absences
She stilled her breath and let the light gather.
It was a simple spell, the final lesson of the day's training—manifesting inner light and making it visible. She remembered doing a rudimentary version of this on her own when Master Eraqus had first found her on a different world, long before any lessons or apprenticeships.
Her light is more focused now than it was then, more controlled in volume and clarity: just enough to make the shadows on her side of the room melt away—but it still came easily. Eraqus nodded at her, pressing a hand briefly against her shoulder. She recognized the signal to maintain and shifted her focus accordingly.
He turned towards Terra.
Even from her peripheral vision, Aqua could see that Terra's channeling was strange—uneven and misshapen. He had never been very talented at magic. His lips were pursed, eyes boring down into his own hands, which were straining with the unstable pressure of his light. Rather than chase away the shadows, the flickering, uncertain quality only seemed to draw them more deeply around him.
Set under the Master's stare, Terra's shoulders tensed further. A snapping sound reverberated through the room as his light flared briefly—Aqua winced—and Terra's hand recoiled like a shock had coursed through it. As the spell extinguished entirely, there was the scent of something charred left behind in the air.
Aqua let her own magic fade, turning towards him. The faint glow of the setting sun, filtered through the stained glass overhead, settled back in around them in its place.
"Again." Eraqus laid his hands beneath Terra's, palms braced upwards. "Take hold of the light within." More softly, as Terra's brow furrowed: "Let go of your anxiety. Think upon the nature of light and draw it outwards from your heart."
Terra's jaw set in determination, not quite meeting Eraqus's eyes. "Yes."
The familiar, learned mantra played through Aqua's mind—long days of kneeling in the main hall with her hands on her lap, listening to the Master, with Terra at her side—as she hung back and watched. The nature of light—kindness, compassion.
The light that emerged Terra's hands barely managed to crackle before smothering itself again.
The ability to hope. The desire to protect.
"Once more. Focus."
"Yes."
The capacity to love.
A rush of foreign, sickly light swept over Aqua and disappeared past her shoulders. It was there and gone in the space of a moment.
Terra's expression closed. He remained in the casting stance even as the Master studied him and finally drew back, as though frozen in place, a trace of something lost and uncomprehending in his eyes.
"All right," Eraqus said, and adjusted his grip to a brief, but firm squeeze to Terra's shoulder. "That's enough." Terra's gaze fell to the floor. "We'll continue during tomorrow's training. Take some time to rest, both of you."
Terra turned his head, as though he had only half-heard, and managed something resembling a nod. Eraqus returned it—another grasp of Terra's shoulder and a weighted glance back towards Aqua—and moved past them both towards the stairs.
Aqua waited for his footsteps to begin fading before she moved towards Terra, uncertain.
"Terra," she began.
"I'm fine," he said—a little too quickly—then seemed to regret it. "Sorry," he amended.
She shook her head, raising a tentative hand. She thought she ought to say something further, to offer some kind of help or advice—but as Terra lifted his head in her direction, the glint in his eyes made her stop. He was looking at her, but past her, onto something invisible and impenetrable to anyone but himself—and she knew that whatever she might try saying to him now, he was beyond hearing it.
"Go on ahead," he said vaguely, gesturing. "I'll catch up later. I just want to keep practicing—a little more."
She hesitated, before saying, "Okay. You can do it."
He answered with a smile, easy and confident, and Aqua laughed a little before turning from him and moving after the Master through the halls. She believed then that he would be all right.
Aqua woke that night to the familiar feel of something burnt pressing lightly against her skin; the taste of something singed lining the inside of her mouth. She opened her eyes. Moonlight was wafting through the curtains of her window. She was usually an early riser, but there wasn't any hint of oncoming morning against the horizon just yet.
In its place, she felt a faint ebb of energy from the main hall, as though a lamp was being switched, weakly and repeatedly, on and off. The stone floor of the castle was cold beneath the soles of her feet as slipped from her room, feeling her way through the hallways and past the stairways. She reached out to trace back the strands of clumsy magic leading her path—but she already knew the origin.
Terra was kneeling in the same spot as when she had seen him last; the same position, his arm extended in front of him, though there was a strange bloodlessness to his face that had been absent before. He had been there all this time.
His lips moved, slightly—the shadows on his face shifted—in some kind of focusing chant that Aqua couldn't recognize from the distance.
She retreated further behind the corner. A faint orb balanced above the palms of his conjoined hands—somehow, to her gaze, its shape brought to mind the motion of a person's re-emergence from the surface of water for air—and quickly flared in another violent burst before fading into nothing.
Terra's face fell, then set. He straightened his shoulders and murmured to himself as the air surrounding him began to thicken again.
She considered moving out to meet him—maybe urge him to go to bed before he made himself sick. Spellcasting wasn't meant to be done for hours on end; it wasn't sustainable to either the body or the mind—but once more, for the second time that day, something stopped her.
Instead, she pressed a hand against the wall, and just watched, and watched; and after enough watching it felt as though the rhythm of Terra's attempted and failed spells began to fall on her ears like a pulse—and it occurred to her, distantly, that it was only in those brief moments of darkness between his stubborn attempts at mastering light that she was actually able to make out the whisper of his voice through the halls.
"Good morning," she said.
"Morning." His hair was unkempt and there were tired shadows drawn into his face, but the self-satisfied grin pulling at either ends of his mouth, not quite suppressed, told Aqua everything there was to know. He had always been a little too transparent—he was Terra. She quirked an eyebrow, but didn't have quite the time to begin teasing before the Master's robes cut between them both in a sweeping motion.
"You're here early," Eraqus noted.
"Yes," Terra said. He seemed to hold his breath for a suspended moment. Then, as though incapable of making himself wait any longer, he thrust out his arm to show the Master what he had accomplished.
The light spread in the gaps between Terra's fingers, illuminating the sleepless spaces beneath his eyes. The glow still trembled at the edges, the invisible outline of magic teetering precariously between both inward and outward collapse at once. But it maintained nonetheless, if only, it felt to Aqua, from a sheer, stubborn sense of refusal to fade, and the shadows of the hall melted into white.
A fresh smile lit Terra's mouth and the corners of his eyes as he rocked on his heels, trying to not be terribly obvious about peering at the Master's face in anticipation of his approval.
"Well done," Eraqus said. His voice was pleased, even amused—but not particularly surprised.
Ah, Aqua realized.
The Master knew, too.
Terra puffed out his chest. It was the same way he had, years later, when Ven arrived on their doorstep and Terra had knelt beside him and coaxed him from sleep with a wooden sword and a dream.
And—watching him glow in that moment through his weariness, still holding onto the spell and practically clutching it against himself between knotted fingers, Aqua felt, suddenly, like she understood this person a little bit more. The nature of his heart. The reason the Master had always looked at him with a particular kind of warmth—a kind of strange, soft, knowing warmth spreading through her own curling fingers and into her lips that, for a fleeting moment, she wondered might have nothing to do at all with light.
That warmth and sound of his enthused laughter had stayed with her for a long time afterwards. She had held onto its recollection beyond the time with Ven and beyond the qualification exam, as she chased him through various worlds and through stories of stolen hearts and other crimes he had committed—across a graveyard lined with discarded keyblades and the traces of an ancient war—and through a corridor of darkness that had left her alone and stranded in a place beyond the passage of time.
It was only at that end, as the contours of the world she knew faded around her and she descended downwards, thinking of a broken castle and a broken boy locked away inside with no one there this time to wake him, that she realized that the feeling of hope she'd engraved into the memory of that smile might have been nothing but misguided self-delusion all along.
She stills her breath and lets the light gather.
The light is as easy to recall as ever. Easier, maybe, by way of the shadows pressing in on her at all sides, coaxing the faint spark to burn all the brighter. She thinks back to the exam, and the darkness that had surged from Terra's palms that day as easily and naturally as breathing, manifested in the space of a second to him in a way the light never had.
It would have been easy to mark that point as the beginning, but it rings hollow to her, somehow. She replaces it amongst the map of her other memories, trying to trace what it was that could have led to this endless moment—a moment that feels like long, long dream she still hasn't managed to wake from, filled with silences and the rough grime of suspended rock and monsters seething from the dark.
She still isn't sure.
There had been other points. A castle surrounded by glass and the motions of dance, resounding with the toll of the midnight bell. The sight of his retreating back in the capital of light. She had said something to him then. It was hard to remember the words, after all this time—but she knew it hadn't stopped him.
As she exhales, expelling air too damp and thick and heavy with darkness—she thinks, she knows—that something had happened amidst all of those jumbled moments, some common link, something simple and essential—that she had failed to recognize.
Something that makes her heart seize with a kind of fear different from any she thought she knew before; something etched in the heavy lines of exhaustion in Terra's face that had been drowned out by the glare of his light—lines that she, and perhaps the Master, had allowed to be drowned in both moment and memory. Something in the strange, persistent trembling of his closed hands and closed voice whenever she had encountered him during their mission to find Master Xehanort after his failure in the exam.
Something in the way an uncomprehending static had flooded her mind, along with an uncomfortable, heightened awareness of the weight and feel of the keyblade clenched in her hand, as she heard murmurs from all directions, rising continuously in pitch, of Terra falling into dark.
The final piece slips from her grasp, as it always seems to. She's left with nothing but the same discordant fragments and the same eternity before her.
But as she stands and begins to walk again, Aqua thinks that when they meet again—she knows that they will, with the assurance of a glass charm pressed against her palm—that if she tries closing her eyes once more, she might finally be able to listen clearly. To both Terra's voice, and her own. Maybe, truly, for the first time.