Kairi's mother said it looked like rain. She remembered, vaguely, a bad storm had been predicted. Faris had told her at the store that morning when they'd run into each other. They had told Kairi's mom they and Bartz had headed back early from their fishing trip because of it. It was supposed to rain the next three days. Kairi had already been nervous about her planned voyage on the raft with Riku and Sora. This just gave the excuse to tell them they needed to delay. Riku sighed through his nose, but he didn't try to argue with her. All he said was that they better make sure to stow the raft further up the beach where it wouldn't wash out to sea without them. Kairi took his right hand in both of hers, an impulsive grab for him when he looked like he was about to storm off, and traced over his life line with her thumbs while staring up at him, searching his eyes with hers for his true reaction. "Please don't be mad. Three days isn't so long to wait, is it?"

She sounded like she was begging. How could he be mad at her then? He couldn't. Not then and especially not when she grinned and laughed, letting go of his hand to jab him in the chest, shattering the earnestness of the moment, but coming for his heart in a different way. "Don't leave without me. You promise?" He swore that too.

Sora came with him to drag the raft somewhere safe to weather the storm. It was a tough job to do, and one they had agreed to get done as quickly as possible to make it back to the main island before the storm hit. They spent an hour chasing each other around, playing keep away, when Sora stole the bucket hat Riku had paired with his raincoat, declaring he needed it more since he'd forgotten to wear any rain gear and Riku's coat had a hood. They'd both ended up covered in sand, wet, filthy, and smiling. They'd sat on the beach talking for another hour under the stars after before being hit with raindrops and being forcefully reminded of their task. Sora suggested that they sleep in one of the shacks on play island instead of trying to take their canoes back home. Riku reminded him that if their parents woke up and discovered they were gone, they'd be grounded or at least watched too closely to sneak out again and get to the raft when it really mattered, so Sora better put all the power he had in his weak noodle arms to dragging the raft and then rowing as fast as possible to beat the storm before rain really started coming down. Riku hesitated a long time before making the decision for them and his eyes twinkled when he made the taunt, so Sora still found himself biting a grin instead of pouting as expected.

There was no opportunity for Riku to visit the door in the secret place with Sora watching, nor did he want to. Three days and then they'd all leave together.

The expected squall never came. Rain that night amounted to little more than on and off drizzling. The sun shone the next two days. Riku couldn't help but feel they'd missed their chance. They'd missed something, and the niggling unease of a missed appointment you were just on the verge of remembering haunted all three.

On day three, Sora got himself grounded. For stupid reasons, he said. He wouldn't share what those were but he swore that he could talk his mother around in a day or two. "Smile like mine? I never serve a full sentence." Riku and Kairi both believed it. They'd give the world to Sora if he asked with a smile after all.

Riku gave him two more days. He was starting to get impatient. The whispers still came, as did dreams that seemed more like memories. The door. The door.

It rained both days they waited for Sora to get off being grounded, much harder than it had when a storm had been predicted. The sky was getting restless too. Selphie wouldn't shut up about how she thought she saw something moving in the bushes on her walk home. Tidus was more preoccupied with counting all the long shadows cast by trees, buildings, and people even though there was no sun. Riku could only think of the door.

His resistance broke by the end of the week.

Sora woke up to a loud clap of thunder that seemed like it shook his walls. He was to his window before he realized he was so much as sitting up in bed. He was dressed before he remembered he'd promised Kairi not to sneak out during his grounding. If it were just up to him, he'd have been out the window the first night rather than keep disappointing Riku (He couldn't leave during the day or detour on the way home from school. The island community was too tight knit. Someone in town would see him before he got to the docks and stop him. Sora, Kairi, and Riku's parents had been burned before and now usually had a few people alerted when one of the mischievous teenagers was grounded to make sure they followed orders). If they were leaving the islands, what did it matter how much trouble they got in? Kairi had shook her head and clued him in. They couldn't know the raft would make it that far. She was humoring Riku, because that was what you did when you cared for someone, but reaching other worlds on a raft or even getting further than the reef seemed pretty far fetched. Sora couldn't help but be disappointed in her lack of faith, but he agreed, no burned bridges. He had a difficult time not putting more priority on not disappointing her than not disappointing Riku. It wasn't always fair, but Riku didn't have the puppy eyes she did.

Kairi would have to understand though. Riku would be devastated if something happened to the raft after they'd waited so long, and it was really coming down hard. They had moored the boat further up the beach the week before, but who knows what the tides had done since and it hadn't been covered. Sora took a minute to grab a tarp from the garage, and then he was off to the boathouse by the docks. There were already empty spots on the canoe racks, but Sora hardly noticed, more worried about getting to his destination and then back. The two canoes tied to and slamming forcefully against the dock at play island were harder to miss.

"Riku! Kairi!" Sora yelled to the wind as he searched for his friends. Neither Riku nor Kairi were at the raft, and all of three of the friends were too late. The mast was broken, bent at an angle with part on the ground, pressing the torn sail to muddy sand, and large splinters reaching up like a claw toward the sky.

He only had a few minutes to mourn before he heard shouting carried by the wind.

"...Trusted you!"

"...All three of us together, but you..."

"...Wait! "

Then, he could only hear voices, not words, but he knew those voices. Sora started running, feet slapping and squelching. A strange shape rose from the sand a few feet ahead in his path, going from what he'd mistook for a murky puddle to a twitching, bright-eyed, clawed creature, the size of a dog but formed more like an ant's head sitting on a child's body. A deep aura of dread and despair came with the abomination, multiplying as the creature itself did. Sora faltered a moment before a piercing female shriek reached his ears and then Riku yelling, sounding as panicked as Sora himself felt, "Kairi!"

Sora balled his fists and ran shoulder first like a football player through the line of creatures. He felt something catch his leg, a light scratch that blossomed into a stab of pain and a hot trail down his leg as he kept running, proving it hadn't been so light after all. There was a similar rake of pain down his back, three burning lines. He didn't care. There were only two things he cared about, and when he saw them his heart surged and he could have flown, forget continuing to run or break through lines of what had to be the legions of hell.

It looked like Riku had caught Kairi as she'd swooned like a maiden in some old movie. Kairi was held mostly upright, held against Riku's chest by one of Riku's arms, head flopped backward, pale but without any visible injury. Riku bore no wounds or scratches either. He stared down at Kairi with the devoted concern of one of those heroes out of those same movies, water dripping from his hair into Kairi's face as he brushed her bangs out of her face with his free hand. The monsters gave them a wide berth, but Riku's feet were sunk not in sand but in a dark sludge that radiated around them and there was another puddle of darkness, a shade blacker than the sky, hanging in midair behind him.

"Riku! Kairi!" Sora knew there were less redundant and more meaningful things to yell, but words left him.

Riku's eyes snapped to him and a sudden, out of place grin split his face, manic with too many teeth and not the right kind of joy. "Come on, slowpoke! Grab ahold! We're setting sail!" The puddle at his feet twisted up his legs slowly.

"R..Riku?" Sora's voice trembled. The hair on his arms stood up. Something about that smile felt more wrong than the clawed monsters that were hanging back from him now too as he drew closer to Riku.

"Don't tell me you're afraid of the dark," Riku taunted. He reached out the arm not supporting Kairi. "Take my hand!"

Sora tried. He honestly did. He fought against the screaming, terrified voice in his head that warned a trap and surged forward, not moving as quickly as he wanted. The boys brushed fingers. Kairi jerked awake and looked directly into Sora's eyes, seeming to look behind them to see his soul or maybe his heart.

"Sooora," her voice came out in a breathy warble. An unseen something pushed hard against Sora's chest, knocking him backward at the same time the dark tendrils tugged Riku and Kairi with him down into the ground with the second dark portal closing in after them.

Sora almost didn't recognize his own scream, animal-like as it was as he sunk to his knees, tears already in his eyes as he tried to process his friends being torn away when he could still feel the ghost of Riku's fingers. His chest glowed warm, a nonsensical flutter of comfort-a strange biological comfort but bodies were strange things- he pushed away.

A nearby shadow creature, whatever hypnosis had been placed over it before broken, pounced at the kneeling, grieving boy with claws outstretched, chittering at its fellows to follow. Sora threw an arm up to cover his face, thinking it was the end and almost not caring, only to find himself engulfed in a flash of light and knocking the creature back as it rebounded off an outstretched silver blade with a tip turned and pointed like teeth of a key. Sora flexed the hand now gripping the gold handgrip of the odd weapon. He turned and swung clumsily at another creature, rolled to his feet, and started running, slashing as he went, not wildly or as sloppily as his first strike but still embodying a man possessed as his brain tried to claw its way back to making sense of the world for him.

It was easier to focus on one thought at a time. Get help for Riku and Kairi. Not that he knew who could help or how. He didn't know what happened to them or even how to describe it or anything else from the last few minutes. Even if he did, who would believe him? No one unless the shadow creatures were on the main island as well, which was an even worse thought than being mistaken for crazy.

Sora's wild man run to the dock was interrupted, Sora nearly tripping over his feet as he noticed a door-so familiar but nothing he'd seen before in waking-covering the entrance to the secret place. Warmth surged in his heart again. Maybe it wasn't the synapsis in his brain misfiring or being misunderstood, maybe his heart was trying to tell him something. He found himself detouring, but he barely reached the door and tugged it open, warmth in his chest again (You're on the right path now), before he was swept away in a gale much stronger than even the unseen force that stopped him from grabbing onto Riku.

A wind like no tropical storm he'd felt before battered his ears, his eyes, his body, and Sora blacked out.