Author's Note: I have a week off from school with almost no homework, which is why I'm updating all my stories now. Yay!

NOTES: This takes place during "Kingdom Hearts II," in an in-between area similar to the place where Axel died. When Axel talked to Sora in Hollow Bastion/Radiant Garden and said Kairi got away from him, I'm taking that to mean she literally ran away from him. So this would take place, time-wise, after Kairi escaped Axel but before Saix captured her. Also, as it's implied in-game that Cloud is not from Hollow Bastion/Radiant Garden, I'm going to assume he's from Midgar for this Fic. So there will be some FF VII references that I'm sure you're all smart enough to get, but feel free to PM me if you don't understand something. Finally, it seems Kairi does have some powers of her own in the game-she saved Sora from being a Heartless and wielded a Keyblade-so she has abilities in this Fic as well. And since I'm a Sephiroth fangirl, Sephiroth can do anything. So there.

DISCLAIMER: I think you guys all know by now that I don't own "Kingdom Hearts," but in case anyone wasn't paying attention the first hundred thousand times…I don't own "Kingdom Hearts."

DEDICATION: For becoafamu, who suggested crack pairings. And she reviewed too, which makes her doubly awesome. Thanks so much!

I love reviews. Reviews and constructive criticism are love. Flames are not love. Please do not flame me. And please suggest some crack pairings if you haven't already, so we can keep the one-shot and crack-pairing love I have here going.

Let's get started, shall we?

PAIRING: CloudxKairi

Gray

Cloud really hated his life right now.

He'd known that Sephiroth, the sick bastard, could do some pretty crazy shit, but opening a weird, swirling black vortex out of thin air and flying into it hadn't been something Cloud had seen before. And he'd been so close to catching him, too-one more swing with the Buster sword and he would have lopped the ass-hole's wing off.

So of course, Cloud had rushed into the portal after Sephiroth, only to find that the One-Winged Angel was nowhere to be seen and he was trapped in what had to be the strangest dimension ever.

The whole place was made up of different shades of white, ranging from a pure, clean snow color like a fresh winter's day to a soft dove gray like the underside of a baby bird's wing. The colors shifted, swirled, merged, shimmied, spiraled, and did other strange things so that Cloud had no idea anymore if he was going north, south, east, west, up, down, or just in circles. All he did know was that mixed in with the white of the place were funny-looking Xs with curlicues and spikes, as if they were created by a rich ShinRa company artist. The Xs moved around a lot too, and certainly weren't helping Cloud's sense of direction any.

Besides being completely, utterly, entirely lost, Cloud kept getting attacked by funny white monsters, the likes of which he'd never seen before. They resembled people in zippered white jumpsuits, but without hands, feet, or faces, and with oddly shaped heads. The damn things were fast, too. They could slither and spiral circles around him, and he couldn't see them clearly against the white of the landscape (if you could even call his strange surroundings "landscape.") After one of them had spiraled right around his blade when Cloud had tried to slice through it and given him a nasty bruise on the forehead, he'd resorted to blasting them with materia when he saw them coming from a distance. Firaga blew the things up quite nicely, and charred black jumpsuit made a nice change from the never-ending white until it faded away.

And to top it all off, Cloud hadn't seen Sephiroth since he'd entered this strange place, which he'd now been stuck in for several…hours? Days? Months? There was no way of keeping track of the time here. So he trudged onward in what he thought was a straight line, hoping that he'd eventually run into Sephiroth or, preferably, an exit.

The bastard just couldn't make things easy for him. He had to pull a vanishing act the second Cloud had him cornered, didn't he? He couldn't be waiting to fight Cloud here like he kept saying he was. Or, better yet, he couldn't just stay dead after Cloud killed him the first time like normal people did. But that would have been too easy, wouldn't it? And life was never easy for Cloud Strife. Oh no.

Cloud squinted his glowing eyes, stained an unusually strong shade of blue after years of exposure to dangerous mako levels, at the hazy white edge of the world. Yep, there was definitely movement there. Looked like more of the jumpsuit things were back. Cloud readied his Buster sword to shoot, making sure the mastered Firaga materia was in the first slot.

Just then, the world around him began to shake violently, as if in the grips of some terrible earthquake. Cloud stumbled and slipped, finally falling to his knees and watching in horror as the white realm thrust upwards around him like a tidal wave, and part of it caved inwards into a kind of canyon. He scrambled away from this newest landmark, his feet scrabbling on the ground as he tried to find friction to use to his advantage.

Then what had been moving on the horizon was upon him. Cloud only wished it had been the jumpsuit-things from earlier. This was a huge white monster, moving partially inside the white material that made up the world, so that only half of it was visible. He could make out a thin, birdlike shape with long legs and huge wings, its body trimmed with huge, deadly, pale purple spikes-

-and then the creature was upon him, moving even faster than the jumpsuits, whipping around his body in a white blur. Cloud saw sharp talons headed straight for him, ready to tear open his chest. He could practically feel the thing's scream of triumph as it dove at him.

Without even thinking, he ducked and rolled under the thing, hearing the dull scrape of its claws on white stuff. His head sprang up, unruly blond spikes whipping away from furious blue eyes. With a loud, strangled roar, he surged to his feet-and nearly fell backwards into the canyon now less than a foot behind him.

Arms desperately pinwheeling, Cloud managed to get his balance just as the creature dove at him again, one of the spikes from its wings brushing his cheek and leaving behind a trail of scarlet blood, which seemed almost too intense after seeing nothing but white for so long. But seeing the blood dripping down onto the whiteness gave Cloud an idea.

He heard the thing screech and turned to face it, Buster sword held at his side for balance. As it dove again a third time, its sharp beak aiming for his head, Cloud reached out and grasped a black-gloved hand around one of the wing spikes, using it to swing himself up and over the monster's back.

For a moment the two sailed over the canyon, the monster too shocked that Cloud was on its back to try and shake him off, and Cloud too shocked that his plan had actually worked to try anything else.

Then Cloud could feel the thing start to buck underneath him, so he tightened his grip on the Buster sword's hilt and, quick as a flash, drove it between the creature's shoulder blades.

The monster screeched in pain, loud and so high-pitched that Cloud screwed up his eyes in pain. The creature spread its wings as wide as they would go and flipped into a vertical dive, shaking and bucking and twisting itself as hard as it could as it went. Cloud tried as hard as he could to hold on, but only managed a few minutes before flying off the thing's back and going flying across the white realm-luckily away from the canyon-skidding across the ground a few feet before finally coming to a halt.

Cloud saw the monster dive into the ground as if it were water and disappear. Then, he saw something that, for the first time since Zack had died, made his blood run cold and the icy fist of panic grip his heart and squeeze so tight he was sure he'd burst.

He saw his beloved Buster sword, that he must have lost his grip on when the monster threw him off without realizing it, tumble down into the canyon as if in slow motion. The sharpened edge glinted dully in the realm's pale white light as it fell, spinning end over end, down into the white abyss.

He leapt to his feet and raced to the edge of the canyon, peering down into its depths. His mako-enhanced eyes were good for one thing-they let him see down to the very bottom of the deep crevasse, where his sword was embedded blade down in the ground. Too far down for Cloud to jump down and get it without getting a broken limb, which he couldn't risk while alone in unknown territory. He scanned the canyon walls for some sort of hand- or footholds he could use to climb down to his weapon…but the walls were as smooth as glass.

For the first time since he'd gone off to fight Sephiroth alone, he felt as if he might die by something other than Sephiroth. If any of those white monsters came back, Cloud didn't have a weapon to use against them. He'd learned pretty quickly when the Heartless showed up that only masters of hand-to-hand combat like Tifa really stood a chance against weird monsters without a weapon or magic, and, well, he wasn't anywhere near as good as Tifa with hand-to-hand. He kept a little materia in his glove in case of emergencies, but when that ran out, he was pretty much screwed. And if Sephiroth showed up now-highly likely, seeing as how the bastard always seemed to know when Cloud was at his weakest-Cloud could only hope his death would be quick. Which would in that case be highly unlikely.

Cloud looked up at the white sky and screamed, a scream that seemed to echo out to the very ends of the colorless world before fading away. "Why?" He yelled. "Why me?" He curled up into a ball, resting his spiky blond head on his knees. "Zack, I'm sorry…"

"Hey! You up there! Is this your sword?"

Cloud looked up and blinked. Had someone just…talked? From the bottom of an impossible-to-reach canyon in some weird dimension? I must be hallucinating again, he thought. It's the stress. I just need to sleep for a little bit and it'll go away, it always does…

"Hello? Come on, I know I saw someone up there! Not like there's many people wearing black in this place…"

Cloud glanced down at his black SOLDIER uniform, covered by a long, sleeveless black coat with a silver wolf emblem on it, and decided to take a look down the canyon anyway. Couldn't hurt.

What he saw nearly made him fall down the canyon after his sword.

There was a girl down there, standing next to the Buster sword. Cloud's eyes could see her clearly, and he thought she couldn't be more than fifteen or sixteen. He blinked a few times, looked away, rubbed his eyes hard, and looked back. The girl was still there.

This wasn't one of Cloud's standard hallucinations. He usually imagined up Aerith or Tifa, or occasionally Zack. This girl didn't look a thing like Aerith or Tifa. She had dark wine-red hair that fell down to her shoulders, and was looking up at him with eyes that reminded him of the ocean at Costa del Sol on a particularly fine summer's day. She was wearing a strapless, pink and white dress just a few inches short (or long, in this case) of being indecent, and which had a lot of zippers for some reason or another, along with purple sneakers, and she appeared to have some sort of satchel tied around her waist with a ribbon.

Cloud then realized that he'd been analyzing his hallucination as he'd been taught to do in SOLDIER for potential threats. He rolled his eyes at himself. When had he gotten so paranoid? It wasn't like a teenage hallucination was really going to do him in.

And she wasn't bad looking, either. That dress certainly left nothing to the imagination, and her waist had an absolutely perfect hourglass shape. She wasn't as well endowed as Tifa in the chest department…but then, few women were, and this girl certainly didn't have anything to be ashamed of. Cloud wondered, despite himself, how it might feel to have her pressed up against him, to be moving his hands over those soft-looking breasts and hugging that tiny waist…

He mentally slapped himself upside the head, hard. He'd really gone too long alone if he was thinking like that about a hallucination. Next thing he knew, the Aerith hallucination would be trying to kiss him and the Tifa hallucination would be inviting him to the private upstairs room of Seventh Heaven.

Meanwhile, the girl had stopped trying to talk to him and was now attempting to move the Buster sword. Cloud watched with idle amusement as his newest hallucination struggled to lift a weapon easily as tall as she was, and which probably weighed twice as much. She braced her foot against the blade's dull edge and pulled as hard as she could with both hands on the hilt, grunting loudly with the effort. Cloud's eyes widened in surprise when she succeeded in actually toppling the thing over on its side. Not many people other than him were able to move the Buster sword at all.

Cloud nearly fell into the canyon again as a realization hit him with all the force and bluntness of a speeding train. His hallucination had touched something. It was able to move things. His other hallucinations passed straight through any solid objects, and he wasn't able to touch them at all.

Did that mean…this girl wasn't a hallucination? Was she real?

And that meant…

"Hey!" Cloud yelled down the canyon. "HEY! Can you help me?"

The redhead put her hands on her hips and looked up at him, annoyance showing clearly in those ocean-blue eyes. "About time you talked!" She called back. "I was starting to think you were mute or something!"

"Listen, I need my sword back! There's a bunch of weird white monsters around here, and they could come back any minute!"

"Well, I can't move your sword! Why is it this big, anyway? Are you compensating for something?" The girl yanked on the hilt again for emphasis, and the Buster sword didn't move an inch.

Cloud could tell that dealing with this girl was going to be a pain in the ass. She gave more lip than a pissed-off Tifa hallucination! He almost just got up and walked away from the canyon to leave the girl-and his sword-to whatever beings that happened upon them next.

But on the other hand, it was Zack's sword…

"Look," he tried again. "Do you see a bunch of little slots in the hilt filled with glowing stuff?"

The girl looked. "Yeah…"

"Pull out the green glowing stuff in the third slot from the top. It's mastered Jump materia. If you hold onto the sword and use the materia, it'll send both you and the sword up here."

"What's materia? How do I use it?"

Cloud resisted-with great difficulty-the urge to bang his head repeatedly, and with great force, against the white stuff that made up the dimension. It was just his luck that this girl had to come from another World where they didn't have materia. Now he'd have to waste precious time giving her a crash course in using the stuff, and Tifa had always said he didn't have the patience for teaching-

Suddenly, the ground began rumbling and shaking again, just like before. Cloud fell to his knees, and looked up at the world's edge. His eyes widened in disbelief. "No way!" He hissed.

The huge white bird monster from earlier was back, now zooming down the canyon towards the girl with the force of a Midgarian bullet train.

Cloud yanked off his left glove and gripped the ice-cold blue materia within. Blizzara. Not great, but it would have to do. "Duck!" He yelled down at the girl, standing up and aiming for the monster's head.

The girl appeared to be in shock. Her eyes were so wide Cloud wondered why they weren't popping out of her head. She took two slow steps back, as if in a daze, then tripped over the fallen Buster sword and landed flat on her back.

Just as Cloud was about to shoot his Blizzara spell and hope for the best, a great white light radiated out from the girl's body. She didn't seem to be controlling it, as her eyes were screwed up tight in fear, and the sweaty pallor of her skin told Cloud she was too scared to concentrate. Nevertheless, the light soon engulfed her body, then radiated outwards to envelope the monster in its radiance. The creature stopped short, its wings scraping the canyon walls, and began to writhe and shriek in what seemed like terrible pain.

The light kept flowing outwards, and soon it seemed the whole of the white world, including Cloud, was bathed in a peaceful glow. And even though there was a huge monster less than two feet away from killing a defenseless teenage girl and crushing Cloud's precious Buster sword, the young warrior felt strangely at peace. He thought of all the good things in his life: The smell of his mother's fresh-baked cinnamon rolls in the morning, fooling around with Zack in Midgar on their days off, Aerith's laughter, Tifa brewing up a drink just the way he liked it…

The girl's light was steadily growing brighter and brighter, until finally Cloud couldn't keep even his mako-enhanced eyes open anymore. He could still feel it though, getting brighter and hotter and bigger until finally-

-it was gone.

Cloud tentatively cracked open one blue eye, and was greeted by only lingering sparkles in the air. He opened both eyes…and gasped.

The canyon was gone, vanished, as if it had never even been there. So was the monster. The red-haired girl was lying unconscious on the ground next to Cloud's sword.

Cloud rushed over and secured his Buster sword firmly on his back, then knelt down next to the girl and put two fingers on her neck. Her pulse felt fine…and so did her skin. Cloud gave himself another mental slap, and gave her body a very quick once-over for any injuries. There didn't appear to be any, so he supposed it was only a matter of time until she woke up.

As he was thinking this, the girl stirred under his hand (which he quickly snatched away) and opened those vivid blue eyes. "Ugh…" she moaned. "Wha' happened?"

"You, uh…" Cloud didn't really know what had happened himself, actually. "You tripped over my sword, and this bright light came out of you, and…the canyon and the monster disappeared."

"Oh…" The girl slowly sat up, putting a hand to her head. "Okay. I did something like that before, once, with a friend of mine. He turned into a Heartless, and I turned him back."

"Hn." Cloud was thinking this girl was more interesting than he'd first assumed. Still, he had to go find and kill Sephiroth, and rid himself of his last traces of darkness once and for all. So he really didn't have time to be sitting around chatting it up with a teenager.

"Well, thanks for your help. Good luck." Cloud got up and turned to leave.

"Hey!" The girl got to her feet and grabbed his coat, forcing him to turn and face her. "You-you can't just leave me here! I was kidnapped! This weird guy in a black coat with red hair who called himself Axel tried to take me away from my islands! So I ran from him into this dark portal, and I ended up in this weird place where the sun was setting all the time and everything was all orange-y, so I was going to wait there for one of my friends, but he tracked me down and dragged me here! So I kicked him, and ran, and another portal opened up, so I jumped through that, and I ended up in that canyon next to your sword."

"I didn't ask for your life's story. I don't care how you got here. Let go of my coat." Cloud yanked his clothes out of the girl's hands and turned to leave again, now quite annoyed.

"You can't leave! I helped you! You owe me!" The girl's yelling was really starting to grate on his nerves. He couldn't believe he'd ever even entertained the thought that she was pretty.

Still…she had a point. He did owe her something. She'd gotten rid of the monster and gotten his sword back for him. And if his time with Vincent Valentine had taught him anything, it was that debts should always be repaid. Even to annoying teenage girls.

"Fine." Cloud turned to face her, annoyance and anger burning in his eyes. She glared right back at him, arms crossed and one foot tapping, not fazed at all. "Do you want munny?" He reached for his munny pouch in his pants pocket.

"No, I don't want your munny!" The girl seemed even angrier now, and leaned in close to him, eyes blazing and hands on her hips. "How about…" She thought a minute. "You let me ask you a few questions."

"…Alright." Cloud sighed deeply and sat down. "For a few minutes only. Then I need to be on my way. You're holding me up."

The redhead sat down across from him, arranging her dress neatly over her knees. "First question," she said. "What's your name?"

"…Cloud."

"Huh. Interesting name. I'm Kairi." She held her hand out to shake, and Cloud took it, inwardly rolling his eyes. He noticed that she smelled rather good, like a warm ocean breeze and tropical flowers.

"Okay, next question," Kairi said. "Why are you here?"

"Same way you got here. I jumped through a portal."

"No! I mean, what are doing? Why are you in such a hurry? Are you looking for something?"

Cloud looked up, away from the girl's too-open face. He hated talking about this. Why hadn't he just left while she was unconscious and not even bothered with her? "Yeah, I am sorta looking for something," he said. "My light." He felt it was best not to bring Sephiroth into this right now.

"What's that?"

"Not what, who," Cloud corrected. "I…don't know yet." Images of both Aerith and Tifa popped into his head as he spoke. He sighed slightly.

"Well, maybe I can help."

Cloud snorted. "I doubt that, kid. You're what, fourteen?"

"I'm fifteen!" Kairi blushed beet-red out of anger, giving her the look of an erupting volcano. "AND I'm one of the seven Princesses of Heart."

"Who the hell are they?"

"The only seven people in the universe with completely pure hearts," Kairi explained. "Together, they can open Kingdom Hearts."

"…Oh." He thought he'd heard Hades say something about Princesses of Heart last year, when he'd been working for the God of the Underworld. That guy had been almost as much of a bastard as Sephiroth. Almost, but not quite. "I can't take you with me. I'm fighting someone, and he's really powerful. He'd rip you to pieces in an instant, even with that trick you did with the light back there. He caused my best friend to die."

Kairi was quiet a moment, as if she didn't know what to say. Finally, she whispered, "I'm sorry," lowering her head so that her hair came forward around her face like a red curtain.

"Yeah, well…it was a while ago, so…I'm not as sad about it as I was. He passed his sword down to me before I died. That's why it's so important to me. It's the most important thing I own. It represents my honor, my friendship, my promises…everything I stand for."

"Wow. That's really deep."

"Yeah."

"So who is it you're fighting?"

"Sephiroth. My darkness."

"Oh."

The two sat for a few minutes in companionable silence, Cloud wondering what it was about Kairi that made him want to be so open with her. He supposed it was the eyes. They were such a deep shade of blue, nearly violet upon close inspection, and so open and trusting. They seemed to say, "Tell me everything. I won't judge you. I'll keep your secrets. You can trust me." It seemed neither of them wanted to leave just yet.

But Cloud knew he had to. "Thank you for all your help, Kairi," he said, standing up to leave. "Maybe I'll see you again sometime."

"Hey, Cloud?" Kairi stood up along with him. "Can I ask you just one more question?"

"Okay."

"Well…um." Kairi was blushing again, and Cloud couldn't help thinking she looked rather cute when she blushed. The girl was looking anywhere but at him, clasping and unclasping her hands and shuffling a foot around nervously. "Um. There's this boy I like, and I was just wondering…what's it like to kiss someone you care about?"

Cloud didn't know why he did what he did next. Maybe because Kairi gave him lip where Aerith and even Tifa wouldn't. Maybe because she'd sat him down and forced him to answer her questions. Maybe it was because he'd been alone for so damn long. Or maybe it was all of those things. Or none of them.

But Cloud gathered Kairi up in his arms and kissed her.

And she kissed him back.

If Cloud closed his eyes, he could imagine that he was kissing her on a beautiful tropical beach where the sun was shining in a bright blue sky, because that's how Kairi smelled and tasted to him. Like paradise. He nipped gently at her bottom lip, and she took the hint and opened her mouth, allowing Cloud's tongue entrance. He explored every inch of her moist mouth, running gently over her teeth and lips and entwining his tongue with hers.

She reached up and wound her arms around his neck, tangling her fingers in spiky blond hair, and Cloud put his arms around that tiny waist and held her close, loving how soft and small she felt. Like how he'd imagined an angel would feel.

The two broke apart eventually, gulping in air and gazing at each other, cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling.

Cloud saw what happened next as if it were a dream. He even convinced himself that it was for a few weeks afterwards, and that he'd wake up and still find himself kissing Kairi in that white place. When he finally admitted to himself that it had really happened, he cried harder than he ever had before in his life.

A dark portal opened up right behind Kairi, and a black-sleeved arm reached out and wrapped itself tightly around her mouth before she could scream. Kairi tried to pull away, and Cloud could see her eyes, full of mind-numbing terror, staring at him. He reached out to grab her.

The arm yanked Kairi back into the portal, and it closed. Cloud's hand brushed the white walls of the dimension.

"No…" he whispered. "NO! Kairi! KAIRI! Give her back, you piece of shit! GIVE HER BACK! OPEN UP, DAMN YOU!" Cloud freed his Buster sword and slashed at the dimensional walls with a savage fury, screaming obscenities. But he did no visible damage.

Finally he sank to his knees, breathing hard, his energy completely spent. "Kairi…" he whispered. "Kairi, I know what this place is now. It's a gray area. It's created when a dark person like me finally finds his light."

Cloud felt a bright light at his back, and whirled around, sure that it was Kairi, that she'd somehow heard him, freed herself of her captor, and found her way back to him.

It wasn't Kairi. It was a portal to another World. Cloud peered through it and saw the steepled, shingled roofs and ruined castle of Hollow Bastion. That was a World he knew well, having fought Sephiroth there.

Seemed as good a place as any to search for his light in.

Author's Note: I know this is really long (Microsoft Word says it's twelve pages) but I just couldn't find a good place to stop. The story just kept wanting to go on, so who am I to tell it to stop when it doesn't want to? ;)

For some reason, I'm not really happy with how this turned out…I don't know why. Maybe because I had more trouble writing this Fic than I did with some of my others, and it's just SO DAMN LONG. Oh, well. It's done now.

I made up the Nobody Cloud fights. It's based on Nobodies that show up in Twilight Town, but I still made it up. :)

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NEXT PAIRING: Namine/Marluxia

Peace out!

-YukaiChick-