Wow. I finally finished one of my fanfics. It's a good feeling. Sorry about the wait, my mom and I went on a trip for a couple of days to take a tour of the university campus that I'll be attending in the fall.
The place where the fairies had left them was a dormitory of sorts; eight low beds stuck out at regular intervals from the walls, and end tables and washstands were spaced between them. Upon rising the next day, the three of them spent a few minutes to orient themselves, both in their surroundings and in the events of the previous day. Light flowed in from the large windows on the opposite end of the room from the door, but there was no sun. Instead, the deep colors from last night's 'sky' had brightened into pastels and more vivid shades.
For a while, they all just sat there, staring at one another.
"Okay," Hayner finally sighed, "we know why Roxas disappeared, we know all about the word thief and why we were having problems with our memories, we also-"
"No, not really." Pence interrupted. "Just because we found that computer and what was on it doesn't mean we now know what is going on with our memories. There is no reason for that data to have been dispersed among us. I told you: no one had been on that computer besides me for ages, so unless that memory lady has decided to start causing trouble, we still need to figure out what's going on."
"Okay. But at least we know where all of this is coming from." Said Hayner. "We know why our memories and reality don't seem to line up, and we know what Sora's involvement in all of this was. We've even managed to find out what's up with that weird mansion. So really, the only missing piece of the puzzle is 'what happened to Roxas.'"
"There has to be some way of getting a hold of Sora." Olette said softly. "It always comes back to him. Even if he has no idea what happened to Roxas, he would still be able to help us search other worlds for him."
Silence struck again. Yen Sid wouldn't be of any more help, he had pretty much proven that. Who else was there? The fairy ladies?
Speaking of the fairy ladies, one of them, the green one, poked her head in the door, and upon seeing them awake, she turned back and called out "They're awake! Come on in, Merryweather!"
Merryweather appeared to be the one all dressed in blue, and she bustled in carrying another huge tray piled with food. She set it down before them, bidding them try certain things.
"Did you sleep well?" she also asked.
Olette's answer was a yawn. "Well enough."
"What time is it?" Hayner asked.
"Why, it's almost noon." She told them. "but don't worry about that, I know you didn't get to bed until some ungodly hour."
"Heh. That sure beats curfew." Hayner smirked, and then stopped. "Oh my God!" he exclaimed "Curfew!"
"None of us came home last night!" Pence also realized.
Olette voiced their fears. "We are going to be in so much trouble!"
A panic followed them as they jumped from their seats. "We've got to get back!"
"Now, now," the two fairies tried to calm them. "there's time enough to eat your brunch first."
"We'll eat on the way." Pence bargained, and he reached for some of the more transportable items.
"You don't understand." Olette pleaded. "We were gone all yesterday, all last night, and all this morning!"
"Worrying about it isn't going to help you any." The-fairy-lady-who-wasn't-Merryweather told them. "You can't leave without the locomotive, and Master Sid took that into town some time ago."
"So we're stuck here?" Olette had to coach herself not to whine.
"Afraid so." 'Merryweather' put her hands on her hips and seemed to puff up at them. "So you all sit down and eat your food."
They meekly obeyed her, but that didn't mean they had to like it.
"Aw, man, my pops is going to ground me for a month!" Hayner complained.
"My dad is going to think we've been doing something inappropriate, again!"
Olette predicted. "And my mom isn't going to back me up this time, because she's been freaking out over this whole 'child kidnapper' thing."
"It's not like we've never pulled an all-nighter before," Pence rationalized. "But with the whole town on high alert, we're never going to get away with this one. It'll be all over the place by now, our teachers will have noticed we're missing too."
"Oh, crap! We're missing class! I missed that essay we were supposed to do for Mr. Francis!" Hayner didn't notice the look of their hostesses at his use of profanity.
"Bah, I hate missing my German class. It's so hard to catch up." Moaned Olette.
They all munched in silence after that.
Yen Sid rolled back in about one o'clock, and he 'harrumphed' his way past them towards the stairs to his office.
"Now you may go." Flora, the one in green, told them.
"Do take care," Fauna, the one in red, echoed.
"Come visit us again sometime!" Merryweather waved them goodbye.
Dejectedly, thinking grim thoughts on what awaited them at home, the teenaged three piled into their transport. The incredible scenery on the way there did little to cheer them up.
"Hey, guys?" Olette asked them sadly.
"Yeah?"
"We'll find him, right? Someday, we'll know for sure what happened."
"Definitely."
"No doubt about it."
Even if their goal had not been met, they knew now that, whatever happened, Roxas was just beyond their reach. All it would take is one more push.
The station was very crowded when they arrived. Through the windows, they could see that people had noticed the strangely decorated train without a conductor. Timidly, they stepped out, and their initial thought was to try and sneak out quitetly.
"WHERE IN GOD'S NAME HAVE YOU BEEN?" Seifer roared at them.
"Umm…"
"DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA THE TROUBLE YOU'VE CAUSED?"
"Well-"
"THE ENTIRE TOWN IS IN A PANIC, AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!"
"STOP SHOUTING!" Hayner shouted over him.
"I'M NOT SHOUTING!"
"YES YOU ARE!
"NO I'M NOT!"
Olette placed a hand on Hayner's shoulder and the two plus Pence tried to pull away from the foaming-at-the-mouth Seifer. Unfortunately, the crowded station seemed to be entirely made up of the team that had previously been searching for Roxas, or at least his body.
"Uh, we really need to be getting home." Olette tried to tell them all.
"You better believe you're going home!" Olette's mother, puffy-eyed from crying, forced her way through. She grabber her daughter by the arm, and stared her right in the eye. "And you're going to stay there! What were you thinking? Do you have any idea how worried we were? You are grounded, do you hear me, grounded!" she started dragging her away.
Olette shot one last look at Hayner, but they were quickly separated by the bodies of many people. Hayner looked around for Pence, but the other boy's parents had come up to claim their wayward child too, they were just a little more quiet about it. That left Hayner standing there under Seifer's glare and surrounded by the now-dispersing crowd.
Seifer looked around, as if expecting to see an adult come tearing in to take this last nuisance off his hands. He was disappointed, but Hayner wasn't. Hayner knew that his step-dad would be glad to have him gone, and his mom was too timid to do anything that her husband didn't approve of. Hayner's real dad, bless his heart, was the kind to turn to drink in a time of crisis.
When Seifer seemed sufficiently distracted, Hayner tried to break off and go home, but he was quickly surrounded by Seifer's gang.
"Where do you think you're going?" Rai said threateningly.
"Home." Hayner told him flatly. "It's where I'm supposed to be."
"A little later." Seifer said. "First, you're going to tell us where you've been."
"Bah." Hayner waved him off. "It's none of your beeswax."
"We'll see about that."
"You can't keep me from my parents' place." Hayner tried to remind him.
"Your parents need to come and get you." Siefer made up on the spot. "In the mean time, we're going to have a little chat about that thing." He jerked his thumb back at the empty tracks.
"Talk about what?" Hayner smirked at him.
"That!" Seifer turned around to point at where the ghost train had sat, but found it missing. "Hey, where'd it go?"
"It went back where it came from." Hayner said as if Seifer was a retard or something.
"But there wasn't a driver. And we didn't hear it leave."
"Of course." Hayner took advantage of the group's confusion to slip past them. "It is the ghost train, after all." He stared walking home.
He was not alone in his trek. The Town Disciplinary Committee followed him as he strolled along. Eventually, Seifer slid up from behind him to fall into step next to him.
"You four weenies were on the hilltop, looking for the ghost train, right before he disappeared."
"Yup."
"And that's what you've been trying to do for the last couple of days. You were trying to search for that train."
"Yup."
"Find anything?"
Hayner didn't know how to answer that question. They had answered so many questions, but they still had nothing to show for their work.
"Well?" Seifer asked, impatient.
"We found…" Hayner let out a breath. "…related stuff. But we don't know where Roxas is yet."
"And what about that Sora kid? Did he have anything to do with it?"
"Well, yes and no. He was involved, or rather, Roxas was involved with him, but it was all sort of indirect."
"Are the two related?"
"I just told you, indi-"
"I mean like family, blood-relations and stuff."
"Oh."
"And? Are they?"
"Umm, that one's kinda complicated."
"Hmm. And do you have any way of finding him, either?"
"Not unless you've got a space ship tucked up your ass."
Seifer was notably and understandably confused by this answer.
"The search team is just about done. They're giving it two more days, and then they're going to disband." Seifer told Hayner.
"I figured they would eventually."
They had arrived at the street where Hayner's mom lived with her husband and Hayner's little brother. Angry words floated out of the thin walls, and Hayner didn't hide his disgust at the situation that his mom had dug for herself and for her youngest child. He strolled on by, knowing that he couldn't do a damn thing to help. If Roxas was here, he would have on the spot come up with some excuse to waltz in and take the kid out for a day, but Hayner couldn't think that fast.
Hayner spared a thought to wonder what Seifer and his gang were doing still following him, but dismissed it as them wanting to have a few words with his father. Good luck fishing him out of what ever bottle he had crawled into.
Three blocks later, Hayner pulled out his keys and jogged up the steps to his apartment. The three flights of stairs reminded him of Yen Sid's lofty tower, but then he was at his door and turning the knob.
As expected, the television was on and Hayner's dad was collapsed on the couch in front of it. Hayner escaped to his room, not wanting to watch as Seifer and his gang tried to prod the man awake and tell him to properly discipline his son.
In the safety of his room, Hayner wondered how he had ever gotten this far without Roxas. In the fake world, Roxas would invite him to spend the night, knowing full well that Hayner would resent the 'charity' and still be unable to refuse a night away from the stink of the messy apartment and his flatulent parent. Life was just better with Roxas in it. It just was.
After their return from Yen Sid's, life slowly returned to normal in the small town. The search team did indeed disband, having run out of places to look. Slowly, the posters of Roxas faded away, worn down by weather and never replaced. Hayner, Pence, and Olette took their lumps from their parents, and their acceptance of their being grounded seemed to surprise everyone. Although they all still saw each other at school, they were having trouble talking to one another. It was simply too big, too much to wrap their minds around. But as the sharpness of that day's memories also faded, they brought up the courage to talk and voice their thoughts on the matter.
Pence eventually made one last trip to the mansion. He went alone, as Hayner and Olette were busy trying to make sure no one noticed that he was missing for the afternoon. When he returned, he told them how the place was all coated in some glowing green barrier. Yen Sid had made sure that no further problems would arise from that place.
"It was a glitch in the system." Pence explained to them. "the hard drive was almost full, the system was shutting down, even its power was fading. Diz had wanted a failsafe if Roxas had ever escaped, so he but in a default path of action for his creation. In case of any problems, the system was to over-write all of our memories and give us all the data from the fake Twilight town, so that Roxas could never guess that his life inside there was a sham. And that's just what it was doing."
"So he stopped it? Yen Sid stopped the computer from running anymore?" Olette asked.
"Looks that way. I couldn't get anywhere near that stuff. The searches I started should have long since finished, but now I'll never reach them."
"I wonder why he blocked it off instead of just leveling the place?" Hayner voiced.
"I kinda get the feeling that Yen Sid isn't much of a computer person. He may
have been worried about the possible consequences." Pence theorized.
Without that particular source of information, they were stuck waiting again. Dejected, beaten, they could think of nothing else to do.
Life went on. Finals came and went. Summer started again. Now, when people looked at them, they didn't automatically ask if there had been any news, or offer condolences. Without realizing it, the group of friends started thinking of him less and less, although he was always in their hearts. When they all got together, they could talk of things other than the friend they had lost, and later, alone, when they individually realized that they had gone the entire day without talking or even thinking about him, it hurt a little less each lime.
Sitting atop the train station tower one day, they all watched the struggle supporter putting up signs. Olette pulled out something from her pockets.
It was the little blue orb from the trophy that had been awarded to Roxas in the fake town.
"Resolve and promises are all well and good," she said, "but it doesn't change the fact that, unlike Sora, destiny will not allow us to leave this world to search for Roxas."
"We'll find him." Hayner said. "Remember what Yen Sid was saying; our world has some sort of scientific value. Someone will come poking their noses around, and we'll hitch a ride."
"But how are we supposed to locate him?" Olette said sadly. "There are dozens, probably hundreds of worlds out there. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack."
"Our hearts will guide us." Pence told her. "Look at Sora. He had two people he was looking for, and he found both of them. It's not because he visited every world, or had everybody out looking for them. It's because he followed his heart, straight to them. And we'll do the same. All of our hearts are connected to Roxas's, too.
"Doesn't being a Nobody mean that you don't have a heart?" Hayner pointed out.
"Maybe. But Nobodies aren't supposed to have feelings either. Just you wait and see."
And thus, the stage is set for KH 3 to start. What will happen? Only those lucky bastards at square enix know. On another note, if it turns out that in KH 3, there is no sign of Hayner, Pence, Olette, or even Roxas and Sora, (as it is rumored that the game will have a whole new cast of characters) then I may just write a sequal. Maybe. If I feel like it.
