Disclaimer: I own nothing in this piece, Kingdom Hearts related or otherwise.

Well, my first fanfic! It's great to be here folks. Well, I know this is a Kingdom Hearts fanfic, but through the course of this story I might take things in a slightly different direction, add elements of other stories that I always thought would work appropriately within the KH universe. This takes place right after KHII, with all of the main characters safe at home. So, enjoy the story!


Chapter 1: The Event

Riku's PoV

I still can't believe that after everything that's happened, we're all still together. It's like over the past few years, there have been times where I thought that I would never see this place again, that these islands were just a bygone memory that I could never reach again. I guess anything really is possible, huh? I've been thinking that more and more lately. That's why I had that talk with Sora; of course, it's also when this whole mess began.

We had just finished school (god, school. Never thought I would say that without a grimace on my face), and I had asked Sora to meet me at our island, where we used to play when we were kids. Took him for damn near ever to show up, as usual. Knowing Sora, he probably was helping Kairi out with her homework, again. Anyway, by the time he finally shows up, the sun's just beginning to set on the water, and I'm leaning on the paupou tree like always, waving for him to come over. Of course, he runs over as fast as he can, huffing and out of breath but still as bright and cheery as ever. I've gotta say, if there's one thing that can bonehead can do, he can always cheer me up out of my over thinking moods.

"Heh, Hey Riku. Suh, Sorry I couldn't get here sooner. Kairi need some help with her trig homework." I knew it! Typical, run off to the girlfriend whenever you get the chance. He doesn't even take trig!

"Mm, it's fine. At least you showed. I really needed to talk to you."

"Oooookaaay, what about?"

I looked out at the horizon, took a moment to gather my thoughts one last time. "How long has it been since we got back?"

He took a moment to think, like he was trying to remember exactly how many minutes since we walked through that Door to the Light. "I dunno. A month or two, maybe?"

"It's been three. Three months since we came back to normal life."

Sora jumped right up next to me on the tree; he knew this was going to take a while. "Huh. You don't say?"

"Yeah. Man, it all seems so surreal now, huh? Looking back, we're lucky we weren't killed, huh?"

Sora was still as confused as ever; as direct as he was, he was horrible at trying to understand anything resembling subtlety. "Yeah, I suppose so. What makes you think that though?"

I kept staring at the horizon, refusing Sora any chances at eye contact; if I had to say everything I needed to while looking at those big blue innocent eyes of his, I was going to lose my train of thought for sure. "Well, I've just been thinking. While we were going through it all, all that light and darkness stuff made perfect sense. But remember all that stuff King Mickey said, when we were facing Xemnas?"

"Something about how light and darkness are each half of everything, right?"

"Yeah, but I can't help but feel that it's not that simple. I mean, there's a little bit of both in each from what I can tell. This is the realm of light, but darkness exists here just about everywhere, and it looked like it was the same way in the realm of darkness, right?"

Sora scratched his head, trying to keep up with my train of thought. The poor guy, he may get better grades than me in most classes, but everyone knows when it comes to a class discussion or an English paper, I'm the deeper thinker. "I guess…"

So, I kept feeding him my train of thought, in hopes of finally getting him to think about it all. "And when I was stuck with Xehanort's face, I used the darkness, but always for good. So that means that one doesn't have to be bad, or even good to use the light or darkness, right?"

He looked at me with this scared look on his face, like a puppy who can't understand why his kid is growing taller. I had never seen him like that before. "I don't know. You're starting to freak me out a little, Riku. Where are you going with this?"

"I'm saying that as much as the King seems to know about light and darkness, I think that there's something more to all of it, something none of us can even imagine. There's just no way it's as simple as we've been thinking." I got up from my spot and walked to the edge of the land, arms outstretched at the world. "And it's only a matter of time before someone finds out what it is and how to use it to endanger the worlds again."

Sora got up and stood right next to me. "Endanger the worlds", now that was something Sora could wrap his head around. "Don't worry about it Riku. We've faced Heartless and Nobodies down, and I'm sure that whatever comes at us next, we'll face it down too. Together." He put his hand on my shoulder, for reassurance more than anything else. "I'm sure of it."

I smiled and closed my eyes, taking in the moment. For all his simplicity, Sora was always there for me, and he always knew how to chase away the creeping doubts in my mind. I really needed that right now, for someone to just get me past all the thinking and tell me that things would be fine. Good old Sora. "You're right. We've done it before and we can do it again. Thanks."

"Don't mention it." He looked up at sky, eyes bright with that undying spark of hope we all knew him so well for. Suddenly, he frowned, turned to me, and pointed outward. "Is that a star? This early in the evening?"

I followed his gaze, and saw that he was right; just above the sun, right where the sky turned a hazy orange, a little pinprick of light was hanging in the distance. It almost seemed like it was pulsing, like a little heartbeat. As I watched the pulsating light, I noticed that, with every pulse it seemed to get a little bit bigger. By this time, it looked about the size of a small golf ball, and it was growing quickly – too quickly.

As soon as I realized this, I turned to Sora so quickly, he flinched. "Sora, we've gotta get out of here, now!"

As usual, he had no idea what I meant. "What are you talking about?"

No time to explain, just had to grab him and run."It's coming this way, just run!"

Grabbing his hand, I dragged Sora towards the bridge. If we hurried, we could get to the boats and get a safe distance away before impact. About halfway across, I jumped off the bridge, with me making a perfect landing while Sora fell to the ground in a heap.

"Riku, calm down, just tell me what's going on!" He looked up at me like I had gone absolutely out of my mind.

"You'll understand in a minute, just trust me on this one!" I pulled him to his feet, got into the boat, and grabbed the oars. It took some doing, along with some barking on my part at Sora to keep rowing, but we managed to row far enough just in time to see it fly by.

I couldn't get a clear view of whatever the thing was; it was moving way too fast. I was only able to see a glimpse of some sort of red and yellow chunk of something before it smashed right into the tree house in the center of the island. The impact was incredible, something I had never seen before. The crash created a series of fireworks of every color imaginable, covering the entire island. Still, even if the fireworks weren't enough to impress, the impact of the thing smacking into the trunk of the tree was enough to create a "BOOM!" loud enough to send waves coursing through the ocean. Thank god Sora was quick on his feet when it came to danger, or we probably would have flipped over right then and there. He managed to keep us afloat by rowing his side of the boat to compensate for the waves; I would have joined in, but I was far too preoccupied with what was happening on the island. The only really strange part of it all (if there is anything that isn't strange about your childhood playground being demolished by a giant hunk of…something) was that even when the fireworks subsided, the colors they made didn't; they just floated a few feet above the sand, forming a psychedelic cloud over the island.

All of a sudden, Sora yanked my oar out of my hand and started rowing back towards the island, an oar in each hand and a smile beaming across his face.

"C'mon Riku, we've gotta check it out!" he hollered. "This is it, this is what you were talking about. And it's already found us, we'd be crazy not to go!"

I thought about speaking out, telling him he was crazy and that we had to tell someone first, but then I stopped and smiled. Sora was right then, and he was right now. He and I could take this together, no matter what. I knew it. "Alright then. Full speed ahead!"


The King's PoV

Gosh, things were just goin' great, better than they had in a long, long time. I was back home at the castle, Minnie was as swell as ever, and best of all, I could finally get back into some routine around here. After years of fighting off all sorts of creeps over the years, it's nice to just kick back, relax, and sign off a whole bunch of administration forms. This stuff used to be a little dry, but in comparison to being stuck in the Realm of Darkness it's a breeze! Besides, I'm a king; if I didn't take care of all the important stuff, who would? It had been piling up since I left, after all…

Anyway, I was in my study, just finishing off my stack of salary approvals and was getting ready to start approving a new well on the castle grounds when I heard a couple of high pitched voices pipe up from the other side of the door.

"You're Majesty, You're Majesty!" "You gotta come quick! It's, it's…just hurry!"

Well, that sure wasn't a good sign. From the sound of it, there were only two people it could be: the castle mechanics, Chip and Dale. They've always been a bunch of chatterboxes, and if one of them was speechless for once, something had to be up.

"Ok fellas, I'll be over in a bit," I hollered. Just had to put a signature down, stamped it with seal to finish off, and off I went.

The minute I made it out the door, I started getting down to business. "Ok boys, what's all the fuss about? I'm a little busy…," only to see the little chipmunks already down at the other end of the hall. Chip stopped at the end of the hall, jumping up and down to get my attention.

"C'mon, Your Majesty! It's the sensors, they're going haywire!"

The sensors! That couldn't be good. When Sora and Riku got back to their worlds, we set up a couple of precautions to ensure their safety. Sora was one of the last Keyblade masters left, after all, with Riku holding a heck of a potential for wielding one of his own; we were going to risk anything happening to them now, not when we were so close to building up some recruits and keeping the keys going. One of those precautions was the sensors, a buncha Gummi Ships on autopilot around the islands, recording any and all spikes of light or dark energy. Chip and Dale had built all of the equipment themselves, from scratch; for something bad to happen to that kind of cutting-edge gummi tech could only spell trouble for all of us.

Anyway, by the time I got down to the gummi workshop, things were kinda in an uproar. Alarms were going off everywhere, the steam vents had filled the room with a fog, and the machinery was puffing away like it had been scared into some strange marathon, with all them trying to fix the problem at once. It took some doing, trying to get past all those crazy robots and the steam, but I managed to find a way to the control board, where Chip and Dale were already waiting for me.

"Golly, things really are getting outa hand here. Well, what's all the ruckus about?" I had to shout just to be heard over all the commotion around us.

"Well, uh, you see, uhhhh…" I could barely hear them, but it seemed like they were a little in over their heads. After a moment, Chip pulled Dale around to face away from me and the two chattered away at each other. It took them a few seconds to agree on how to describe what had happened, but once they did, they turned back to me and stood up as straight as they could. "Ok," Chip said. "Well, you know how the sensors usually show two colors on a screen, white to show the levels of light and black for the levels of darkness?

"Yeah, sure fellas." To be honest, it was the only thing about the sensors I did understand.

"Well, a few minutes ago, the power levels just started spiking like crazy. And then…well, see for yourself. Dale?"

Dale turned around and pressed a few buttons on the board, making a screen pop up just behind it. Immediately, the screen showed a bar, filling up to show the loading process. 30 percent, 65 percent, 100 percent…

Whoa.

There was now other way to put it: the entire screen was covered in a swirling mass of rainbow-like colors. The dull flickering of the black and white sections had been replaced with an overflowing, all-consuming wave of colors. Any color you coulda imagined, it was in there; clouds of light blue, spinning spheres of orange, veins of red spilling out, and throughout it all, more than any other color, was a harsh, pulsing, blinding yellow. It was beautiful, but terrifying too, like it was going to come out and consume everything in its path.

"Do ya see now?" Chip shrieked. "We've got no idea what it means, there's no record of anything like it in our files! What are we gonna do?"

Well, if the islands were in trouble, no doubt the kids were right in the middle of it. I had no choice; I had to get down there and see why the ruckus down there was causing so much ruckus up here. "Get the Gummi Ship ready, fellas. Looks like they need my help."


Lord, Mickey's hard to write! I love writing for Riku though, lets me go as deep as I want.

Well, that's it for now! let me know what you think, and I'll try and have another chapter done as soon as I can!