" he said, as his bunkmate began to back up. As the hangar fell down around them, as the runway lights burned out on their last circuit, as the air howled. "See Midgar again someday."