Chapter 4: Sweetheart
Honor Code Point 4: Guards never abandon their posts and may be summoned or called upon to perform their duties at any given hour, in any given location.
"So what's going on, partner?" Fresh fury rises within Lea as he whirls on Elrena, who stands, unfazed, leaning back on one heel, as if detached from the chaos unfurling around them.
"C'mon, Lea. How the hell should I know?"
Isa drops to his knees beside the abducted child's wounded father and unhooks the earring dangling from his own left lobe. The silver-blue charm hanging there from a thin silver chain is actually a Cura bead-a gift from a skilled healer (his anxious mother, to be exact), presented to Isa on the day he moved out.
He can't help but wish, just for a split second, that he had invited her to join him here this morning. She's cool in a crisis, and she would know how to fix this crumpled man and his daughter.
All Isa can do is swing a sword.
But that's going to have to be enough.
"I'm going to do everything I can to help your daughter, sir." Isa presses the bead into the man's palm and watches it dissolve into his skin. Light begins to radiate from it in a slow yellow-green ripple, down his arm and through his torso. The man clears his throat as if he wants to say something, but all that comes out is a low hum.
Isa's own father would have choked out something cliche. Something like, Give 'em hell, son.
Isa pushes back onto his feet and tears toward the Dusks and the stolen toddler, teeth clenched.
"I see one of those creepy crawlies chillin' in your living room, and a mob of them just so happens to follow us here?" Lea drags out the syllables to emphasize their absurdity, his palms spreading open.
Elrena's eyes shift away and he catches her forearm in his long fingers. "Are you in on this?" His voice lowers out of habit as he steps closer, though in the scramble, no one's really listening. "Is that it?"
The intensity of his gaze is hard to look away from. His face, she thinks, has no right to be so goddamn pretty in the pale yellow morning, stretched as it is in complete outrage, passing judgment on her silence. His brows rise higher, lips thinning to nothing.
"Seriously, Rena? I thought you were better than..." he gestures loosely toward the pound of someone hitting the ground beyond them, "this at least."
At least.
Somewhere beneath the pounding of her heart she considers how much prettier, happier, his face would be if she could just tell him what he wants to hear and have it be even a little bit true. Or else tell him the truth, stained black and blue and red as it may be.
"No," she blurts. "No, Lea." Elrena tosses back her head, pony tails lashing out and scoffs.
But fuck that.
Because this Lea, coloring inside the lines Lea—Isa's Lea—would never accept it.
The Ice Queen had made sure of that.
"Braig just pays the rent, okay?" She shakes her head quickly, tone hostile, because she shouldn't have to be spelling it out for Lea like this. He's southside and he should know. "I got jack without him. So I don't ask a whole lot of fucking questions. Especially not about his illegal job and illegal pets."
Dumbass.
He's heard her talk like this, yeah, but not to him. Not with this much bile, not accentuated by a bolt that buzzes through his bones on its way to the ground. Not lately. Lea drops her arm in recoil.
Her jade eyes take this in with a quick flicker. She yanks on a ponytail, frowns, and says more amenably, "Plausible deniability and all that shit."
"Alright, alright," he nods along, shaking out his hand to rid himself of the fried feeling and deciding to forgive it, because despite her reputation, she prefers sugar to vinegar. "But, c'mon, Rena," he's begging a bit, lower lip jutting out. There's urgency in his eyes searching hers. "You have to know something."
She scowls, eying the hedges where she last saw her wiry, old flatmate vanishing without her. "I know one thing for damn sure. Braig's going to be out on the street if he put me in the middle of this bullshit on purpose."
A woman slams to the ground at Isa's feet. She's not young, maybe a few years less than his mother, but considerably more athletic, and has a burgundy and turquoise scarf wrapping her dark hair. Her brown eyes blink rapidly and flicker shut. After that, she doesn't do much more than twitch. His own skin feels like ice, the fine blue hairs on his arms rising.
But the Cura is gone and Isa yanks his gaze away. His stomach gives a violent twist in objection, like a wrung out towel.
Her rapier stands impossibly upright, blade in the dirt not four paces away, disturbing a bed of zinnias. Isa spots the Dusk the woman had managed to agitate enough that it dropped its hold on the child's ankle to dispatch her.
The Dusk glances around for its peers, nods to itself, and leisurely ambles to rejoin them. The rest clump together, shuffling along, their progress only slightly impeded by the dodging crowd and a handful of brave but ill-equipped townsfolk.
Isa lets out a sharp cry and lunges for the rapier, simultaneously flinging himself into the space between the Dusk and its phantasmagorical brethren. He thinks he can probably get to the sword before the Dusk gets to him. But he wouldn't bet Munny on it.
In the distance, Lea can hear the clang of metal and grunts muffled by gritted teeth. His muscles itch to spring toward it, to put himself between the monsters and the crowd. To put all his training to some kind of use. "Don't suppose you know how to call them off?"
"Nasty little shits won't listen to anybody but Braig."
Lea hisses, shaking his head, "And I let him go. I brought him here."
Elrena masks a smirk. Let him. So cocky.
"Fuck me," he mutters, raking fingers through his hair, tossing a glance behind him, just a quick one, to ensure Isa is upright. "I knew I shouldn't have gotten out of bed this morning."
Elrena's lips fold in. This is so not the context I wanted to hear those words in.
Elrena almost says as much, but he's practically shaking, expression taut, mood blackening by the second, and all of Radiant Garden is shoving past them, knocking them in the ribs and elbows. So she offers up a half shrug, raises an open palm, and presses closer to hiss, "Those things have minds of their own, Lea. What would Braig want with some kid?"
"Ransom? Human sacrifice? Always wanted to be a granddad? Does it look like I have time to play detective?" he gestures behind him again, nearly whacking a passerby in the face, and someone obligingly screams.
Both of them wince. He hates himself a bit for feeling relieved that it doesn't sound like Isa.
His joking tone slips off, revealing that raw, serious thrum she knows he typically reserves for his best friend, in the rare moments when he's not attempting to get a rise or a blush out of him.
"Just tell me how we get rid of the Dusks, and I will get off your case. For good, if you want."
She hesitates. Coming from a future Guard, that means something.
Unfortunately for Lea, she has Braig to think about.
"I don't know," she bites off the syllables emphatically, pauses to shoot a death glare at someone who nearly plowed her over, "I've never actually been stupid enough to try it."
Well. Knuckles clenching, Lea turns on his heel. Then this has been a truly spectacular waste of time.
"Me, I'd just electrocute them." She flicks him in the arm as he goes, and her touch gives him a tiny visible shock, fine white light like thread. Her lips twitch, almost a smile. "But I'm funny that way."
"That's more like it." He turns halfway back around, just enough to swing his arm playfully through hers, buried as it is in a swathe of thick yet cool black fabric, and snaps a momentary grin. "Let's go, partner."
"Oh, sweetheart," she yanks back, friction as her muscles strain free from his, tensing as that grin dies. The spirals in her ponytails tighten under a jolt of electric current. "I don't think so."
He blinks at her as she brushes a stray petal from her shoulder. She may as well be sitting at a picnic, arguing with a bumblebee. Fuck, Rena. What do I have to do? Bribe you?
He drops his outstretched arm, thinking of how she had clung to it earlier, his jaw is rigid, working through words too cruel to say by Guard standards. His arms bar his chest.
She frowns. As if I haven't had enough of his hypocritical disapproval for one morning.
"We're talking about a teensy little girl, and you want to just stand here and let them," Lea cocks his head and grimaces, recalling her earlier word choice. He twirls a finger. "Ya know."
Obliterate.
"The Guard is on its way."
And that stings both of them to hear her say.
He glances around through the bodies tousling them this way and that, pushing and snatching, like standing amid rough waves. Still not a glimmer of royal blue. "Yeah, I can see that."
"If they catch me putting on a fucking firework show of unlicensed magic, with all my priors, I'll lose everything I've got."
His green eyes trace the inexplicable sincerity drawn in features people would describe as cute if Elrena wouldn't murder them for it.
"Is that what you want, Lea?"
And to think you used to want to be them.
And Elrena's grateful she got the Fira back from Lea because it could set the entire willow tree above him up in a blaze, the way he explodes. "Are you fucking kidding me? A baby, Elrena. The Dusks nabbed a baby, and that baby's about to lose everything she's got because you're playing house with a lunatic. So you better reevaluate your goddamn priorities." His steps smack against the pavement as he turns away, and once again she catches his sleeve.
"Here, white knight." He glances back to catch Elrena rolling her eyes and reaching two fingers into her breast pocket. The one where Braig keeps his cigarettes. "Quit your bitching."
Actual bile rises in Lea's throat, but she's still holding fast to his arm, long, pointed, painted nails digging in. He hesitates a second longer, held by a memory leaning against an academy wall, smoking beside her, on a particularly bad day, neither of them so much as glancing at the other as they watched the other students heading home, their smiles pasted to their faces, their shoes polished to a sheen.
She had something horrible to say about every one of them and he had contemplatively blown out a ring of smoke, before asking her why she kept showing up to the academy if she hated everybody in it so goddamn much.
"This is what I've got. I don't do this, I don't get a legal job, I'm worthless. If I don't do this I'm never going to be fucking, I don't know…"
"Somebody?"
"Yeah," she exhaled slowly, "And the gods know my family has enough nobodies, you know?"
"Yeah, I do."
"And it might be a nice change. Me, doing something really fucking heroic."
"That I'd like to see."
He had cast her a brief, ghost smile and it returns now, as she plucks the Fira stone from her pocket and tosses it his way. He snatches it midair, and the temperature of his touch rises ten degrees through the thin white fabric of his button down.
"Keep it."
The Dusk reaches Isa, pausing to tilt his head, a gesture which reminds him absurdly of Lea. The way he sometimes stops speaking mid- conversation, caught up in a sidelong glance, considering the way the light catches the angles of Isa's face in profile. Lea leaning in to kiss his cheekbone or his jaw.
The Dusk's eyeless assessment gives Isa not quite enough time to crouch and wrap his long, callused fingers around the hilt of the rapier before the creature whips out its arm like a tendril, pulsing red-violet darkness in waves that make his vision turn white and blurs the edges of his thoughts like a forgotten intention.
Well-served by a decade of muscle memory, Isa's arm raises itself in defense and in that hand the book, which the Dusk strikes instead of Isa's face. The singe of smoke lights under Isa's nose as the Dusk draws back. A hole sweeps clean through the tome from cover to cover. Heat scorches Isa's bare palm, but he doesn't think about it, executing a clean roll to the side and springing to his feet between the monster and its companions and the girl.
Isa flexes the rapier, a lighter weight than he's used to, but better than a hardback, he supposes, somewhere in the back of his mind. And then there isn't time to think, as the Dusk extends another whip of a limb toward Isa's side. He takes a deep breath, sends up a silent prayer that Lea is faring better, and lunges.
Isa feels the seams of the sleeves in his Radiant Academy blazer ripping out as his blade slashes through the Dusk's skin, a consistency like cloth. He slices down through a substance light as air, and then out the other side. Its pointed, black-striped arm floats to the ground at a slow drift like a paper boat.
Bystanders point to his small triumph and murmur, but Isa scarcely processes it-the first point doesn't win a duel. He draws back the sword again, as the Dusk releases a loud hiss and then whispers, "Isssssa."
Isa's endured all manner of trash talk and distraction from Lea alone whilst sparring-not to mention from his classmates, irritated by the fruits of his years of long hours of unflagging practice. Decorum always went out the window once they were dealt a few scratches and bruises, their eyes lit green with envy.
So his weapon strikes true though his brain freezes, grappling with the impossible syllables. His rapier strikes through the Dusks' remaining arm, and it cries in agony.
This alone stops his feet. Adrenaline vibrates his heart like a bell. That's a sound he's never heard from anything he's fought, classmate or Heartless.
"Desist," it whispers, then, swaying. Its feet move it closer though a more or a less intelligent creature, once disarmed, would have scampered away. Isa knows no one else can hear it-would believe it. Maybe the thing did strike his head and he's lying in the dirt hallucinating the wise echoes of its speech, "Embrace your destiny, child of the moon, son of the light."
What the fuck?
The chills wrap his spine like climbing ivy, and he plunges his blade into the center of the Dusk's torso. His blazer separates, sleeves from shoulders, with the force of the movement. His eyes fix on the insignia branded on the Dusk's serpentine forehead.
It's a symbol he's never seen before, despite his years of devoted study, like the strange characters inscribed on the illustrations in the storybook of the Keyblade Wielders. He and Lea had poured over it as children, in the light of the oil lamps and the moon, one quilt wrapped across their narrow shoulders. The captivating, otherworldly legends had made bearable the nights Lea had been tossed or snuck out of his own home, more often than not with some kind of bruise blooming across his pale skin. Blue-violet. Like a forget-me-not.
Isa considers the cool confidence with which his friend had evaded all Isa's mothers questions, the tears coming, soundless, only when the lights went out and it was just Isa beside him. They couldn't have been older than seven then.
Abruptly, the blade in Isa's grip warms and burns pink, and he's forced to release it. Fire spreads from the Dusk's entry wound to engulf the strange being in a fiery pillar. Screaming in anguish, the Dusk seems to shatter into fine black shards of glass, and these into a fine sand that fades on the breath of the spring wind.
The display leaves a void of empty air, the smell of toasting marshmallows, and an overwhelming feeling of absence. Ironically, unlike the Heartless, the Dusk leaves behind no glowing, pulsing pink thing to float up and away. No light springs from the creature's dark depths.
It's just gone.
"Hey! You don't have a license either, dumbass! If the Guard catch you doing magic you can kiss your invitation to join them good-bye!"
If Lea heard Elrena's shouting after him, he opted not to acknowledge it.
She admires the bravery in that.
Really fucking stupid.
But brave.
Elrena sets herself back where Braig had dropped her off, against the circle of manicured hedges, out of the way of the fleeing citizens of Radiant Garden and the Dusks that could knock a grown man off his feet with the slightest touch—a safe distance away from any crimes or heroics committed but close enough that she can still survey the fallout.
More importantly, she can still call down a bolt of lightning from the heavens to save Lea's flat ass if it comes down to that.
I shouldn't, she knows, but I would.
Elrena watches Isa's gaze drop from the Dusk that had just charred, blackened, and fizzled up like a spent ember to see Lea, standing beside him. Lea's impossibly long and skinny legs and torso give way to arms and shoulders gleaming with tongues of flame, more torch than man.
And she's glad she's too far away to hear what they say, because she's sure now—after watching Lea sprint to Isa's side instead of toward the other monsters—that despite the circumstances, it would be disgustingly cute, like a mouthful of sugar mints. Enough to choke on.
Anyway, they don't waste a lot of time with that because there are still three Dusks left, and they're so goddamn fucking heroic these days.
But her stomach twists anyway. The little girl. It's a bit much, even for...
"Hey sweetheart."
"Braig."
Elrena has become so accustomed to Braig sneaking up on her that she manages to keep both feet on the ground this time. She glances sideways. His hood is up, masking his face in shadow, but she catches a glimmer of his gold iris. "Get the fuck off of me."
"Okay." He shrugs and lifts his right elbow where he's propped it on her left shoulder like she's asked for something unreasonable.
He follows her gaze to the battle. The Guard have begun to arrive on the peripheral of the crowd, but it's unclear if they're really needed. Isa's snagged a sword and is slashing at the first of Braig's three remaining Dusks. He's passed off some kind of book to Lea, who in one fluid motion, lights it on fire and whips it through the air like a chakram or a frisbee, setting the other two Dusks ablaze with a triumphant laugh.
"What, did Radiant Garden start offering Guards an elective in elemental magic when I left?" Braig brows rise, though she can't see them. He's genuinely impressed with the light show. What he had seen Lea do at Elrena's place had been child's play in comparison.
Perhaps, should he join us, he would serve a greater purpose than your amusement, Xehanort suggests in Braig's head, voice gravelly yet regal, articulate yet sinister.
Maybe so, Braig replies, and then frowns. You're a regular chatterbox today, Gramps.
Magic is a touchy subject in Radiant Garden. A tear rent in the fabric of an otherwise orderly society. First off, not everyone can do it. No matter how many hours of practice put in, some students can't light a spark. Not blessed by the gods, not in their DNA, not raised properly, not trying hard enough… Even the most wizened Academy professors can only conjecture as to why.
Even among those who can do magic, a natural affinity for a certain element is rare. Without an affinity, a practitioner will never rise far above the subpar. Those with an affinity need less training, their skills rising and ebbing with their emotions, their self-control. Well-taught, left unchecked, they could become unfathomably and uncontrollably strong.
This alone has the potential to create a dichotomy of power like nothing the city has ever seen. So the kingdom keeps a firm grip on magicians' reins: the teaching of spells, the distributions of charms and potions.
Not to say magic is forbidden. Far from it. Common magic, approved for everyday use by anybody, runs rampant despite its varying degrees of authenticity. Licensed magic is performed by Masters, if you can shell out enough Jewels or limbs, and of course, the black market-street magic-flourishes in between Guard crack downs.
Magicians, witches, wizards, sorcerers, those were all street terms but Masters...
At Radiant Academy, only a handful of students with impeccably clean records, advanced marks, and mature, sparkling personalities even have the opportunity to learn advanced level magic, and most of them simply can't. The truly gifted might have the opportunity to work under the wing of a Master. Elrena almost had, before she had Fucked Shit Up.
Even so, the exams are said to be incomprehensible, the trials arduous, the filing fees exorbitant, the paperwork atrocious.
But the pay-out is high. It's said Ansem prefers all his apprentices to have some kind of affinity, untapped or not.
However, teaching magic to Guards in training, some of the physically strongest specimens in the kingdom, and some of the most volatile, has never exactly been on the Captain's to-do list. Not when there were parries to be perfected and sprints to be run.
But magic is like a whispering voice in the dark. It calls you and you find it. Whether you want to, whether you're allowed to, whether you know what it is—or not.
Elrena had begun practicing with her parents at age five, and they had gotten arrested for it.
Well—Among other things.
It only strengthened her drive. She would learn from friends, street magicians, books, and what she couldn't be taught, she taught herself. And Lea…
Well, that hadn't turned into a total disaster. It keeps him dropping by.
Elrena smirks at Braig's suggestion, which he is well aware is ridiculous. "More like Lea and I elected to skip fifth period every Friday and borrow some equipment from the advanced science and sorcery lab.
He nods and she can sense smugness though it's not present on his face, as he watches another Dusk erupt into shards like volcanic glass. "Wonder whose idea that was."
"Well, it would have been really fucking boring by myself." She's so whiny when she's defending herself, he notes for the millionth time. "And it's not like he took a lot of persuading."
"Oh?" He gives her the side eye again.
"Not after I offered him lessons."
"Ah." Cackling tumbles from the hood, and Braig leans back for support rustling the leaves of the shrubs. "I bet he aced the oral exam."
Her lips pucker, eyes narrowing. "We didn't get that far."
They watch Isa and Lea struggle to sidestep the second to last Dusk. It's protecting the third, which is cradling the girl on its own now, as it soldiers on toward Braig, despite the flames caressing its back. Lea and Isa exchange a long look and then lunge in unison.
"Well, now," the chuckling softens, sobers, "there's a shocker."
The Guard is pressing in and Arleen yanks her hood up under the pretense of avoiding their gazes.
"Because it's so fucking impossible for you to picture."
He glances down to inspect Elrena, searches her shaded expression, shrugs a bit. "You're not Isa."
"Are you saying I'm too trashy for Lea?"
He doesn't own a second pair of boots, and his father could drink a brewery dry.
"That is completely…" Braig's hood shakes back and forth, tongue stretching, "off topic." His spine straightens, eye rising to gauge the assent of the sun. "Look, I'd love to spell it all out for you, Blondie, but I don't have that much time."
Elrena stares hard at the shadow across his face, but can't make out any kind of expression. "Go fuck yourself."
"I don't have time for that either."
She pauses to press back the surprised laughter that bubbles into her mouth, and waits for Braig to elaborate on his plan. But he seems content to watch Isa and Lea try to blow up his monsters.
"So make it."
He sighs and motions two fingers. A portal unfurls and another couple Dusks slink up behind the encroaching Guard.
"Not like…" She half-heartedly reaches out a hand to stop him, drops it. "Shit, Braig. I don't need deaths on my conscience."
He waves this notion off with a dismissive slash of the hand and rests his arm against her shoulder again. "You gotta admit, years of magic lessons and no…" he pauses, snaps his fingers, "sparks? Lea's just not that into you. And the sooner you wrap your pretty little head around that, the sooner you can focus on more important things, like us."
The older man's hardly serious. (Not any more, at any rate.) Though the words are unusually slow and smooth, overly sweet. Like butterscotch. It's his way of comforting her. The only way he knows how. Flattery. His strong fingertips dripping down her shoulder, heavy through the coat.
"Years?" she snorts, relaxing into his massage, mumbling, "It wasn't even months."
Braig gestures his free hand vaguely as Lea coaxes a plume of fire from where it's caught Isa's sleeve and directs it at one of the Dusks.
Elrena shakes her head insistently, as he thoughtlessly weaves the silver drawstring of her coat through his fingers. "We got busted half way through the semester. Lea wouldn't have learned anything but he has an affinity for fire. You should see him with an Aero charm." He can hear the indulgence in her smile, though the hood shields it from his critical stare. "Guy can barely ruffle a paper."
Elrena expects Braig to be impressed or concerned with this development, but he laughs again. Louder than he probably should considering they're watching a battle from a short distance in suspicious black hoods.
Elrena bats at the hand hovering a careful half inch from the fabric of her coat. "What's so fucking funny?"
Braig gives the drawstring a light tug, the massive hood tightening around her and then lets his arm drop. "I'm wondering how you didn't get your ass kicked out sooner."
Her drooping sleeves cross. "Isa wasn't trying to get his precious bestie expelled, Braig."
"Isa caught you?"
"Ice queen heard Lea was skipping class and followed us." She pouts and his laughter deepens. She finds it unnerving, floating from the mouthless void below his hood.
He clutches at his sides with his gloves. "Oh no." He wheezes. "What he do, glare at you?"
"Not at me. I've never seen Lea look so fucking terrified in all my life. Isa led him away by the elbow and that dick barely spoke to me for weeks." She shakes her head, teeth gritting. "Selfish bastard. He never even gave me a fucking chance to be a good thing for him."
"Blue give you a chance to be good enough for Red?" Braig rolls his eye and his whole hood rotates with the motion. "I've got the eyepatch, but you're fucking colorblind."
She lifts a hand to swat at him again, harder, opens her jaw to form a retort, but all that comes out is a faint, "No."
In the field, not a few yards away Lea and Isa stand on either side of the last Dusk. Isa cues Lea, and then backs up, prepares to dive and catch the child when, if, the Dusk explodes. Lea spreads his arms, gives a battle cry. But instead of igniting, he pitches sideways.
Heady gray smoke wafts from paper white skin like a doused bonfire. Elrena and Braig can smell it from where they stand. It takes a minute for Elrena's heart to resume beating.
"No," she hisses again, a flash of lightning whips across the dove gray sky. The Guards gaze up at the crackling boom. One makes a gesture of prayer. Her fists and muscles clench in anticipation as she moves to spring forward, but Braig slides his arm in front of her, rigid, resolute.
And she halts.
"Ah, ah, ah. Wait."
Isa screams, throaty, brutal as the lightning. He hurls himself, empty-handed toward the Dusk. It's unclear to the bystanders whether it's suicide or he thinks he can defeat the ghostly creature through sheer force of will.
A massive silver sword materializes in his outstretched palms. The weapon radiates white light that sears into the vision of the onlookers like a scar. The claymore's tip is edged with a six-point star of powder blue spikes, and these extend outward as Isa plunges the weapon forward and pierces the back of final Dusk emerging through its chest—mere inches away from the toddler cradled in its arms.
Too close, Elrena can't help but think, green eyes blinking, widening.
Isa drops back on his ass and the heels of his hands beside Lea, inert, and the sweetness of the grass, and the flower petals suffocate him. Too fucking close, he thinks.
A cheer erupts. No one else seems to notice. They think that he conjured the weapon. They think that he took aim.
Elrena knows better.
The Dusk disintegrates and Isa's not there to catch the child. Her silence breaks into a sound like shattering glass. She plummets four feet and she would have smacked into the ground if she hadn't landed in the outstretched arms of her father.
Isa's charm had healed him, but clutching at the pale, cool arms of the red-head beside him, letting himself inhale the smoke, a stronger version of what Lea always smells like, remnants of firewood on a salty beach in mid-autumn. Isa's not sure if he would make the same choice twice.
"You sure there wasn't some kinda elective?" Braig inquires turning away from the scene, the sword, stepping toward the circle of topiaries he had emerged from. His arm steers Elrena with him.
He's joking again. Isa clearly had no idea what he was doing. The dive toward the Dusk had been suicide, the response of the magic locked deep in his bones a minor miracle.
Locks are no matter to me. The depths of Braig's mind echo with a single cold laugh from Xehanort. You continue to serve me well.
"Lea," Elrena repeats as the Guard surrounds him and Isa. She and Braig can no longer see anything but a wall of navy uniforms, hilts, and armor. "I need to get to…"
An exasperated scoff rumbles deep in Braig's throat. "Relax, would ya? You and I both know that kind of magic'll knock the shit out of you, if you're outta practice. Your soldier boy's probably just taking a hard nap on the cold ground."
Yeah, unless he touched one of your cute little Dusks.
The lightning crackling through her bones and her long, curling ponytails quiets in one moment of resolve. "If he's dead Braig, you're going to join him."
"Shame," he says and she sees the darkness playing at his hands, a faint maroon flicker. "It'd be more romantic if you did."
Nobody's joking now. For a moment it seems the end of their wayward alliance, as they search each other's postures for vulnerabilities. A guard happens to glance their way and they go still. The breeze swaying the excess fabric of their coats, rustling their drawstrings. He blinks slowly and turns back.
Braig takes a heavy, world-weary breath, an old man breath, as Elrena likes to think of them. "If you want to stay, then stay." He shrugs, though she knows him and his agreement spells something far worse for her than an argument. "But I'm not taking back the graduation gift I brought you."
He gestures toward the grove within the topiaries and, ponytails straightening, fair hair on her neck on edge, she follows him inside.