i dared myself to just stop being a wuss and write one whole thing and post it even if it's terrible so yeah that explains this. i am very sorry.

lbr tho, come on Disney, you have your tropes, you have your narratives, You Know What You Must Do

apologies also to gurren lagann

It's just that sometimes when Sora dreams, he sees the light in the dark - the light that is sometimes just a pinprick and sometimes a great pillar and sometimes a plane that ends in a claustrophobically close horizon where the dark meets the light like sky and earth and sometimes is all three at once in a way he can't put together - and when he wakes up, there's always this feeling in his chest. It's like a combination of a warm hug and holding hands, although it's also a feeling tinged with sadness, and loneliness, and it's this feeling that Sora has right now, standing in this room. It's the feeling of a meeting before a parting, like he is always on the verge of saying goodbye.

(Sora's hands are shaking, and he wishes someone were with him, some two people who are always with him, all for one and one for all.)

For reassurance, he looks down to the note clenched in his hand, the one he keeps surprising himself by finding. It's still legible, rambling in a light feminine hand: castle oblivion scrambles the memories and the purpose of all who enter without protection. but the memories are never *lost* - that was my doing last time (i am sorry). if it's you, sora, i think you can find it - what they were looking for. follow your heart, ignore your memories (they will return! they are safe). follow your feelings. trust your heart.

And Sora had wandered, lost, through empty white room after empty white room, with no cards, with odd memories from childhood floating up at times and at other times suddenly realizing he remembered someone really important that he'd forgotten after walking in. His sense of time had utterly vanished. At least twice, he'd suddenly broken down in the middle of a room, shaking, gasping, overcome by anxiety and fear that he'd never be able to leave, that he had been abandoned, that something terrible was going to happen - and it was then that he would flip the letter over from Namine's mission statement to see another message, much shorter, written in blocky capitals: don't panic. i'll always be there to bring you back. Both times, this had given him courage enough to stand again.

And then after minutes, or months, or hours, or days, Sora began to think he knew where he was going after all. Suddenly between two doors, he would have a flash that one would take him where he wanted to go, and the other wouldn't. And he began to walk faster, and faster, until he was nearly pelting through room after room, crashing down staircases, sprinting, barely thinking except that there was somewhere he needed to be, needed terribly to be. It grew cooler the farther down Sora went - or is he going up? or outwards? - until -

Until now, when Sora slams shoulder-first into a huge white door, carved all over with silver, the first color since white (and the vague bluish shadows of white) he's seen since he entered this castle.

Sora presses a hand to this door and feels energy spooling in ribbons along the silver threading, feels his will to enter eroding (he should go he should leave should go should leave this place is not for him should leave should go not for him not for you GO LEAVE THIS PLACE), but as he flinches back the Keyblade appears in his hand (and strangely, in this weird dissociative moment, it feels alien in his hand, as if it isn't his own Keyblade he's holding). Muscle memory takes over and Sora swings the Keyblade up to the door, and the door swings inward almost reluctantly.

Despite the turmoil his mind is in, despite that Sora is trying to ignore the fact that he can't remember why he came here in the first place, something keeps his legs moving forward, step by shaking step, into another room. This one is huger than any other in the castle. Light flickers along runes embedded in the floor, runes and chain-marks and sigils, and even though Sora's only specialty is hastily flung battle spells, he can feel the residue of this room's magic in the air. The source of the strange power of Castle Oblivion, of its forgetting and restfulness and eerie blank hostility, is this very room.

There is someone in here.

Sora realizes this about three steps in and he nearly jumps out of his skin. After not seeing another person in... in however long it's been, to suddenly see someone in this kind of a room is beyond unsettling. And yet - does he recognize this boy? (There's a name that's just beyond him at the moment.) His hair is blond, and he's sleeping peacefully in a large chair in the center of the room. The magic hangs heavy in the air, and Sora feels as though his legs are carrying him through a cloud of static independent of his will.

Sora's lips part and he whispers, trembling, "Roxas?"

But no, it's not. It can't be Roxas. The boy in the chair is older, imperceptibly - his face is just slightly thinner, his arms longer, and his clothes look as though they don't quite fit him right (Sora thinks of his own clothing when he... when he woke up, once.) This feeling in his chest is older than Roxas, older even than the Keyblade, older than when Sora knew about other worlds. It's as old as the nights when Sora would dream about stars, about a star drifting down into his hands and warming him with its light. As old as the night when he first realized that there was a lot of sadness out there beyond his reach.

I don't remember why I'm here anymore, Sora thinks, but I have to help him. Maybe I'm here to help him.

Approaching the sleeping young man directly seems somehow intrusive, so Sora walks around to the side of his chair and kneels down beside the arm, so that their heads are at roughly the same level. Up close, Sora knows for certain that he's not Roxas. "I met you in the dream, didn't I?" he whispers. He's more certain of this conviction than of anything else he can remember only fragmentarily right now. "Roxas was there, too, but he's not you."

(Sora still remembers falling in the dark, exhausted, eaten away at until he had no certainty anymore, falling where he knew he dreamed of seeing the light in the dark but seeing nothing... until a star drifted down towards him. Until it embraced him to shield him with its back, to take on the dark itself.)

That same intense purpose which gripped Sora earlier, which led him to this room, now burns in his chest, pulls at him. His hand comes up, but he hesitates. "You saved me," he says, "back then." Is it just Sora, or did the other guy's eyelashes flutter slightly? Sora reaches out and touches his face, just to see if there would be any reaction, any movement, anything. (His jumbled, garbled memories cough up a scene: Kairi asleep like the dead on a bare floor, the sickly shifting light from Hollow Bastion's keyhole playing over her face.) Sora opens his other hand (the note inside it drifts to the floor) and puts it to the young man's other cheek. He shakes him, gently, but there is no response.

(Sora's heart is pounding in his throat.)

"Wake up," he whispers, like that would work. "Please, wake up. I think - I think I'm supposed to help you and I don't know... I don't know what to do." And then Sora suddenly remembers a story, the story that one of the Princesses once told him about her past (was it Aurora? Or Snow White?), about waking up from a long sleep.

Before Sora has the time to chicken out, he brings the young man's face close to his, and kisses him on the lips.

(And as their lips touch Sora feels the burning inside him, the burning of a star, blaze forth in sudden glory, fill him with radiance and fire for a brief second before traveling through him into the other - and the magic which filled this room with hostility is blown away, burned away like a fog beneath a bright sun - the chain markings and glowing runes blaze and then dim, break and fall away, and Sora can remember everything now, that Namine had a theory, that his Majesty had known three Keyblade wielders back before Xehanort had destroyed Hollow Bastion, that Lea told them the Organization was working out of Castle Oblivion for more than one reason, that the night he captured a star in his hands was several nights after a strange young woman had met him and Riku on the island, several more nights after he saw Riku talking to a strange adult man - he can remember everything and see that they are connected in some immensely important way - )

They part suddenly, and Sora sprawls to the floor, dizzy, gasping for air, his vision graying at the edges like he is going to faint. He hears - movement - and then he feels a hand on his shoulder.

"Is it - ?" (He sounds like Roxas, Sora thinks.) "Is it really you?" Sora looks up. The young man seems nervous, disoriented - he jumps back a little when he sees Sora's face, watching him warily, until some sort of recognition dawns in his eyes. (His eyes are the same color blue as mine, Sora thinks.) "It is - you're not - you aren't..." He reaches out, touches Sora's shoulder again. "You're... you're the one who saved me. After all this time..."

"I think either we've got this backwards," Sora says, pushing himself up to his feet, "or I'm really, really lost." He was about to continue on to say, You were the one who saved me, weren't you? You were the star, but then he realizes that it's one thing to call people 'stars' in your head where it all makes perfect sense, but saying it aloud is another thing entirely.

The young man suddenly enfolds Sora in an exuberant hug, laughing, and it feels so familiar, as if they had done this every day of their lives. "It is you!" he exclaims when they break apart. "You saved my heart from fading away... and I don't even know your name."

Now this is well-worn territory. Sora straightens up, and puts his hand to his chest. "I'm Sora!" he says.

The young man grins at him. "Nice to finally meet you, Sora," he says. "I'm Ventus. You can call me Ven."

"Ven," Sora repeats, and for the first time in what feels like forever since this stupid war began, since the Mark of Mastery exam, he thinks that maybe they have a hope of figuring out how all of this fits together, that in some way all of their hearts, like stars, form constellations that they just haven't yet drawn.