(-CHAPTER-I-)
I Couldn't See you with the Sun Shining In My Eyes
-nOte-
This is a Second Generation fanfiction to my last Kingdom Hearts trilogy called A Step Into the Twilight. If you want to read this fanfiction, please read that first because it will make things a lot clearer. Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts or its characters, which will hardly show up, but I feel bad for it. Heh. XD;
-/nOte-
Amali messed around with her necklace as she walked inside of her house. "Anyone home?" she called, sticking the keys back into her pocket. She groaned as a response came from her mother in the other room.
"Hey, Amali." she called. She was obviously making something, or at least trying, when Amali dumped her bag full of at least half of the contents of her locker on the floor. "Graduation tomorrow. You excited?" she asked her.
"In the slightest." Amali flipped her dark silver hair behind her shoulder. She had some odd mixture of her parents' hair; although she could never tell why it was her father had silver hair. Her eyes, however, were her mothers; a dark, golden brown. The thirteen year-old girl fell backwards onto the blue couch and grimaced from the smell.
Her mother snorted. "At least I was excited when I graduated high school; you could at least be excited graduating jr. high."
Amali rolled her eyes; she had only heard her story of her father coming for her after graduation a billion times, but sometimes she felt as though there were holes in the story that still had to be filled. Like her mother was keeping something for her.
"You're home early, Charity."came her father's voice, kissing her mother on the cheek. His eyes glowed when he saw Amali, and ran right up to her. Lifting her up like a feather, he asked, "How's my baby girl?"
Amali laughed; Charity also mentioned how quiet and reserved her father used to be before they were married.
"Dad; I'm great, put me down now, the heights thing..." Riku laughed and put his daughter down back on the couch.
"And as for you..." Riku started, moving towards Charity.
"Oh, God, I'm out of here." Amali struggled to get off of her butt, and shook her head like there were bugs on it. She ran up the stairs and into her room. It was small, but comfortable. Crashing onto her bed, Amali flipped over to look at her open closet.
Red graduation gown. Was she really ready for this?
The graduation was being held at the high school with the other five schools that were feeding into Stevenson. Just the fact that she would be spending an hour at the parent/student party afterwards with a bunch of people she didn't know scared her. As far as friends went, she had always been fine with Jaiden.
Jaiden; honey-blond hair, violet eyes, calm face and deep voice. She had known him since he was a little baby, as he had known her. They were always best friends. Amali met a bunch of other kids; kids that were also those of friends of her mother and father, but she only stayed friends with Jaiden because the others went to other schools.
Her father especially had been good friends with Jaiden's adoptive parents; their names were Sora and Kairi. Jaiden didn't seem to have anything against being adopted, and Kairi and Sora said that they adopted him instead of having one of their own 'just in case'. But what did 'just in case' mean? Could it have anything to do with the holes in her mother's story about seeing her father after two years of being separated?
Now she was thinking too hard.
She just had graduation to 'look forward' to. Amali was receiving no awards or special stars or anything of the sort, just the diploma and that was it. They probably spelled her name wrong on it. Shrugging, she practically fell asleep on the spot.
ooooo
"Mr. Bonk's last lecture was about his life and how his English teacher influenced him." Amali told Jaiden while they walked down the hall of the school, sitting to wait down for an hour before they finally got to walk into the room.
"How... educational." Jaiden chuckled. He looked around nervously at the nine hundred something others surrounding them, caring nothing about getting in alphabetical order. "So many of them." he murmured.
Amali scanned the area; really, there were. She glanced over at one girl in particular; her hair was a bleach blond with black ends and silver streaks, straightened and put into a twist ponytail in the back. Jewelry was donned over her head, neck, wrists, and she had one, large hoop earring on her left ear. Hanging from the hoop was a keychain charm that looked much like her own, except it looked like a sakura petal charm at the end.
Talking to the girl was a slightly taller boy with the same bleach blond hair as her, but nothing dyed in. He was wearing simple clothing, but attached to his jeans was a keychain of his own; this one had an odd-looking star-shaped object at the end of it.
"Are these... that popular?" asked Amali, her hand running across her necklace charm. Her mother had used a special name for it a while back, a few years after she received it, but she was only around five years old and couldn't remember now.
"Actually, they look kinda familiar." Jaiden admitted, scratching the back of his head.
"I don't think they're from Aptakisic." Amali pointed out.
"Well, no," Jaiden looked down at his gown and back at theirs, "they're from Woodlawn, they've got blue gowns on."
"Right." Amali shook her head. "I had a rough night last night."
"Did you ever find out who that guy was that looked like you that they found in the cafeteria yesterday?" asked Jaiden, focusing more on attaching the odd dangling object to the top of his hat; it didn't seem to want to stay.
Amali shook her head. "I know just as much as you do."
"So you knew that he had a charm, too?" asked Jaiden, overly proud of himself as he stuck the way-too-tight hat on his head.
Amali's dark eyes widened, "Wait, what?"
"Yeah. He was walking around with a charm in his hand kinda like your keychain, but darker." Jaiden pointed to the one hanging around her neck.
Amali didn't know what she was more nervous about; the fact that this boy had a keychain almost exactly similar to hers somehow, or if he was still wandering around the school.
At least she was going to high school this time.
ooooo
It seemed like hours until it was finally over. All of the names had been called and, much to her surprise, her name was spelled right on the diploma. Charity and Riku went to go talk to Jaiden's parents, Kairi and Sora, along with two other couples that they might have known a long time ago but could no longer recognize.
Amali and Jaiden, however, were sitting on the steps of the Pointe, a commons in Stevenson that was almost entirely encased by glass windows, and what wasn't was pure white. The first five seconds, they thought they would go blind.
"This year," Amali started, "I'm ready for adventure. Aptakisic; boring, eighth grade and seventh grade home. Stevenson... I'm up for anything."
"You're just barfing out words now." Jaiden laughed.
Amali giggled lightly and pushed her dark silver hair behind her left shoulder. "You think?"
There was a scream somewhere down in the Wood Commons, a commons relatively close to the Pointe.
"Should we even?" asked Jaiden with an exhasperated sigh; he already knew the answer.
"Duh." Amali murmured, pushing herself off of the stairs and began running through the crowd of people to the Wood Commons. She didn't even have to look back to find Jaiden; he was probably running right behind her, nervously messing with his lip ring.
"It's the same as at Aptakisic," a friend of Amali's, named Kera, remarked, "There's that guy that looks like you with the huge key and that black thing, but there are more."
"Huge key?" asked Amali. All she could think of was some mayor getting the key to the city. Did he plan on killing the black thing with it?
"Let's see." Jaiden suggested, as if he was mocking Amali's determination. Amali, however, was already halfway in the crowd before she could even hear what Jaiden was trying to say. Jaiden finally caught up with her, and the other students stared in shock.
The boy had dirt brown hair with brown and green eyes. His face was soft; and there was something very familiar about it; he had Charity's nose, ears, and lips. He was at least a few years older than Charity, and was wearing clothing that looked like her father's old pictures. In his hand was a giant key; it was green with black running down the sides of it. The top of the key looked odd as well, almost cartoon-ish, like it couldn't fit in a normal keyhole.
"Amali." the boy said. Amali cocked her head to the side, and looked to both sides of her.
"Uhm. Me?"
The boy could only nod, and he frankly looked like he was burying a strong mixture of sorrow and excitement down somewhere.
"Amali, do you remember me?" he asked her firmly, walking closer to her.
"W...What?" she asked.
He had a look of pure disgust on his face as she looked at something invisible behind Amali's shoulder. His height shocked her; he was at least a half of a foot taller than her. "I can't believe those two let you go your whole life without remembering me."
"Those two?" Amali asked, a worried expression moving across her features.
"Charity and Riku. Mom and dad."
Amali's face was hard to read, but the boy's was even harder. Her jaw dropped open in the slightest, and she crossed her arms. "Wait a second. I don't have a brother."
"I'd like to try to convince you that you are, a DNA test, perhaps, but it's not the time. There's a lot to tell you and little time to do it." The boy's stern look only made Amali giggle.
"Hold up. You're not telling me anything before you tell me your name and prove to me that we're even related." Amali had no way of deciding whether this boy was mental, retarded, or just very imaginative, but she stood back to listen anyway.
"I'm Trevor. Your brother. You were born on my fourth birthday." His hand suddenly dug in his pocket, and he pulled out a keychain. This keychain was a darker representation of a cartoon-like wind formation.
Without even having to ask what was going on, Amali unhooked her keychain from her necklace, and put it next to his.
"They're identical." Amali groaned out of discomfort, "Aside from color, anyway."
"They're keychains to one of these." Trevor put his giant key out in front of Amali, "Mom gave them to us when we were born; yours is of her Keyblade, Savior of Balance, and mine is of her Nobody's, Exie's Destroyer of Balance."
Amali took a second to try to comprehend this sentence. "Hold up." she just laughed slightly as she began to hook her keychain back onto her necklace, "What you're holding is a keyblade?" she asked. Not waiting for an answer, she continued, "What's a Nobody? Mom had one of these?"
Trevor nodded. "Dad, too."
It struck Amali like a bullet. There was somebody... somebody that she had known when she was only a year old, but he left quite suddenly. "You're my brother...? What's going on? Why didn't I ever know this? What do the Keyblades do?"
"Hold it!" came a voice. Running up to them were four other students; two of them were the boy and the girl that Amali and Jaiden had seen talking before. They all held out their keychains to him, and the bleach-blond boy asked very firmly, "Why do you all have these?"
"There's no time." Trevor looked to his left, "We have to find an empty classroom."
"We'll go to the band room." Jaiden suggested, who had only been listening this whole time. He probably only suggested the band room because non-band students weren't allowed and he desperately wanted to see the inside of it.
ooooo
"It's locked." Amali told Trevor, "Just as I thought. See, if you're my brother, you could at least listen to me...!"
Amali was utterly shocked. Trevor had not been listening to a word she had been saying, since he lifted his 'keyblade', and a bright, white light shot from the top of it and into the door handle. He grabbed the handle and the door was open.
"...Convenient." Jaiden smiled.
"That so... disproves a lot of scientific theories." Amali shook her head in disbelief.
"You'll be surprised." They walked inside, and pulled three chairs from the stands. Sitting in all of them, Trevor started.
"There's a lot you need to know. We'll work our way from why I haven't seen you your whole life, huh?" he asked her. Amali nodded her head ferociously; obviously she was quite interested. "On my fourth birthday, about thirteen years ago, when you were born, mom and dad decided to tell me about keyblades and Heartless. Don't ask about those yet, I'll tell you later. They told me that other worlds existed, and that night, simply because I knew about keyblades, I got mine. I wanted to go out and see other worlds; but when I stepped outside of the door, the Heartless started attacking me because I had a keyblade.
"Mom and dad were obviously scared, and they thought that Azure Daybreak wasn't the right place for a four-year old to be running around with a keyblade. Ever since, they sent me to Sora and Kairi's home world, Destiny Islands, to live at." At this, Jaiden jumped. "They wouldn't let me come visit because they were afraid I would tell you about the keyblades and then you would get hurt. You know those periodic 'business trips' Dad goes on? They were to visit me."
Amali could barely move. "Th-that's a start. What are the keyblades? And why did mom and dad have them?" she asked him.
"Mom," Trevor started, "was pulled out of her world at the end of her freshman year to go help seal worlds. Each world has a heart, or the keyhole. When you use these keyblades to seal them, they're safe from a big amount of Heartless, black creatures that steal peoples' hearts, and darkness can't swallow them up. Together, they defeated Dad's Heartless and Nobody mixture, a man named Kiur. The second time, it was the end of her sophomore year and she was dragged into assist in neutralizing the Keyblade War, a war between the light and dark Keyblade Wielders."
"...Savior of Balance!" Amali laughed nervously.
"You're getting it." Trevor smiled slightly, "And the third time she was called out it was the end of her Senior year, she was called to go seal worlds that were unsealed from the Keyblade wars and to destroy the Organization, to which her Heartless took two previous Organization members that were her friends, Roxas and Axel."
"What's the Organization?" Jaiden interrupted.
"It was a band of thirteen people that sought to uncover the mysteries of a heart. Well, not technically people. Nobodies."
"And a Nobody?" Jaiden asked.
"A Nobody is like a mirror of a person. They're like Heartless, only they have real intellect, and if your heart was strong enough before it was stolen, then they're born as higher-level Nobodies. The highest level are the human shaped and thinking Nobodies. Some of them can even remember their Somebodies. They have no physical difference from Somebodies, but they lack a heart and emotion." Trevor explained.
How did he know so much when Amali knew so very little? She wanted to find out more. "Okay. So who did Mom do all this stuff with? She couldn't'a done it alone."
"It varied a little bit. But she always traveled with her best friend, Nessa, whom I'm sure you've met," Trevor was interrupted by the two other boys that Jaiden and Amali hadn't met.
"That's our mom!" they both said at the same time. The fact that they talked gave Amali and Jaiden a good reason to get a good look at them; one of them had curly, light brown and bleach blond hair, and was a little shorter and sturdier than the other. The other, however, was taller, with hair so dark brown that it was almost black, and a little thinner.
"Sora, Kairi, and Dad also traveled with her." Trevor continued, "Dad had been best friends with Sora since they were little and with Kairi only a little less. Then there were some that came and went, like Quince and Anton, who Nessa and her husband, Hayner, named their kids after."
The two boys interrupted again. "That's Q and Anty."
"Whatever," he said, and kept going, "And there were two others that they always traveled with named Naminé and Roxas, these two's parents." he pointed to the boy and the girl with the funky hair.
"How'd you know that?" she asked in a slightly airy tone. She was, however, smiling, that was a good start for someone that looked like her.
"I can see it in your face. Your parents come to visit Destiny Islands a lot, so I see them often. But there's more time for that later. First we have to go down there and get rid of the Heartless invading your ground floor."
"What?" asked Q, the blond one, "There're those things here?"
"That's what you fought earlier, right?" asked the girl with the strange hair. They decided that her voice was just airy in general.
Trevor only nodded, but he practically darted out of the band room, leaving the others to follow him, having only the slightest idea where he was going.
"I'm June." the girl smiled, shaking Amali's hand as they ran.
"Amali," she replied, and got a good look at her keychain; it was much different than hers at the charm, but had the same exact chain. "This is so weird. I can't believe what we're getting ourselves into."
June gave a sad smile and silently agreed.
"You wanted your adventure," Jaiden pushed her graduation hat down farther on her head as they ran just to mess with her, "you got it."
Author's Note: I wanted to finish what happens, but that will take about many more pages, so I decided to cut it off here. So, I hope you liked it! I'll be updating soon!