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Summary: The city of Hollow Bastion, a veritable utopia where the residents are always smiling and at peace with their lives…because they had no other choice. The Organization saw to that.

Writer: finem

At the Edge of Life

Part 1

Smile…keep smiling… nod, wave, smile. That's it…There's nothing wrong…nothing at all…

Sora made his way through the throngs of late afternoon pedestrian traffic. It was 5:00. Work was done and they had exactly one hour to clear the streets and get home for Dinnertime. As always, there was an air of carefully concealed tension and haste in the people of Radiant Garden. Smiles and greetings were freely exchanged, but no one stopped to chat for a bit. No one laughed or pulled friends to the side. Everyone pretended that everything was fine, but they knew that they had to get home.

It was very bad to be caught outside during Dinnertime.

"Hey, Sora!"

The brunet looked up and returned the smile and wave from one of his 'friends' where he strolled happily along with his flip-haired girlfriend. Tidus and Selphie. That was one he still had to get used to. A month ago, Tidus really had been one of his closest friends, and he had been in a happy relationship with a completely different girl.

Sora looked around and spotted Yuna not far away, heading for the flat that she and Tidus used to share, a vacant smile forced firmly on her lips as she pointedly ignored the couple. That was over now. Tidus had never been one to stand by complacently and accept the enforced conformity of their city. He had bad-mouthed the Organization one too many times, and now the Organization had made sure that he would never have anything bad to say about it again.

smile…smile…

It wasn't an easy life, living in Radiant Garden. Dreams didn't exist here, only cold gray reality. There had been a time when Sora thought that maybe he could get out. Maybe he would be able to travel to another place, actually go to a University, but that hope had died long ago. His brother had tried to get them both out of the city, but the Organization had taken him, and Sora had never seen Roxas again.

Perhaps Sora would have disappeared along with his brother the night he'd been taken. The brunet had been ready to storm the Organization's base of operations and demand that his brother be returned to him. He knew that it would have been futile, but life without Roxas had lost all meaning, and even if it meant undergoing the Organization's reeducation, Sora thought it would be worth it if he could be reunited with the only family he had. He would have gone, but before he could leave, his computer had turned on.

The message on the screen looked like spam. A random email, bulk-sent to his account, but the text in bold across the top caught his attention and drew him to sit before his monitor.

"Those who are lost are not lost forever. Your Brothers and Sisters can be saved."

Further inspection showed the email to be from some kind of religious group called Kingdom Hearts Ministries. To this day, Sora wasn't sure what possessed him to reply to the message, but he had.

"I want to save my brother." That was the text he'd sent. Almost instantly, he received a reply sending him a time and address where 'services would be held.'

That was the first time he had learned of the Resistance. He'd gone to the address given, a small church in the older part of town, and been greeted by a silver-haired teen, just barely older than he. The boy looked like an avenging angel, the fire and intensity burning in his Aquarian eyes almost frightening. It was the strongest emotion Sora had ever seen in the eyes of anyone aside from Roxas. Standing beside the boy ways a redhead girl, amethyst eyes wet with tears and wide with confusion. Later he learned that the girl was like him. She had lost her sister, Naminé, to the Organization, and she, too, had responded to the strange message that appeared in her inbox.

Riku and Kairi. They had changed his life; given him purpose when it seemed like all was lost.

That had been two years ago. Sora was nineteen now and he had been living with the other two since that day. A strong kinship had formed between them that, in Riku's case, had eventually grown into something more. Sora had actually found a kind of happiness with them, and together, they worked silently, along with untold others in the city, to sneak people out when they were at risk of reeducation, help the reeducated regain the memories they had lost, and slowly dismantle the Organization's power in whatever way they could.

Riku was an organizer of some kind to whoever was coordinating the group's combined efforts, but even he didn't to know from whom they were taking orders. Everything was secrecy and subtlety. They generally worked in teams of three and never gathered more than two teams together at once. They never spoke of the Resistance in public. All of their communications were done through codes hidden in emails that would change daily. They all took special pains to ensure that the Organization would not be able to track them. Still, the Organization was aware of their existence, and it had begun actively seeking to weed out the Residence, bit by bit.

"Sora!" Kairi called, rushing to greet him at the door of the small house the three of them shared. "Anything?"

The question in her eyes and anxiety radiating from her every move told Sora that her search had been no more fruitful than his. He shook his head, slumping against the door as he allowed his outside persona to slip away. He fought to keep panic at bay.

"I haven't heard anything or seen him anywhere," he told her in a carefully controlled voice. "I even risked asking Hayner and his group if they'd seen anything." Sora swallowed around the lump that was constricting his throat, making it difficult to breathe. He didn't want to believe it had happened again, that the closest person to his heart was once again taken away, but…

"I think they caught him, Kai. I think the Organization has Riku."