AuNo: Welcome to my Kingdom Hearts fanfiction! First of all, this isn't my first. I've written many before, but all on different accounts. No, you may not have those accounts. Anyway, I'm extremely excited for this. It may start off slow, but let's face it, they all do. If they don't, they're usually crap. This fanfiction takes place about a month after the ending of Kingdom Hearts II. Enjoy, and please review! They're what keep me writing. :D

Chapter One

Descent of Hell

Under the burning sun
I take a look around.
Imagine if this all came down.
I'm waiting for the day to come.

30 Seconds to Mars, "Oblivion"

"These streamer things really piss me the fuck off," Kosma complained, wresting the ten-foot green paper serpent. It spun and lashed at her in protest. "Why do they have to be spirals? Can't we be just as festive with straight crepe paper?"

Her best friend, Siobhan laughed as she pushed a lock of dark blond hair behind her left ear. "When they start selling straight strips of crepe paper at Card and Party I'll be sure to let you know. And be careful of what you say; my mom could walk in any minute."

"Like your mom's never heard you swear," Kosma mumbled incredulously, finally managing to tape the green monster to Siobhan's doorway. Even then, it looked lopsided and weak, to fall down at any moment. "It's mocking me," she whispered angrily to herself, but eventually turned away to look at Siobhan, who was standing on a small letter, pinning balloons higher up on her wall.

"Well, not all of us swear like sailors," Siobhan stated flatly, walking down the ladder. Her tone should have told Kosma that she was done, that the conversation had ended, but already pumped up for a party, Kosma decided to take this as far as she could.

"No. Just us two," Kosma smirked, narrowing her brown eyes, which looked black in the dim lights of Siobhan's living room. Her tone caused Siobhan to turn around and almost slip on the last step, but she managed to regain her balance just in time. While her face was furious from Kosma's arguing initially, it quickly softened.

"You're right," she mumbled.

"What's that?" Kosma asked, putting her right hand behind its corresponding ear, "Did you just say I'm right?"

"Don't get used to it," Siobhan warned her, and pulled up her slipping pink skirt. "You think it looks okay?" she asked, pointing up to the mass of green and gold balloons taped to the wall. They may as well have been eyes staring down at the two of them, and soon enough, the rest of the partygoers, but Kosma decided that she owed Siobhan a little less sarcasm.

"Looks great," she said, nodding her head, "except the color combination is hideous."

Siobhan sighed. "I know. And it's-"

"I know, I know," Kosma waved her off, "our school's colors. It's also the Packers' colors, irony abounds." Living in Illinois meant that everybody was a Bears fan for football (everybody, that is, except for Kosma's parents), and their high schools colors being the same as the rival's was some amusing irony that the students often poked fun at. "Anyone would celebrate getting out of that hellhole, even if just for one summer."

"That's what I'm trying to say," Siobhan laughed, "it's a celebration that our junior year is finally over. Not like senior year will be any better, but hey, I could use a celebration. What time is it?" she asked.

Kosma scoffed. As if she actually carried a watch on her. No, that would mean being responsible. She glanced at Siobhan's old VHS player, the one that she refused to get rid of. "How will we watch Child's Play movies without it?" she would say sarcastically. In a way, Kosma agreed; both of them seemed to have a hard time letting go of their past. "Six," Kosma answered dreamily, her mind now on the old movies they used to watch. "What time are they supposed to get here?"

Before Siobhan could answer, the doorbell rang. Siobhan smirked and headed over to the door. Through the window, they could see several people (obviously carpoolers) waiting at the door. All of them were dressed to kill, as usual. "Now," she answered, and opened the door.

Epik High was blasting through the speakers, music choice courtesy of Kosma. Everyone was talking, some people were even dancing in the little area that used to be occupied with couches and a glass table. The original occupants had been pushed somewhere into Siobhan's garage. Kosma's best friend always liked giving her uncle a hard time, which sometimes meant shoving furniture in where his car was supposed to go.

"I heard there's supposed to be a big storm tonight," Kosma caught hints of chatter when she walked by to throw away some of the used, empty cups. Part of being the hostess's best friend meant being on the clean up committee, but she was okay with that. "A big one. Around midnight. Tornado warning and all that."

"Where'd you hear that?" Kosma asked, joining in immediately on the conversation. It was their friend Yuki speaking with Seth. Both of them were usually very comical people, hilarious in absolutely everything they did, but even with the amazing atmosphere of the party, the blinking lights and the loud music, Yuki's voice was grave.

"Weather this morning," Yuki responded, "but my dad says that they've been predicting this for a week."

Kosma, back then, disregarded this as nothing. She rolled her chocolate eyes and sighed dreamily. "If only this storm could have happened one fucking week ago. Then maybe we would have gotten some time off of school."

Yuki laughed meekly, but Seth shook his head. "No, it's probably best that it's happening now, because we'd have to go to school for an extra day."

"Bah," Kosma said, waving it off with fingers with chipped green nail polish. "Maybe there won't even be a storm at all. After all, summer's starting. Storm season is practically over." Yuki and Seth gave her looks of disbelief. "Honestly, how many times have those crackhead weathermen gotten the weather wrong? They said it wouldn't rain on my birthday last year and we had a hailstorm. Oh, it didn't rain, all right."

Seth laughed now. "Maybe you're right."

"I have to throw these away," Kosma said, leaving Yuki and Seth to their conversation. Although she wanted to pass it off as nothing, Kosma stopped Siobhan on her way into the garage to recycle the plastic cups.

"Siobhan," she said, "did you hear about the storm?"

Siobhan nodded and followed her into the garage. "Yeah, it's pretty much the only conversation that's going around right now. They say that it's going to be huge; and you want to know the weird thing? They say that it's going to happen everywhere."

"What?" Kosma asked, disposing of the cups, "All of the U.S.? Like another Hurricane Katrina?" She shook her head. "I'll never get why they name hurricanes with such pussy names. Who's going to be afraid of Katrina or Ivan? They should call them Hurricane Dicksmasher or Hurricane Cuntpuncher, maybe then I'll be a little afraid."

Kosma had gone ranting, so Siobhan shook her head quickly. "No, not just the United States. I mean it, Kosma. Everywhere. As in, the whole world."

The last cup, Kosma missed, and it landed with an irritating clank on the garage's floor. Kosma scrambled to pick it up and throw it back into the recycling bin, but her epiglottis had already failed in blocking the passage of her saliva into her trachea. In other words, she was choking on her own spit. "The whole world? That's bullshit."

"Don't use your fifteenth birthday excuse again, Kosma," Siobhan said, but her tone wasn't snappish. On the contrary, it was quite calming. Her forest green eyes were digging holes into Kosma, however, so she stiffened and tried to take Siobhan seriously. "They really mean it. Every meteorologist that has been consulted so far agrees. But they all say that there's something off about this storm, something that's not normal."

"A storm all over the world isn't normal," Kosma mumbled, a little frustrated with her dropping the plastic cup and hearing such shocking new. "Well, let's try to enjoy the party until ultimate doom falls upon us." She thought faintly of the Hadron Collider incident earlier that year. Siobhan sighed and opened the door for her on their way back into the house. "What time is it, anyway?"

"Shouldn't I be asking you that?" Siobhan asked.

"I don't have a watch," Kosma said simply. Siobhan squinted to read the VHS player from across the room. Kosma sighed; Siobhan had something against wearing her glasses when she didn't absolutely have to. There was always the option of LASEK surgery or contact lenses, but Siobhan wouldn't have any of it.

"It's... oh my God," she breathed, "11:45. I didn't even realize it got so late."

Kosma bit her lip. "Fucking A. Way past curfew." It looked like a lot of people would be getting rides home from their parents that night, or, even better, driving illegally. Then again, the police probably had other people on their mind if a huge storm was going to hit the world in fifteen minutes. "Siobhan, can I spend the night?" Kosma asked faintly.

Siobhan nodded her head. "I kind of expected it."

Kosma didn't even bother to fish her cell phone out of Siobhan's room; her mother was so used to the two of them spending time together that it really didn't mean anything if Kosma never came back from Siobhan's house. Well, maybe it meant a little. "I'm going to go outside, okay?" Kosma asked. She always liked the atmosphere outside before a storm. It was always so calm and the air always smelled so good.

Siobhan sighed as she watched Kosma throw on her dirty, black converse, tying the white and red laces haphazardly. "I'm not even going to count that as asking for permission because I know you're just going to go, anyway."

"Love you, too," Kosma said to her best friend and began weaving her way through the crowd, heading out the door. Whenever Kosma heard something she didn't want to, she had a tendency to assume that they were just saying "I Love You". It was an effective solution, but sometimes it went too far. Oftentimes Kosma would miss out on important information because, instead of her friends informing her, they said "I Love You".

Finally, she made it to the door to the backyard, and pushed it open.

The air did not smell right. It didn't have that amazing pre-rain smell, the smell that made Kosma want to lie on her back and stay there forever. It didn't even smell like static electricity like it did before a lightning storm. The atmosphere wasn't wet, and nothing felt right.

Kosma looked up at the sky and saw traces of small, dark clouds, which were blotting out any hint of stars in the sky. She stared up at the remaining stars for a moment, but soon had to rub her eyes to be sure of what she saw; did one of those stars just blink out? "No," she said to herself resolutely, "it's just the clouds." It better be just the clouds.

There was something messed up about the clouds, as well. They weren't dark so much as they were purple, and they almost looked like they were swirling, as if made of poison gases. They looked vicious and deadly and ready to suck up everything in their paths. And Kosma wanted to get a better look at them.

As she walked farther away from the house and closer to the field that lay outside of Siobhan's fence, the booming music was fading. Rammstein now, Kosma thought faintly, yet another choice of her own. That didn't seem to matter as much as the clouds. It was almost as if they were shedding a purple light, making the gold of Kosma's own brown eyes stand out. They looked amber, like a cat's peering through the night.

And her curiosity could have killed her.

Kosma opened the gate and left it open, hoping that Siobhan's toy poodle, Mocha, wasn't outside on the lawn. "The hell?" she murmured to herself, walking further into the field. Away from the distractions of the party, the light coming from the sky looked more distinct, as did the color of the clouds and the sounds that the thunder was making. Lightning struck somewhere in the distance, but there was something wrong with it. It was too bright, too heavenly. Much too otherworldly to be in someplace like Nebula Heights.

And eternal darkness. Kosma saw impossible lights, bold color, all swirling around eternal darkness. While at first she thought that she was looking up to the staircase to heaven, it soon became obvious that she was staring into the descent of hell. Above her, the thunder boomed, a symphony of sound violating her eardrums like an unwanted guest. She was drowning into some mingling of light and darkness.

And she wanted out.

Before she could shout, the darkness all accumulated at her feet. She jumped out of the way. Kosma wanted to pass it all of as a trick of the light, herself seeing things, herself dreaming. But she wouldn't wake up. From the darkness, spots of yellow glowed that almost looked, humorously, like sprinkles on some odd black icing. The yellow spots grew darkness around them, however, as they ascended out of the pool of oil-like darkness.

They began to take form into bug-like creatures that Kosma was sure she had never seen in her life. While she expected to feel shivers and shudders down her spine, instead she was full of some sort of ecstasy. Her body went numb. Kosma was sure that she was saying something- anything- but she couldn't hear herself.

There must be thousands of them by now, Kosma thought dully, not bothering to count every pair of glowing amber eyes that surrounded her. When she turned around, she could see that Siobhan's house was gone, her yard was gone, and slowly but surely, everything around her was disappearing. She turned back to the creatures. One of them was making an odd finger movement, as if it was beckoning her into the dark- and Kosma would have followed them. It would make sense, that feeling of numbness she got when they were close to her, pulling her in, sucking her dry, dry, dry of all worries and fears.

But then she realized that they were lunging for her.

One by one, those creatures were jumping at Kosma, their little claws extended further than their antennae reached behind them, trying to destroy her, destroy her like whatever had gotten at Siobhan and the others destroyed her house. Like whatever had destroyed the town, which she realized was being gulped up all around her, save for the clean spot she was standing in the middle. The diameter was a good seventy meters at first, but it was dwindling. sixty-five, sixty, fifty-five... soon enough, she would be gulped up with the rest of them.

The rushing of the creatures changed instantly from an ecstasy to immense pain. Out of desperation or stubbornness for her life, Kosma through her arms in front of her in a cross, protecting her chest and her face. She feared for the worst and whispered an old, forgotten prayer beneath her breath, hoping it would save her.

No attacks came. No claws scratched up her body and no creatures knocked her to the ground. Instead, it seemed, some light was penetrating the thinness of her tightly squeezed eyelids, some light brighter than the purple that had been filling the sky- that is, before the darkness took over. And an odd weight had come into her hand, somehow foreign and familiar all at the same time, like a long lost friend that had grown up in her absence.

With much effort, from fear rather than fatigue, Kosma opened her eyes.

"Whoa."

In her right hand was a long object, shaped, she thought vaguely, like a key. The handle was strong and lilac-colored, the guard around it shimmering as if made of glitter. The guard made way to the long shaft of the key, which was also a shimmering lilac, making way to a darker purple, and soon to a dark blue. The glittering, at this point, looked more like stars. The top of the key was adorned with a small, crescent moon, and the teeth were yellow, extending into points.

Lethal points.

The creatures surrounding her had backed away, shielding their nighttime eyes from the bright light that they key had brought with it. The weapon calmed down in a moment, however, the light around it disappearing. At that, the creatures once again gained their courage and rushed towards Kosma with more speed than other. "I'm dying," Kosma mumbled ironically, "and I pray to God for help, and he gives me a key." If it was God that gave it to me at all, but that's not the point.

But it was a key with sharp teeth.

She wielded the weapon like as something just short of a master swordsman, pointing the tip of the key threateningly at the creatures. They flinched, but did not stop her attack. With clumsy swipes, she attacked the creatures, contented by their disappearing into nothing as she did so. But they aren't disappearing into nothing, Kosma thought bitterly. More and more continued to appear as she destroyed more of them. Still, the more she destroyed, the less world was being swallowed up, leaving her on her fifty-five-meter-diameter patch of land.

And these little pink shapes kept floating up in the sky with the more she destroyed! Was that what was making them multiply? Angrily, when she destroyed another of the creatures, she reached up for one of the pinkish objects and grabbed it.

The object was weightless, like thin glass (and equally as translucent) in her hand. She noticed ironically, that it was in the shape of a heart. What were things things that were flying out of the creatures when she destroyed them, and why were they so beautiful? How could something so magnificent come from something so horrible?

And then, Kosma let it go. Instead of floating up towards the corrupt sky above her, however, it stayed directly in front of Kosma and, to her surprise, flew at her. While Kosma tried to get away, the object was at much too close of a distance, and the creatures surrounding her were looking at her carefully, if with anything, awe. She could not escape.

The little heart went straight through her.

Kosma looked behind her to see where it had gone, but it was not there. She put the hand that wasn't desperately clutching her giant key to her heart.

Ba-Ba-dump-dump.

An irregular heartbeat.

No, two heartbeats.

Kosma opened her mouth to scream, but before she knew it, all of the Heartless around her had disappeared. She was left with the large patch of land she had been fighting on, but she was all alone. "What's going on?" she murmured, praying for an answer, an answer that, surely, she would never get. Siobhan was gone, Yuki and Seth were gone, and even the creatures, bad company as they were, that were trying to attack her was gone.

A rumbling coursed through the earth, and Kosma let out an unintentional squeak. "A goddamn earthquake, too?!" she shouted bitterly, but was knocked to her feet by the vibrations. From an all new kind of darkness, blacker than ever before, a creature stood, at least fifty feet tall. Materializing slowly, Kosma soon recognized him simply as a larger version of the creatures that had been there before him, except he had distinguishable fingers, legs and knees, arms, tendrils for hair and a torso- a torso with a cutout of a heart.

"Did... did I take your heart?" she asked nervously, but the thing did not respond. Of course you didn't take his heart, she thought to herself numbly, you took the heart out of some random little creature that was trying to make you dinner. Don't be worried. Fight.

Maybe hearing these words would have made her braver, but Kosma did not back down. She had already lost her friends, her home, and most likely her family, so all she had left was herself. "If I've gotta sacrifice that," she said, "then at least I'll be wherever my friends are." This time, she used no prayer, only her key. Kosma charged at the creature and struck the closest place she could, its knee. The creature stumbled, and cried out.

He's actually hurt by this, Kosma thought, pushing a lock of chocolate hair out of her eyes.

Of course he is, came a voice in Kosma's head that she didn't recognize, you struck him with your keyblade.

"What?" Kosma yelled into nothing, scared and wondering where that voice came from. She didn't want to fight anymore, not after hearing that voice. She wanted to wake up from whatever bizarre dream that the lemonade she drank the night before had given her, and she wanted to wake up now. The large creature struck down with his hand, and with a sidestep, Kosma was able to narrowly avoid him. "Who are you?" she asked nobody in particular, either the voice in her head or the creature.

Never mind that, came the voice again. It was both reassuring in the sense that Kosma knew she couldn't be crazy if she heard the voice twice, and not reassuring because it could have just meant she was crazier than normal. The deep voice, however, was trying to calm her down, trying to get her to focus. She could feel it. Just attack that heartless with your keyblade!

A heartless. Was that what she was fighting? Without a second thought, she rushed up to the hand that had struck the ground next to Kosma and hacked at it with her weapon, her keyblade. The creature cried out in some indistinct moan and tried to lash at her, making two cuts through her red t-shirt, no doubt staining it even redder.

Kosma was faintly aware of some smaller heartless surrounding the hand in the blackness that it was creating, but she was too busy concentrating on destroying this one. From its hand (after a good few more hits) she ran up to his head, hoping it was its weakest point. When she made it to the side of its head, she began to swipe away with her keyblade. She made no welts or cuts in it, but it seemed to be in some kind of pain. "If you had a heart," she shouted at the creature after looking at its cookie cut-out torso, "I'd fucking stab it. Where are my friends? My family? You're the leader, aren't you?"

He can't understand you, came that male voice in her head again, he may be stronger than the others, but he's still just a heartless. He's not their leader, but you'd better get rid of him or else your whole world may be swallowed up.

"What does that mean?"

If your entire world is swallowed up, it's impossible to get back. If you can leave a fragment of it- just a fragment- it will go to a place called End of the World, and you can restore it.

"How? How do I restore it?" she cried out, hacking only harder at the creature, which was groping blindly by its head, though its arms were too muscular to let its hands reach its head. "How do I restore it?" she repeated.

Two words resounded in her head. Kingdom Hearts.

The creature cried out, fell to the ground, and everything went black.

Author's Note: Okay, it wasn't that amazing, but I've definitely gotten better since my first ever fanfiction. XD' I hope that we learn more about Kosma as time goes on. And don't worry, Sora, Kairi and Riku are coming into the picture; in fact, expect them in the next chapter. Until then, please review, and thank you for reading!