It's here!

I took a 4-month long hiatus from XIII after Oncoming Storm was finished- partially to take a break, but partially to finish Nox Caelum, my long XV fic- and now I'm back with the second installment of the Into Chaos series! This picks up almost two hundred years after the ending of the first fic. I'm super excited to continue this journey with y'all; it will be a much, much shorter installment than the previous arc, but it will have key events and turning points that will lead into the final arc and then into Lightning Returns when we reach the end.

Welcome to new readers, and welcome back to older readers! Thank you so much for your patience with this series, and I hope you enjoy! :)

Summary: Nearly two hundred years after the events of Oncoming Storm, Hope continues to research the Chaos on Bhunivelze as Snow, Noel, and Sazh monitor the situation down on Nova Chrysalia. Hope has been having the same recurring nightmare for a century now- the image of a rose-haired phantom, her name lost in the recesses of his memory- as he searches desperately for answers. Things become more dire as the highly classified team of researchers and scientists begin disappearing one by one, and young Dajh Katzroy falls into a coma.

Disclaimer: I don't own the Final Fantasy XIII series
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Bhunivelze – 700AF

There she- Hope was fairly certain it was a she- was again. It was the same thing every time, a transparent, glowing figure in the darkness. He couldn't see much of her, but then she moved, and he saw the flash of peculiar-colored hair. Not that his own silver hair was completely ordinary, but hers stirred something deep in his memory, that color so striking, so incredibly special that he felt her name just on the tip of his tongue, but as his mouth opened to form the word, it disappeared. Please, he wanted to call out to her, arms outstretched. Please, wait!

His gloved fingers grasped at air, at nothing; frustration filled him as he struggled to reach, struggled to remember her name, her name, her name. "Please," Hope begged. "Please, a name-"

And he was awake, his body flailing, legs tangled in his sheets before he managed to extract himself, sitting up on his bed and swinging his legs over until his bare feet hit the cold floor. Panting, Hope ran his ungloved hands over his messy, bed-ridden silver hair before they came together over his face, attempting to get himself to calm down. Cold sweat trickled onto his fingers and palms as he waited it out, waited for his brain to register that it had only been a dream, a nightmare, waited for his heartbeat to slow. Shakily, Hope stood and walked over to his desk, grabbing his glass of water before he padded out of his room and down the hall into his personal lab, opening the second door to what had been dubbed the Crystal Chamber.

Inside, the singular crystal placed in the middle of the room glowed a calming hue, helping just a little in soothing his fragile nerves. Hope dropped his forehead against the shape of the shoulder of a young woman lying on her side, her crystalized curls framing her face.

"Vanille, what am I doing?" he groaned quietly. "Two hundred years, and I'm still here. Vanille, what am I doing?"

The girl gave no answer, the smile hidden in the corner of her mouth frozen, just as it had been the past seven hundred years. Hope took deep breaths through his nose and exhaled through his mouth. "I had that dream again," he told her quietly. "Someone was there, waiting in the dark- I…still don't know who- I can't even think of a name. But…I know her. I know I know her."

Maybe, he thought to himself, she would tell him to take a break. Vanille would smile that bright, sunny smile of hers, lace their fingers together, and drag him running through fields like she did when they were both still teenagers running through the Archlyte Steppe. He had been fourteen then, and she had been nineteen, had been nineteen for six hundred years before then, had been nineteen for over a thousand years now. Fang would tell him the same thing, to do what he needed to keep a level head, and Lightning, oh his heart ached for his mentor, frozen in crystal stasis, knowing exactly where she was and unable to get her out. Lightning would tell him the same, probably to attack the problem from a different angle.

Hope straightened and looked over at Fang, curled up with her hand clasped in Vanille's, and then at Serah Farron, whose body had been suspended in stasis for two hundred years beside their crystal. He ran a hand through his already-messy hair and sighed, thinking about the inbox in his office that had been left beeping and unanswered.

Snow Villiers – 9 missed calls, 2 messages

"Hey Hope, haven't seen or heard from you in a couple of weeks. Call me back." -beep-

"Hope, it's me. Getting worried about you. Call me back." -beep-

Noel Kreiss – 6 missed calls, 1 message

"Hope, it's Noel. Call me back. Things are…not great down here. Snow and I are worried. So is Sazh. Dajh keeps asking about you." -beep-

Sazh Katzroy – 2 missed calls, 1 message

"Hey Hope, hope you're doing okay. It's bee a while, wanted to hear how you're handling things up there. I know it can't be easy. Dajh misses you, and we're concerned. You know you'll always have us behind you, kiddo- well, you're no kid anymore, but, well, you know. Drop us a line. Lightning, Fang, and Vanille would tell you the same." -beep-

Director Nazca – 1 missed call

"I have to get to the bottom of this," Hope said aloud, his voice raspy and rough from sleep, but firm. "It's been two hundred years since the Chaos was released. I've been researching all of this- time travel, the Time Gates and the Chaos itself warping everything, and…" he clenched his fist. "And I'm getting nowhere. Two hundred years, on top of the five hundred I already had. We're running into the same questions and the same results over and over that don't give us any answers. People are still dying, and no one is being born."

Hope squeezed his eyes shut for a moment before opening them again, his confusion, frustration, and loneliness all of a sudden absent from his features. He put a hand on top of the joined ones of the two Oerbans in front of him. "I swear, we're going to get those answers soon. I swear it. We can still help people. We can still save the world, just like we did before. This world is going to become one you and Light and Serah can come home to."