Recap: Because, let's face facts… I'll never keep a schedule. Therefore, I've decided to have a mini recap at the beginning of each new chapter so you, my beloved readers, don't need to go back to the first chapter.

Ciel wakes up and Larxene, surprise, acts like her usual sadistic self. Luckily, Axel is there to come to the rescue! Then the savior and the saved coincidentally meet Roxas, who behaves very oddly indeed. After Roxas effectively runs from Ciel for reasons unknown, we ended the chapter with Axel comparing our protagonist to Demyx in a multi-layered analogy.

A good recap it's not. I hope that is enough to jog your memory a bit. I may have mentioned my issues with conciseness in previous chapters/other stories... as evidenced by this rant. Happy reading! ^o^

Chapter 3: A Teacher Affects Eternity

"They say D minor is the saddest key," the cheery blond told her, shifting the position of her left hand on the neck of the beaten chillador. "But I don't think so." He waved a finger in the air, motioning for her to play.

Ciel strummed briefly, concentrating on the melancholic resonance. She looked up at her instructor's satisfied face and plucked the bottom four strings. "You don't think so?"

"Nah." Demyx lifted his sitar and played a series of chords, pausing when his student winced. "D# minor," he said. He glanced over his shoulder at his bedroom door to make sure it was closed and lowered his voice cautiously. "It's Larxene's key. Scary, huh?"

She nodded.

"You want to know the others'?"

She nodded again.

Demyx played each chord, naming the Organization member while his long fingers shifted smoothly between frets. He never had to glance at the fingerboard. "Db major: Xemnas. Eb major: Zexion. F major: Lexaeus. F# major: Xigbar. F# minor: Marluxia. G minor: Vexen. Ab major: Luxord. Ab minor: Saix. A minor: yours truly. Bb minor: Xaldin. B major: Axel."

Ciel didn't recognize most of the names, and she didn't understand the connotations of each key, either. All she knew was that none of their musical representations, despite undeniable beauty, sounded remotely pleasant. She also noticed one member was missing and couldn't help asking, "What about Roxas? What is he?"

The blond's nimble fingers skimmed the strings again. He played a series of notes that sounded like a scale, but again, Ciel couldn't be sure. "The Key of Destiny," he answered cryptically.

Puzzled, she stared into Demyx' unequivocal blue eyes, searching for some hint of the context. Failing to find any, she repeated, "The Key of Destiny? Is that, like, D major?"

He laughed, as though she had made a joke. "That's funny!" The young man paused, and then Demyx scratched his head, accidentally flattening a patch of spiked hair. "Sorry, I forgot you're new."

When he didn't follow his apology with an explanation, Ciel asked, "What's the saddest key?"

This time, Demyx didn't play. Instead he laid his instrument tenderly across his folded legs. His facial expression shifted from impish to morose faster than even the King of Masks could have managed. "B minor. Even worse than Larxene's. Know what I mean?"

"I don't understand very much of what you said," she confessed.

"You'll figure it out when you meet the others," Demyx assured her. His tone wasn't mocking or dismissive, which she knew Axel's would have been. He wasn't cold like Roxas, and he certainly didn't terrify her the way Larxene and the other one had. The blue-eyed blond was genuinely nice. Probably.

Ciel nodded a third time. Her neck was getting supple from all the bending. "Okay."

"Everyone's always going out on missions, so it might be a while before all of them get to introducing themselves. Some of them are pretty antisocial, too."

"Antisocial..." Ciel thought of Roxas. He qualified as unsociable by her standards. But Axel had said that he and Roxas were normal. "Is that anyone I've met?"

"Who do you know?" he asked. He took the miniature guitar from her, signaling the end of their lesson.

"You, Axel, Roxas... Larxene." She and her newfound friend both shuddered. "There was the first one, the one who brought me here. I don't know his name." She counted them mentally. Five out of thirteen. They were too few to draw any negative conclusions about the remaining members. The girl hoped to God she wouldn't meet any more Larxenes.

Demyx fiddled with one of the tuning pegs. His sitar had been perfectly in tune. "Did he name you?"

"Uh-huh."

"That's the Su-pe-ri-or." Demyx enunciated each syllable slowly and with great care. "The boss man, Xemnas. The naming ceremony is his deal."

"Naming ceremony? When he does the X thing?"

There must have been some significance in the letter X. It was a part of each name, and the Superior went to the trouble of changing each member's name. She wanted to ask him, but somehow, she didn't believe Demyx would know. Ciel made a mental note to ask Axel, but somehow, she didn't believe he would answer her. It was worse than when her sycophantic tutors had to guide her lessons with selective information.

"People used to call me Ciel." Ciel was careful to state this with neutrality. She didn't want to risk a tentative friendship over a name. The girl had the impression that Demyx was unique in Organization XIII.

"You don't like that name, huh? It'll be better once you get used to it. Roxas was sore just, like, yesterday. He didn't know his old name, either. Hey, it's not too bad being a Nobody," he added encouragingly when he looked up from his sitar and saw her blank expression. "The way I see it, the Organization is a huge dysfunctional family at a reunion party."

"That's... uh, quaint."

Demyx grinned, revealing teeth that were as white as the walls. "Thanks. So am I. A quaint, canorous callant is what Luxord called me."

"Ab major," Ciel recalled.

The blond looked proud of her. "Exactly."

Neither of them spoke for a moment as Demyx concentrated on retuning the strings he'd tightened.

"You're a better teacher than Axel," she commented randomly.

"Of course, I am. Don't tell him this, but"—Demyx leaned in close—"I'm naturally better. He's fire and I'm water, you see?" His next declaration was shouted at the top of his lungs in the direction of the door. "So my awesome water warriors put out his lame fire chak—"

The door burst apart in an explosion of sparks and shards of white plaster. A fireball roared past where Ciel sat, helpless, and headed straight for the jokester Nobody. It clashed with the barrier of water that jumped up around Demyx. The cerulean shield vaporized.

Tongues of flame licked the hem of Demyx' black coat tauntingly. Demyx yelped curses as he beat out the flames, hopping absurdly around his room and flailing his limbs. He ran in circles around his room, knocking over stacks of papers and piles of discarded cardboard boxes. The show continued until the maladroit blond tripped and collapsed onto his unmade bed. He beat his fists on the mattress and screeched like a child having a tantrum.

Ciel scrambled over the messy floor, slipping on books of sheet music, and frantically smothered the persistent fire with Demyx' rainbow-colored comforter. She heard a sound and turned toward the door, a scorched pillow held out before her like a shield.

Axel sauntered in, crushing the ruins of Demyx' door under his black boots. He twirled in his hands a pair of strange, circular weapons enhanced with long spikes along the circumference. "What," the menacing fire-wielder growled, "did you say?"

Demyx held up his hands, offering surrender. "Just kidding," he grinned. "Hey, Ciel, we were just kidding around, eh?"

Ciel let the pillow-comme-shield fall and nodded mutely. She couldn't find her voice.

Axel focused his cold eyes on her, and he smiled plastically. "I wondered where you'd gone. Come on, girl, I have to get you ready for your first assignment."

She looked at Demyx, who was still grinning.

He waved.

Ciel rose reluctantly and stretched her long legs. They had cramped painfully in the hours she'd been kneeling on the hard floor and were stiff. "Thanks," she mumbled, not looking at the foolishly good-natured face.

Axel gave Demyx a look, a promise of future punishment, and marched Ciel out of the room.

Demyx called out as they left, "You're C minor. Good luck to you!"

The red-haired Nobody glanced back towards his charge. "What's that about, then?" he demanded suspiciously, jerking his head in Demyx' direction.

"C minor is a musical key," Ciel replied. "The C minor triad is formed with the root, third, and fifth of the C minor scale: C, Eb, and G."

Her deadpan response must have surprised him. Axel stopped walking, stared at her for a few seconds, and sighed. "Hopeless," he muttered in his nasal whisper. "You're worse than Roxas when he was new. Your attitude is gonna, well…" Axel feinted a punch, and Ciel flinched violently. His fist froze a hairsbreadth from the bridge of her nose, hovered there ambiguously, and then relaxed to tap her lightly on the head. "Your attitude," he reiterated, "is gonna get you killed."

Ciel stepped out from under his hand and ran her trembling fingers through her dark hair. She glowered up at his haughty countenance. Her attitude? When Axel was bipolar and as temperamental as an active volcano? Unfortunately, based on what Ciel had seen, he was also Organization XIII's normal. She bowed her head. "I'd rather it doesn't."

Axel waggled a bony finger in her face. "See what I mean?" He considered her silence and muttered with a role of his emerald green eyes, "No, you probably don't."

"I don't," she agreed.

Another sigh. Louder, this time. "It's a good thing," he mused, "I didn't hand you over to Larxene. You'd be so much as pretty ribbons to decorate the castle with by now, and we're trying to recruit members instead of lose them."

"Recruiting? Why?"

Axel gave her a look. It was a look that said she was stupid for asking and would have known if she'd paid any attention at all. If he'd been wearing spectacles, the Nobody would have looked exactly like Ciel's former tutor. "Another dreamer," he said contemptuously. "Shape up," he advised. "It's not kind ol' Axel you'll answer to if you disappoint. He has high expectations for you. Then again, he hasn't got a clue about your attitude problem, does he?"

Ciel's dragging feet became rooted to the ground.

Axel kept walking and was nearly three meters ahead of her before he noticed that she'd stopped. Impatient, he stomped back and posed, akimbo. With his thin physique and feminine features, he looked just like a girl. "What is it, now?"

"What do you mean? Who has what expectations for whom?"

His mouth split into a creepy smile just shy of Larxene's. "Whoops. I may have said too much," Axel acknowledged shamelessly.

"Axel?" she probed, not very hopefully.

"Nuh-uh. You have fun figuring it out on your own." He smirked. His tone was both mocking and dismissive, just as she had expected.

"'A teacher affects eternity,'" she quoted for him. "Or so my tutor said."

"Tutor, huh? So little Lexci was a rich kid. Makes sense, since you know nothing."

"Isn't that why you are supposed to teach me?"

"Hmph. It's about time you finally want to learn." Axel grabbed her by the wrist, but instead of leading her down the hallway, he opened a dark, ominous abyss in the middle of the white wall. It was, she remembered, what the Superior had done.

She didn't want to go in and balked when Axel pushed her toward the darkness.

"Suck it up. We're on a deadline—there's not time to walk everywhere."

The girl gazed indecisively at the rippling black hole and the smooth white wall. In truth, she was less afraid of the darkness than of the light. Ciel took a breath, stepped into the portal, and let darkness dissolve her body.

Quays and Artichokes

About content from 358/2 Days, Roxas' lovely backstory…

Well, since I've also never played 358/2 Days, only common knowledge from that game could possibly be included. I'd like to take the opportunity to confess that I've never played CoM, either. Don't have a Gameboy Advance. Don't have a DS either. It's cool that they try to diversify their games, but I can't be expected to buy a new consol at each release, can I?

The Mini Blog (Formerly A/N)

Remember how I wanted this chapter to have action? Yep… failed. We'll try for next chapter? Please be patient with me. It's that these chapters are a lot shorter than my usual. I don't know why. Although this one, despite its shaky transitions, is a bit longer.

Erk. I need A LOT of critique, and I would appreciate it so much. (hint hint ;D)

Thank you, all of you wonderful readers and reviewers and subscribers and favorite-ers! Best wishes for the new year! 2010, woot! It's graduation year. It's college application deadline time. It's dwindling vacation days. It's countdown to failing AP exams. It's time for me to stop being weird! I hope you all have a nice holiday!