Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This collection is mine, as are the OCs sprinkled throughout. More built-in references for Sentient Midnight and the Mercy Trilogy are in this chapter. Some language due to one of Cid's soldiers. Enjoy!

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085 – Rewritten History

After all this time and after so much, it all was going to boil down to this.

Merlin sighed, withdrawing his wand from the pocket of his robes. The stacks of boxes that he had retrieved from the storage warehouse under Allied Headquarters stood in the middle of his private study. Looking at them was like looking at a cardboard, anachronistic mountain: displaced by time and memory and rewritten history.

Radiant Garden's history. The past 30 years of it, to be exact.

That was the beauty of magic, he supposed: it always provided new slates and allowed one to clean up all the mess…and put that mess in a stack of cardboard boxes, to be carted down to the dustiest part of the storage warehouse and left to rot there. He had only managed to transport the boxes without arousing suspicion because Tifa and Leon had been sifting through Project Stasis investigation materials and everyone else on the Restoration Committee had been off-world on missions. He was relieved that he hadn't bumped into any of them.

This would be a tricky one to explain.

The elderly sorcerer wasn't prone to lying. It was distasteful and disrespectful. But…somehow…this secret had felt different. It was a lie, he couldn't refute that, but it was a lie by omission. Radiant Garden's history was built on a foundation of misrepresentation and blissful, blissful ignorance. That was how the old world had wanted it.

All of them. Good people. The BEST people that perhaps he had ever known. They had given up so much and received so little recognition for it. Their secrets had been their own to bear, and they had taken everything to their graves.

There were a lot of graves.

Now Merlin was the last one. He was all that left of the old world. He was the only one who could remember how it all had gone down. Of course, Aerith and Leon and the others had been teenagers when the Heartless invaded. They would all remember that. But they had been too young…far, far too young…to remember the events preceding the invasion. Those wheels had been set into motion almost two decades before the invasion.

The doors. Those confounded doors. The war. The sorcerers and the rebels that had endangered their entire way of life. The authorities who refused to open their eyes. Radiant Garden had been broken long before the Heartless arrived. It had been splintered, and the divide in their society that had been created by the Sorcerer's War had still been keenly felt for years afterward. All of it…buried under secrets and a memory blocking spell so powerful that it had lasted nearly 30 years. It was properly terrifying, that after all that their little group had gone through and seen, that there were so many 'why's and 'how's of their childhood that they had never bothered to address.

It was a wound best left unprodded.

But one of the unceasing epiphanies that came with age was that one's pool of people with similar experience was drying up. Merlin had developed a well of memories in his years. Many wonderful, some not so bright. The fact of the matter was that there was no one else to carry the burden of Radiant Garden's true history anymore. The nightmare of it all could finally be put to rest. Only his memory and these few scant boxes could betray the beautiful illusion of the history books. The members of the Restoration Committee had seen enough ugly. They had endured enough trauma. Part of Merlin despised the idea of ripping away the anchor that they had clung to through those dark days. He had resigned himself to refusing to do it.

Now there was this talk of a time traveler.

It would have been easy to laugh off Cloud's disjointed tale. His story had sounded preposterous both in plot and in execution. Not a lot of things truly got under the young man's skin, but clearly this had. So Merlin couldn't ignore it.

The mysterious woman wasn't the same time traveler who had appeared near the end of the Sorcerer's War. He knew that to be an absolute fact. This only made the situation more uneasy, because that implied that there were more people out there capable of travelling through time.

The traveler from the Sorcerer's War was long gone, and the one that Cloud had encountered seemed to have no real interest in 'when' she had landed; she had been more preoccupied with some other mission. It was unnerving, but it didn't sound dangerous.

Merlin whisked his wand and one of the boxes opened. A bound notebook with a lock levitated from inside, hovering over the box for a moment before bouncing through the air toward him. He caught it with the hand that wasn't holding the wand, and he deftly unlocked the journal, flipping through the pages absently.

His own tiny handwriting, identical from 30 years ago to the words that he had written today, covered the pages. Paragraphs, side notes, hasty sketches and drawings, measurements, incantations: he recognized this particular notebook's purpose immediately.

The implementation of the Rising Falls.

For all of the exploration of the old castle ruins and the scouring of every inch of the surrounding area, Merlin thought it was a miracle that no one on the Restoration Committee had…stumbled onto something amiss. The spell maintaining the Rising Falls had deteriorated not long after their group had moved back to 'Hollow Bastion,' and they had begun clearing out the Heartless in order to begin the restoration process.

The old inverted waterfall had done its job after all those years, guarding and protecting the darkest secret of Radiant Garden, just like the old wizard had.

The Sorcerer's War had never ended, and he feared the day those walls crumbled.

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086 – Love on the Battlefield

Yuffie fired off three shots from her gun before ducking back behind the mound of debris, breathing hard through her nose. She could hear the artillery going off behind enemy lines, barraging her makeshift fort…if there were any enemy lines left. The battle had hardly begun, and already each side had broken their respective formations. It had become a bloodbath; she had no idea how many people in her party were even still fighting.

She cast a sideways glance down the line. Her temporary shelter ended after five feet, leaving a swath of nearly twenty exposed feet until the next debris shield. She could see two of her squad members hunkering down behind, looking right back at her: Private Cooper from Leon's department and Major Valerie Banks from Cid's department. No sign of Trevor.

Which meant…

"Cease fire!" An enemy's voice called out.

Yuffie got back up on her knees, peering as far around her shelter as she could safely manage. She didn't know how many of the enemy's unit was still in the battle, but she was running low on ammo. They needed to end this, quickly.

"You've fought gallantly, Kisaragi." The enemy sneered. "But your ragtag group of misfits is just no match for us. Surrender and you'll be spared the humiliation."

"Eat dirt, Wallace!" Yuffie shot back. "If my team and I go down, we go down with HONOR! Something you know nothing of."

There was a resigned silence.

"So be it." He hissed. "Men…attack!"

The pepper of artillery against her fort resumed, and Yuffie exchanged a look with Cooper and Banks across the field. She gritted her teeth. She wouldn't let it end this way.

"Charge!" She screamed, springing up from her position.

Banks and Cooper followed suit, raising their guns, aiming quickly, and firing. Yuffie lifted her gun and fired off a few rounds, trying to reserve her ammo. One of her remaining shots had Wallace's name on it.

Major Banks darted forward, both of her handguns raised and unleashing Cain. "Eat lead, fuckers!" She barked, dropping the enemy's men like flies.

A louder gun report than normal sounded, and the impact of the slug slammed into Banks's shoulder, almost spinning her in a complete circle. Her eyes widened and she looked to Yuffie. "…Snipers…" She gasped as she hit her knees.

"No!" Cooper spun and aimed for the high ground where Wallace's snipers were hiding.

Yuffie felt a wave of panic and darted across the empty field, landing in a roll behind Cooper and squeezing off two more shots, taking down two more of Wallace's troops. A body hit the ground beside her and she spun on her knees, leveling her gun.

Trevor lifted his hands, handguns around both thumbs. "Don't shoot."

She gasped, "You're still in?" She beamed. "I thought you were—"

"Greatly exaggerated." He winked, "Wallace only has one sniper and two more soldiers left. We're down to just us three. What do you think of those odds?"

Cooper slumped down on Yuffie's other side, his knee stained from a hit. "I got the sniper and another of his soldiers…It's just Wallace and the other guy now." He handed Yuffie his loaded gun. "Sorry, ma'am. I'm out of this one."

Yuffie took the gun and grasped his shoulder. "You fought the good fight, soldier." She glanced to Trevor. "If we make it out of this alive…"

"When." He corrected her, snapping a fresh clip into his gun. "Let's do this."

As one, they both sprang up from behind the shelter, aimed at the two remaining men, and fired. The ammo peppered the two enemies in a small explosion, sending one man dramatically to his knees before he slumped to his side and remained there. The other felled man, Wallace, just slumped his shoulders, dropping his gun.

"BOOM!" Yuffie threw her hands in the air. "Suck it, losers!"

Wallace looked down at the multi-colored blasts of paint across his uniform, scowling as he took his helmet off. Beside him on the ground, his comrade, got up to his knees, rubbing his chest where the paintballs had actually dealt some pain.

"Victory is ours!" Trevor shot his remaining paintballs into the sky.

On either side of them, their fallen comrades and Wallace's teammates all got up, splattered in various colors of paint, and shuffled to their respective sides: winners and losers. Banks was cussing up a triumphant storm, and the sniper—Hank from Leon's department, of course—joined in with Cooper despite their paintball enemy status.

Yuffie and Trevor high-fived and then Yuffie tossed her guns down, jumping on him and throwing her arms around his neck. Trevor caught her and started to say something, but Yuffie shut him up by covering his mouth with her own. The kiss was sloppy and it had been a half-assed decision on her part in the heat of the moment, but he started to kiss her back, so she doubted that it bothered him. When the kiss ended, her face felt flushed.

"So," She abruptly said, "I guess we're the new black panthars of paintball."

Trevor snorted, "I doubt your buddy Alms will appreciate us taking his title though."

Yuffie waved an absent hand, "Eh, I doubt he'll notice."

Across town, Jake got a chill up his spine and narrowed his eyes. "Kisaragi…"

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087 – Aerith's Letter

Dearest Cetra,

I hope this letter finds you in good health, a fair hope considering your endeavors into the study of hearts.

Until recently, I believed all of your kind had faded into the realm of myths, so imagine how delighted I was to discover that one pure blooded Cetra was left. You should count yourself lucky; I've known many a Cetra who didn't survive your world's precious war decades ago. But that is neither here nor there and as such is not the topic of this writing.

As you know, I have an affinity for the study of hearts and I have garnered quite the reputation in the field, however unsavory I'm sure that reputation is. Fear not, I have no intention of either regaining your trust or forgiveness. Such things are trivial to a man of science such as myself. Rather, I would like to offer a suggestion.

You will never coax water from a rock by poking at trees, dear. Spawning flower fields and digging wells are all well and good acts, but I sense that your eyes are on a bigger prize. If you truly wish to uncover the long buried secrets of the heart of Radiant Garden, you will need to consult with an expert in such matters.

A world's heart, like a human one, is subject to will, personality, moods, and emotions. To categorize it as an inanimate object simply because a planet does not have a face is to embrace ignorance. If it is knowledge and progress that you seek, I would recommend a man who has, quite literally, written the book on world hearts. He is an outcast from your so-thought utopian society, exiled by the very people whom he has protected all this time.

I would almost presume that he could be family to you, not by blood, but by marriage, should the future come to it. Though all of Radiant Garden would like to think him dead, I can promise that you will find him Nowhere.

He is alive.

Cloud reached the end of the letter and stared at the signature at the bottom. The door was closed, and Aerith was the only other person in her bedroom with him. He could feel her eyes on him, waiting for his reaction, but he wasn't sure what she was expecting from him.

This letter immediately sent a hundred questions to the forefront of his mind, none of which either he or Aerith could answer. This…this man who had initiated Project Stasis and made their lives a living hell for weeks…had out of seemingly nowhere reached out to communicate with Aerith.

Why? Why her? Why now? What was the point? What did he care about the heart of Radiant Garden? Who was this expert that he was referring to? How did he know about Aerith's Cetra heritage? What was the 'war' that he mentioned? Aerith had no living relatives, how could she be related to this expert? 'Not by blood, but by marriage, should the future come to it': what did THAT mean? Who was alive?

"I don't like it." He said quietly, tonelessly. "I don't trust him."

"Neither do I." Aerith replied slowly. "When I talked with him at Jinx, he confessed to doing this only to stir up drama and conflict."

"What drama? What conflict, though?" Cloud looked over at her. "We've moved on. Project Stasis…That mess is behind us. Leon, Tifa, they've moved on. What is the point of this?" He held up the letter. "To taunt us from a prison cell?"

Aerith frowned, "I tried to research the 'war' reference, but all of the historical materials on Radiant Garden's military sector had been removed from the warehouse."

Cloud lifted an eyebrow, "And that doesn't seem suspicious to you?"

"One issue at a time." Aerith stood from her seat. "We have to find out who this expert is. This…exile who wrote the book on world hearts."

" 'We'?" Cloud repeated. "I agreed to be open about this research, but I'm not touching it. It's all yours, remember?"

Aerith looked flustered, "Clearly it involves you…I could be related to this person through marriage…I don't see any other male suitors lining up for my hand here."

She said it absently, but immediately pursed her lips afterward. Cloud glanced at her briefly before dropping his gaze back to the letter. Now wasn't the time to open THAT particular box.

"It's going to be difficult to find a guy who is nowhere." He pointed.

"My question," Aerith recovered herself as well. "is why is 'Nowhere' capitalized?"

Cloud looked at the sentence again and frowned, "Because…it's important?"

"Radiant Garden would wish to think him dead," Aerith mused aloud, "But he is Nowhere…What if it's a place?" She turned slowly to face him.

"A place called Nowhere?" Cloud narrowed one eye.

Aerith's eyes widened dramatically with an epiphany, and Cloud stood in concern that she might topple over.

"Humans have hearts…Worlds have hearts." She looked at him. "Nobodies are created when a human loses a heart…What do you think is created when a world loses a heart?"

Was she suggesting…

"Cloud," She exhaled, "Radiant Garden lost its heart once."

..:-X-:..

Preview for next week: "It's ALIVE!"