Standard Disclaimer: I wish they were mine, but they're not. Disqueenix owns them all. The plot is mine tho…mostly.

Notes: Wee! Moving right along.

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Dive into the Heart

Part 4: A Piece of Peace

Even before I was fully awake, I could feel my friends and family surrounding me, ripples of agitation and anxiety brushing against my mind like static electricity. It was a newish kind of feeling, but I couldn't help noticing how I wasn't freaking out about it nearly as much as I thought I should have been. I cracked my eyes open to see everyone hovering about my room restlessly, and my mind did sort of a somersault as I tried to make sense of what was going on around me.

Here's where the poet would say something like "It was as if I had been blind all my life and now suddenly could see," but that's not quite right. It wasn't so much like I had been blind…more like I'd been wearing sunglasses for a while and then someone snatched them off of me. Everything around me was still familiar, just a whole lot more intense. I could both see and feel things I'd never noticed before but somehow, none of it was really foreign. I just needed a little bit of time to…readjust?

Pressing my confusion aside, I figured that I should let everyone know that I was back among them. As I shoved the blankets away from me, my last thought came rushing back to me and my pulse sped up in excitement. Sora had been right there! There was no way the others could have missed him.

"Did you see him?" I asked by way of calling attention to myself. Hayner was the first person to kneel beside me, concern radiating off of him in sharp waves, making me flinch a little.

"See who?" he asked, and I flashed back to the argument we had the day before. I couldn't wake up talking about Sora. Hayner would kill me…

"The guy behind the wheel of the truck that hit me." I had to pat myself on the back for that quick save. "What the heck happened?"

"You tell us!" Hayner exclaimed stepping away from my bed. "One second everything's fine, then you almost fall off the tower, then you totally pass out on us! I don't know what we would have done if you're sister hadn't shown up when she did."

"Naminé?" I asked, trying to figure out what she would be doing near the station when we had been there. I looked over at her, noticing in a weird detached sort of way, that she was different from Hayner, Pence and Olette somehow. With my new vision, I could almost kinda see the emotions coming off of the others in the room. There was a gentle pulsing glow around all of them, but Naminé's light seemed brighter than the others' even thought it seemed incomplete somehow. And then my dad stepped into the room and my eyes widened at the level of power that rolled from him. What the heck was going on?

"Roxas, you're awake," he said. Why do people feel the need to state the obvious when someone's sick? I never got that. Did he think I didn't realize that I was awake or something? He brought me a glass of water, which I readily accepted, coming back from that random train of thoughts. I was probably still out of it from whatever that was earlier.

I heaved a quiet sigh of relief when he turned to my friends and told them that I needed my rest and that they could go now that they saw that I was fine. I felt a little bad for wanting them to be gone, but I really wasn't feeling too great, and I just wanted to lie back down and tune the world out for a few more hours. They didn't really have a reason to stay anyway, so they didn't make much of a fuss. After a little gentle scolding about being careful and not scaring them, they said their good-byes filing out of the room with promises to see me the next day.

I had finished my glass of water by the time they had left and was already wiggling back down into my blankets.

"Roxas, we need to talk" my father's voice began in a gentle tone that should have told me to pay attention. Unfortunately, all of the weirdness was still weighing down on me and I was still working on that whole adjusting thing. I wanted to listen, but I was so tired. I just wanted to sleep a little and then we could talk as much as he wanted.

"Roxas," it was Naminé's voice that time accompanied by a firm shaking of my shoulder. It didn't work. I was already too far gone. A ripple of agitation from one or both of them was the last thing I remembered before falling into a deep, deep sleep. I didn't dream of Sora. I didn't dream at all.

-:- -:- -:-

Sora was unsettled all day before the night he had decided to head back to find Roxas, which left the three members of his team of guardians unsettled as well.

"I don't like the way he's acting," Kairi commented watching him kick stones around outside from where she was sitting by the window. "He's never been this on edge before."

"Well from what he told me earlier, it looks like he's finally feeling the darkness that's been seeping into the world since before we got here. His eyes and heart are really open for the first time, Kairi. Of course he's going to be a little 'on edge.'" Riku was also watching their friend from the window, but the kindly old fairy who was their overseer sat tranquilly in a corner working on some knitting.

"Sora will be fine, you two," she said in an almost bubbly voice that gainsaid the gravity of the situation. "What we should be worrying about now is making sure to get Tidus, Wakka, and Selphie out of harms way. Those three have a great deal of potential and we might need to call on them before this is all over, but that doesn't mean we should tie them up in it from the start."

"We know, Gran," Kairi said walking away from the window to sit in one of the comfy chairs decorating the room, "but we can't help but worry. We don't even know what's going to happen when they meet. What if they really do become something dangerous? What if distance is the only thing keeping our Sora the way he is? I'm not saying this is a bad idea but we have good reasons to be concerned."

"Speak for yourself," Riku grumbled from his place by the window still watching their charge. Kairi shot him a knowing smirk. She, of course, would know better than anyone how he was feeling, so it really was pointless for him to deny his concern, but by now it was force of habit.

"Well, whatever will happen will happen," their foster mother told them with a fond smile. "No matter what, I want you both to know how proud I am of you, and how sorry I am for all that has been done to you."

"Gran—" Riku began a gruff protest but was quickly cut of.

"Go spend the day with Sora," she told them. "I'm going to give the Holani's a call to let them know the others will be moving in with them tomorrow and I'll break the news to Tidus, Selphie and Wakka. Have faith, my darlings. Things will work out just fine in the end." The two younger guardians looked at their elder with doubt in their eyes but did as she said. After that day, their worlds would change, and they played long and hard making the day last as long as it possible could.

-:- -:- -:-

I was awake instantly and didn't know why. A glance at the clock told me that it was just after 5 in the morning, which meant that dad and Naminé were probably still asleep like any sane person would be at this hour. I apparently wasn't feeling very sane at all, so following that theme, I decided to take a walk in the cool morning air. The sun was sinking into one of its lower twilight cycles this month making temperatures drop a little, but it was still warm enough for me to not need a coat, so pulling on my favorite two tone pants, black sleeveless shirt and black and while over-shirt, I mad my way out of the house and into the empty Tram Commons.

I was adjusting to my new vision, though I will admit, the shadows creeping always just out of sight were freaking me out more than a little. How had I never known there was so much darkness saturating the world? When I really thought about it, there were a lot of things that didn't make a lot of since to me, and I couldn't figure out why I had never really questioned them before, just like with the whole dream thing. For example, where's my mother? It had always been just me and Dad and Naminé, but while there were plenty of pictures around the house of us, all blond hair and bright smiles, there was not a single picture of the woman who must have given birth to me and my sister.

And why did I never find it strange or disturbing that Sora and I seemed to have the same face? Even by the rules of dream-logic, that should have at least gotten my attention a little, but somehow, it always had seemed natural. Of course he would have my face, but I didn't know why that made sense in my head.

My thoughts kept tumbling around like that, getting me more and more confused as the pieces of my life seemed to fit less and less together. Why were there no baby pictures of me or Naminé anywhere? Where was the rest of our family? Why did Kairi remind me so much of Naminé? My head was spinning by the time I made it to my destination, and I was a little surprised to find myself at the steps leading up to the clock tower. You'd think that after almost falling to my death, I'd avoid the place, but it had a lot of good memories, and it somehow seemed like the right place to be.

I climbed the stairs slowly, soaking in the sense of impending…something as I reached the top, and as I stepped out onto the ledge where I always sat with my friends, I wasn't shocked at all to see Sora sitting there waiting for me, red jumpsuit and all. For the first time, I noticed that he was barely even there. The light from the sun passed straight through him, and I saw that he had no shadow. Was he a ghost or something? Maybe I had been Sora in a past life. Somehow, when he looked at me, sun shining through his eyes, I knew that was wrong. Sora was alive somewhere, but I still couldn't figure out how that could be.

"How did I know that you would be here?" he asked me, and I could tell that he really wanted to know. He was just as confused about all of this as I was.

Looking at him, seeing the same emotions I was feeling reflected in his eyes, I felt a kind of panic seize me. Maybe it was because I could see straight through him, or maybe I hadn't really completely adjusted to all of the very sudden changes that had taken place in my life over the past day, but the need to not lose him again became overwhelming. He was the key to answering all of my questions and I felt a desperate need to not let him go again.

Without even thinking, I lunged forward to grab him even though by all logic, I knew that I shouldn't be able to touch him since he didn't seem to really be there. To my not-quite surprise, my hands did come in contact with…something. Not a body, but an energy field or something that made it seem almost as if I was holding him by the shoulders. I stared at him in wonder. Part of me really had been expecting my hands to go right through him. We shared a split second of that strange contact, and then something happened, and I know that neither of use had seen it coming.

I think…we exploded. Well, at least that's what it felt like. It was like every cell in my body tried to run away and bond with everything around us at once, but there was something holding them back. Then it was like my mind expanded to a hundred thousand times its original size and for a moment, I just understood everything about life; everything about the universe; everything about well…everything, and through it all, Sora was there, and we felt everything together, thought everything together, and it was like we were one being and always had been and always would be and I felt in me that the united 'we' was and had always been everything. Then it was over. It felt like we had existed as one for millennia, but now we were two and I felt very, very small and confused as I lay on the stone surface my brain eventually identified as the clock tower I had gone to ages and ages ago. There was something different, though.

As I tried to remember how to make my tiny, tiny eyes function again, a hand grasped my shoulder, and my brain snapped back into place. I was just Roxas, again, and lying on the floor next to me…was Sora. Real Sora. I grabbed at his shoulders feeling flesh and clothing under my fingers and a wash of undiluted rapture filled me for reasons my too-small brain still couldn't quite put together.

"Roxas," he breathed smiling over at me. There was a beat of silence and I could feel the sparkle of his happiness dancing somewhere inside of me as he spoke. "Long time no see, man."

-:- -:- -:-

Silent tears slipped from Kairi's eyes as Riku held onto her. As promised, Riku had sat guarding Sora's sleep as he set off to meet Roxas again. As expected, not long after, Sora had vanished in a burst of light and energy setting off a chain of events whose end they could only guess at. Kairi had rushed in to the room immediately, Gran had hovered by the door. All they could do now was prepare themselves as best they could for anything and everything…

…and wait.

-:- -:- -:-

Roxas had been gone when they had woken, and Ansem and Naminé both knew that it was too late for questions or explanations. When the shockwave of unleashed power reached them, they rushed to reach its epicenter in hopes of alerting the boys to the danger they faced, but by the time they arrived, the boys were both already gone.

-:- -:- -:-

"Number VIII,"

"Yeah?"

"The Key has awakened."

A pause. "I realize that, Number VII."

"The superior had assigned you to retrieve it for us. Do not fail."

Green eyes roll, red spikes flash, and a black clad figure vanishes from a world that never was.

-:- -:- -:-

"This place is crazy!" I was walking along the wall of the bizarre room Sora had brought us to, but it couldn't be the same room because that would mean that gravity had just gone weird. Though, considering the things that were going on lately, I guess weird gravity shouldn't really have bothered me too much. Sora just grinned at me as he jumped into a painting of a pond and vanished. I blinked at the painting for a second before shrugging and stepping in after him. Nothing in this world made sense anyway. We ended up in a clearing surrounded by what looked like giant flowers. Of course, I knew they weren't actually giant. We were just little. Even littler than I had already felt.

"Man!" Sora said, walking over to touch the green stem of one of the flowers. "I've been here so many times but never got a chance to really feel what it's like." My heart swelled in empathy with the emotions he was feeling. As soon as we had figured out what had happened back at the clock tower, Sora had immediately begun taking us to the places he had visited in his dreams. Ok…so maybe he had just grabbed me and maybe we had popped up in some freaky place that looked like the set of a horror movie…and maybe I had screamed like a baby when a walking talking skeleton popped out of nowhere, but the point is, after that, Sora knew that all the places he had been told were just "figments of his overactive imagination" were actually real. Of course we had to go exploring.

As we traveled from world to world, he had told me about what it was like for him before. He had basically been like a ghost. Only a few people could see him in the worlds, and he spent a lot of time just wandering around, looking for someone who could see him. All sensations had been dull or not even there and he'd been yearning all his life to know what the worlds were really like, even before he knew they were actually real.

Now that we were together, united by a bond that neither of us understood, I felt his yearning too. I wanted to visit all the worlds he'd always talked about in my dreams, see everything he had seen, experience it all with him, together. He looked over at me grinning as though he knew what I was thinking — and who knows? He probably did — then reach his hand out to me and I took it as he pulled us into yet another of the worlds he'd been waiting his whole life to see.

The experience of world hopping in general was much different from that first contact we made. It wasn't like expanding or merging or anything mind-bending like that. It was just a sort of cool wash of energy that sparkled against our skin, light and color swirling around us until they worked themselves out to become whatever place in whatever new world Sora brought us to. The one he brought us to next was dry and hot, full of sand stone buildings. Sora looked around the dilapidated room he had brought us to as though looking for something.

"He won't mind," he said with a bright smile, and I felt something like excited anticipation pulsing from him. "We can come back to find Aladdin later, I just wanted to show you this view!" With a flourish, he pulled back a ragged curtain revealing a sunset-lit palace of cream and gold shining in the distance. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen in my life.

We continued like that for I don't know how long. Sora took us from world to world, showing me his favorite places and occasionally introducing me to some of the friends he had made through his travels. Everyone greeted him with a little shock and a lot of joy when he showed up in the flesh and they of course shared their welcome to me when he introduced me as his "other" which was the best word we could come up with to describe our current state.

Eventually, we were both getting tired, but Sora took us to one last stop before we decided we had to head home and ask our respective parental units what the heck was up. The place he chose was an old castle that looked like it had been very beautiful in the past but had been abandoned for years. There was an odd energy about the place; something somehow familiar, but also cold and almost disturbing in a way.

"This is where I come sometimes when I need a break from wild adventures and stuff," he told me, leaning on the wall of one of the turrets where we stood. "There's something sad about this place, but at the same time it feels really warm, y'know?"

"Yeah," I replied looking out at the misty mountains surrounding us glowing with peach and rose, "I got that feeling as soon as we got here. Who lives here?"

"No one as far as I can tell,' he said joining me where I stood. "It's been abandoned for years. There's a town a ways over," he flicked his hand to his right, "and I have friends there, but they don't ever really come over here or even talk about it much. It's like it was once this great, proud, powerful place, but now it's just… empty…hollow."

"A hollow bastion," I murmured more to myself than anything, but Sora heard me and smiled.

"That's what I call it, too." I was a little surprised by that. I didn't remember ever hearing him talk about the place in my dreams. He walked over to a section of collapsed stones that looked over across a crystal fissure in the ground and a waterfall that seemed to be falling up instead of down and took a seat on one of the fallen stones. I walked over to sit next to him staring out at the strange beauty of the place.

"So what do you think is going on with us?" I asked, broaching the subject that we had both been avoiding. He gave a small shrug, not looking away from the land around us.

"I wish I knew," he said, and his heart was echoing the anxiety in mine.

"You think our parents will really know something about it?" I asked, even thought I already knew the answer. Talking really was kind of pointless between the two of us.

"Yep, I do," he told me anyway even though I know he knew what I was thinking. We sat in silence for a little bit, then Sora spoke again.

"You know, for all my life I've wanted this; to actually be in the world I visited in my dreams; to really be able to touch, and feel, and experience everything; to interact with everyone and not just the few who could see me. But now that I can do all of those things, I feel like it will all come at a huge price. I don't want this peace, this happiness to end."

He was talking about how we had both been stalling the conversations we would have to have with our guardians. There was a lot of explaining to be done and we both knew that learning the truth would change everything even more than it was already changed.

"We should go, back," I said voicing our mutual thought.

"But I really don't want to," he spoke the other half of the thought. We both shrugged getting to our feet when Sora paused with a thought. "Hey! Do you wanna try it?" he asked. I knew he was talking about making the jump back to Twilight Town, but I honestly still couldn't figure out how he was doing it.

"All you have to do is concentrate on where you want to go and then…want to go there," he explained answering my unasked question.

"Riiiight. If you say so," I told him. Figured it wouldn't hurt to try. We reached out and took each other's hands and I concentrated on the first place that popped into my head. The usual spot where Hayner, Pence, Olette and I hung-out. I focused with all that I was on going there like Sora seemed to do so easily, but we remained where we were.

"Jeez, how do you make it seem so easy?" I asked laughing a little.

"It is easy," he told me brightly. "Just try it again." I never got the chance.

One moment Sora was standing in front of me smiling brightly and in the next, there was a flash of green energy that sent him flying across the turret to slam against a far wall.

"Sora!" I screamed racing towards him diving just before another blast of energy ignited the air where I had been seconds before.

"Insolent fools!" a voice like shredding spider's silk seemed to come from thin air, but I ignored it as I rushed to Sora's side. His red jump suit was toast, but aside from being a little disoriented from the impact, he seemed miraculously okay.

"They should have never let you live," A tall woman, dressed in black and wearing funky hat, appeared from a shimmering darkness that formed in the air in front of us. In her hand, she was clutching a black staff with a green sphere on top. "The fools who found you were warned that your power was too dangerous to be allowed to exist, but they failed to heed our warnings. Now I, Maleficent, Mistress of all EVIL, will take your power and use it to rule all worlds!"

Freaked out as I was, I stopped and stared at the crazy lady who was babbling on when she claimed that she was trying to capture us or take our "power' or whatever. While she was talking, Sora had fully recovered and shared a bemused moment with me before grabbing my arm and shifting us back to the safety of Twilight Town. I'm pretty sure she was still talking when we left.

-:- -:- -:-

A/N:

Ah, monologuing. Gotta love the villains who do it. Sorry to any Maleficent lovers out there, but seriously. I just finished playing KH for the 2nd time, and I just couldn't get over how…laughable she was as a villainess. I mean come on! "The Mistress of all Evil"? Who says that? She was cool for most of the game, but then near the end… And let's not even get started on her KH2 persona. Anyway. Our boys meet! In the flesh! Yay! And things are now officially underway. Next chapter will be full of information and a touch of action and this is fun to write.

Like it? Confused about something? Wanna make me smile? Just send a review! They're like magic! D