Sooo... hello there. Beater here and this is our story. Ours as in, mine and my friends', because it all came out of a big RPG we had on WhatsApp.
You may already have started reading this in AO3, yeah, it's cross-posted obviously. Of course it's still me - I can prove it, this account was made long before the AO3 one and I haven't been using it in a while. I didn't think of posting here, too, because I thought of putting my friend Miraha as a co-author and only AO3 allowed me to - or at least I think so. We're the two who did most of the writing, and I hope you will enjoy reading this four-part series as much as we loved writing it. (and translating, in my case, because the original draft was in our native language, Italian)
Chapter 1
Patterns in the Big Sky
"This is my family.
I found it all on my own.
It's little and broken, but still good.
Yeah, still good."
The deafening sound of shattered glass echoed in the hall, immediately followed by the wail of a small child.
«You're in trouble, Terra.» The teenager who had been strenuously dueling the culprit until that very moment shrugged and dismissed his weapon with a flick of his wrist.
His name was Ventus, and even if he didn't look his age of sixteen, he was the youngest student in that castle – student, not person.
Normally Terra, his sparring partner four years his senior, would have responded to such an accusation by seizing him by the shoulders, lifting him up in the hair, and scratched accurately his golden hair with a noogie, but in that very moment, the wail of the little one had left the older boy full of concern.
«Shiro…» Terra hissed between his teeth, slapping his forehead with the hand he wasn't holding the Keyblade with.
In a corner of the room, fenced by a playpen, a girl little older than one with blue eyes and unusually whitish hair was clutching the colored fence and crying, while she looked for the other people in the room with her gaze. Terra ran to her and picked the toddler up immediately.
«I'm so sorry, sunshine, Dad didn't want to scare you…»
«Yeah, you just wanted to blast me into a wall.» Ventus chuckled joining his friend. «She would have started crying anyway, though, if you did it.»
Ventus just adored Shiro, along with his status of uncle in all but blood, but he hadn't always been so agreeable towards her. Despite having turned sixteen the previous fall (he had a bad case of amnesia, and the other student in the castle, Aqua, had decided his birthday to fall on November 27, the day in which he had walked through the doors of that castle for the first time), he didn't show his age neither physically, as he was rather short and thin and he still had the same childish face he had had when he had arrived there, nor mentally, and when he had discovered, almost two years before, that his classmates, his only two friends Terra and Aqua, had unwittingly had a baby, he had erroneously thought he would have been kicked out of the castle, or put aside, because of the newcomer in the Land of Departure.
He had needed several days of persuasion from Terra and Aqua, and a tiny, accidental help from baby Shiro, before Ventus understood that little or nothing would have really changed in his life.
Shiro turned her gaze on the boy and reached out to him with a tiny hand, squealing: «Unky!»
«No way, sunshine, that isn't fair!» Terra pretended to be offended, swung Shiro upside-down towards the floor, then he raised her back up, tossed her in the air and caught her, then he squeezed her in a hug. The little one giggled.
«You know, Terra, you have no reason to be jealous.» Ventus smirked. «At the end of the day, it's your shoulder she pukes on.»
Shiro stopped laughing and stared at a spot behind Terra and Ventus, then she smiled again and pointed at someone.
«Mama! Pawpaw!» she exclaimed happily.
Aqua took Shiro from Terra's arms and checked if she was fine, then she stared at the window that Terra had smashed with a badly-aimed Strike Raid.
«What happened?» she asked the boys.
«Dada BOOM!» Shiro intervened before one of the two had time to explain.
Aqua was visibly trying to throw a dirty look at Terra and Ventus, but Shiro's comment managed to get a smile out of her.
Ventus bit his lip. Shiro was hardly capable of saying about a dozen words and a sentence ("wuv ya!"), but she was perfectly capable of spilling the beans when she was asked to.
The boy could hardly imagine what Shiro would have been able to blather in the following two, maybe three or four years, that would have taken him to get to his Mark of Mastery exam.
The man who had arrived along with Aqua, who had black hair and beard streaked with grey and wore an ample white cloak, stopped in front of Terra and looked in his eyes.
«You're nervous, son. Try to stay calmer.» He recommended him.
«I'm sorry, Master.» Terra hinted a bow.
The formality in his words and gestures was a mere façade: the older man whom Terra had called Master, Eraqus, was the closest person the three youths had to a father. He had raised Terra and Aqua ever since the two were barely old enough to write their names, and Ventus since an old friend, brother in arms and rival of his had left him there, stating the child had been gravely wounded both in his body and his heart.
«That was an accident…» Ventus tried to defend his friend.
«I know what it was, Ventus, don't stress out.» Master Eraqus raised a hand to calm down the youngest student. «However, I think that both for your safety and your tranquility, it's better if the three of you finish today's studies elsewhere, in the library.»
Nothing would have really put Ventus's spirits down, not even the perspective of spending the rest of the afternoon on magic theory tomes, but he knew it wouldn't have been the same for Terra, so he grinned from ear to ear to cheer his friend up and started marching for the staircase with the widest stride his short legs allowed him. Terra sighed, then forced a smile, followed Ventus and walked past him ruthlessly tousling his hair.
«Uhm, Terra?» Aqua caught up with him, with a smile halfway between embarrassed and vengeful. She passed him Shiro, who was starting to stink. «You break it, you bought it.»
Terra's face took a shade of green, but he took the toddler and carried her to the bathroom to change her diaper.
Walking towards the hallway that led to the library, Ventus had the time to notice, in the corner of his eye, that Aqua had stayed behind and stopped in front of the broken window.
Before he turned the corner, he saw her picking up some pieces of glass.
«Wait, wait! One more time, please!» Zack laid down in the sandpit and looked at his girlfriend with a pleading smile.
«All right… just one more try, though!» Aerith, thirteen years old, an innocent smile, and wearing the uniforms of one of the middle schools of the city, ordered him.
Zack kicked up his legs and stood up in a single, fluid movement.
«Heh!»
He opened his arms and grinned wide, then he plopped himself on one of the benches of the Radiant Garden playground.
«So, are the city guards treating you okay?» The girl sat next to him, her smile still on her face.
Zack nodded. Being only sixteen years old, the job he had wasn't full time yet – he was still obliged to attend the local high school – but he had been immediately become the big man on campus ever since he had started following one of the three city guard officers wearing a blue uniform.
Even the troublemakers in his class had pulled him aside and started proposing him to share the income of their "business" if he played along.
«For now the most heroic act I have been assigned was to retrieve a little boy who got lost in the city market. Angeal keeps saying I have to do stuff my size, which basically means that I get babied.»
Aerith turned serious.
«Zack, I know you won the bet, but I still have to ask you a favor. There's a boy… in my class…»
«A boy?» Zack had a start. «What… who…?»
He hoped with all his heart it wasn't bad news… Aerith was dating him… of course it was more plausible she'd be hanging out with someone her age…
«He tried to get into the city guards as a trainee. Like you did.» Aerith looked down. «I think someone chased him away and ridiculed him, probably one of the Lord's guards, and now he's in low spirits.»
«There's nothing much to do when Lord Ansem's guards don't like somebody…» Zack pulled a face. «And you said he's thirteen… he might have more dreams than brains if he tried to do it now.»
Aerith smacked one of his ears.
«Zack!»
«Do you think he could make it?» Zack gave her a puzzled look.
«I don't know.» Aerith stared back at him. «But what he needs right now is a friend. A friend like you.»
She took one of his hands, then she smiled again.
«You say you want to become a hero. This would be what a hero would do.»
Zack grinned back, and gently squeezed his girlfriend's hands.
That was something he could do. Aerith's classmate wasn't the threat he had imagined. He was just… a friend of hers. Maybe even a friend of his, in the future, if things were about to go as…
«ZACK AND AERITH, SITTING IN A TREE, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!»
A voice shouted behind them, and Zack looked back to see a boy his age, with spiky, messy red hair, an orange sleeveless jacket, and a yellow checkered keffiyeh over a white sleeveless shirt and tan trousers, a mischievous smirk and a makeshift megaphone in his hands.
«They're sitting under the tree, you dummy!» Next to him, another boy, with sky-blue hair neatly combed back, a navy blue jacket and spotless white trousers, gave his megaphone holding friend a condescending look.
Zack looked at the two for a moment, then he made a noisy snort.
«Of course it had to be you guys!» He reproached them, then he gestured to Aerith. «Cheese…» he pointed at the red-haired boy… «… and Chalk.» … and then his tidier-looking friend.
The mention of those two nicknames produced the reaction he had hoped for, and the paper megaphone boy tossed his toy to the ground, rolling up his green eyes.
«Zack, what the heck! You do know my name!»
Zack burst into laughter. «That's why it's fun!»
The boy shrugged and looked at his friend, trying to get some kind of support.
«I say, Isa, did you hear him? He insulted you, too!»
«You were just asking for retribution, didn't you know?» Isa didn't even flinch.
«Who's the more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows him?» Megaphone Boy picked up the megaphone and the grin and walked towards the bench. «Aerith, right?» He held out a hand. «Zack keeps talking about you. The fool who's following is Isa, and my name is Lea.»
«Nice to meet you.» Aerith shook Lea's hand.
«Pleasure's mine.» Lea shifted his weight from toes to heels, then he pointed at his own head. «Just to be sure… L-e-a. Got it memorized?»
«I'm quite sure she did. Along with the abysmal impression.» Isa joined Lea. «It's a pleasure, anyway. I'm Isa. We're in Zack's class.»
«Yeah, sadly. They are my classmates.» Zack subsided into a slouch on the bench and let his butt drag on the seat. «Never, ever, ever get into science class and do lab on Lea's same table!»
«Oh, come on, that was one time!» Lea started looking rather offended. Isa looked nonchalantly at him and raised three fingers.
«Let's just say he can be rather explosive when he…» Isa had started saying, but Zack didn't pay attention. In a pocket of his trousers, his cell phone had started vibrating and making beeping sounds.
«Hello?» He brought the device to his ears and pressed the answer button.
«Zack?» The voice of Angeal, one of the city guards' officers, echoed from the phone. «I'm calling on behalf of Lord Ansem. He wants you to go through further training during the summer vacation.»
«Oh…» Zack mumbled. Summer vacation would have started within days. From a certain point of view, he didn't know if those news were good or bad.
«Tomorrow after school you will immediately report to the castle. Dilan knows you're summoned, so don't worry about being kept outside.»
Zack covered his exposed ear with a hand, stood up, and took a pair of steps away.
«Fine. Tomorrow.»
«I don't know all the details, but Lord Ansem is fully convinced it's about time you learn to use a weap…»
A few steps away, Lea was holding up his megaphone.
«ZAAACK! DON'T HOG ALL THE BEER, YOU BIG PIGGY!» he shouted, while Aerith stood up and tried to snatch the megaphone from him.
«Are you nuts? Shut the heck up!» Zack instinctively replied, but he immediately realized that Angeal could have heard him and thought he was telling him to shut his face. «Sorry, Angeal… classmate of mine. With a megaphone.»
As soon as Zack had said "Angeal", Lea stopped laughing and fighting Aerith and became white as a sheet.
«Can you turn on the external speaker?» Angeal asked Zack.
Zack took the phone away from his ear and pressed the speaker button.
«Are you saying, kid, that some storeowners in this city could be selling alcohol to schoolchildren?»
Lea staggered and stayed quiet.
It looked like Angeal had interpreted Lea's silence exactly as what it was meant to be, because he spoke again.
«Tomorrow after school, I want to see you at Lord Ansem's castle along with Zack, and I want you to tell me exactly who broke the laws.»
There were many things of his childhood Ventus did not remember at all.
He didn't remember where he had grown up, nor the names of his parents, nor whether he had had a real family.
He did remember his name, though. He remembered he had already learned to read and write, how to hold a weapon, that he had always loved cats, and that he had heard somewhere that to see a shooting star in the sky was a bad omen – the warning of a forthcoming disaster, or a war.
To some extent, he didn't want to believe that.
In the last four years he had been taught not to believe to the first nonsense he heard – to observe, listen, think with his own mind, and to be certain of something before starting to worry. It was one of the many things he was grateful for learning under Master Eraqus.
Terra and Aqua, sitting next to him, the former on the left and the latter on the right, on the stone bench on the summit near the castle, both looked rather worried as well, even if it was surely for other reasons: some days before that evening, the day that had preceded the window accident, the Master had announced them that they would have been tested for the Mark of Mastery exam. And the exam would have been tomorrow.
Even Shiro looked rather nervous: that evening, she had thrown a tantrum and refused food, and the three of them had convened that a walk would have probably calmed her down enough for her to accept the bottle.
Probably.
At the moment it definitely looked like a lost battle.
«Hey, Aqua…» Maybe Ventus knew how to start his speech without mentioning the old forthcoming disaster saying. «Do you ever wonder what stars are? Where light comes from?»
Aqua diverted for a moment her focus from Shiro's tantrum and looked in Ventus's eyes.
«Well, they say…»
«That every star up there is another world.» Terra intercepted the answer, taking also the chance to ruffle Ventus's hair. «The light is their hearts, and it's shining down on us like a million lanterns.»
That wasn't exactly the best piece of news, but Ventus didn't want to add more worries to his friends' pile, so he tried to get more information as casually as he could.
«What? I don't get it.» He shrugged.
«In other words, they're just like you and sunshine here, Ven.»
«What does that mean?» Ventus had a start. Terra's speech just got more and more puzzling with every word.
«You'll find out someday, I'm sure.»
«I wanna know now!»
«You're too young to know now!» Terra seized Ventus's shoulders with an arm and started rubbing his scalp with his knuckles.
«Quit treating me like a kid!» Ventus pretended to be offended and tried to wriggle away from his friend's grip, but he did not struggle for long. He had never said it out loud and he didn't think he had a reason to do it, but he just loved the moments in which Terra and Aqua let him sit near them, hugged him, or even tickled him.
There were many things in his life Ventus did not remember at all, but if there was something his heart did not forget, it was the feeling of being terribly alone for a rather long time.
Every little attention of his makeshift family reminded him that they were there, they loved him, and they wouldn't go away.
He was already leaning on Terra's shoulder with a yawn when Ventus heard Aqua saying: «You two would make the weirdest brothers…». The young woman was keeping her voice low, as if she knew Ventus was about to conk out.
Actually, the boy found it hard to keep his eyes open… he still heard Shiro's fussing, he felt that Terra was trying to shift his position somehow, but still Ventus felt way too sleepy to care…
«I'm scared, Terra…» Aqua was saying. «I'm afraid that tomorrow something might change us.»
«Even Shiro noticed you're nervous…» Terra was chuckling, but something in his voice gave his worry away. «It's gonna be okay…»
Ventus tried not to give in to sleep. Probably, if his question only had turned out to be a chance to get snuggled, he would have found the answers he was looking for now his seniors thought he wasn't listening.
«What if…?»
«Shush… tomorrow we'll be facing each other, but whatever happens, nothing will change what's between us.» Terra stopped to catch his breath. «And we're supposed to take care of this big boy here and of our amazing baby…»
«Terra… thanks… thanks for everything.»
It was in moments like that, Ventus was sure of that, that everything in the worlds was right.
Then Shiro, who during all that time had kept fussing and emitting senseless speech, started complaining louder and crying.
Ventus opened his eyes and sat up, ready to help if they ever came to the point it was hard to calm her down (it always came easy for him to make her laugh), but Terra was already on the job: he had taken Shiro in his arms, made her sit on his lap, and, holding her with an arm, had started stroking her head.
«You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey, you'll never know, dear, how much I love you, so please don't take my sunshine away…»
Terra was badly out of tune, and in some points of the song he recited the words instead of singing, but those words to Shiro were just like an incantation – the little one smiled instantly.
After a while, Ventus joined the song, at least to cover Terra's wrong notes and save his own eardrums, and before they finished Shiro had forgotten her tears and was happily clapping along.
«Oh, yeah, I almost forgot.» Aqua started looking for something in the pouch she wore under her sashes. «I made us good luck charms for tomorrow.»
She pulled out what looked like three small colorful stars, all made out of stained glass with a leather string hanging from each of them. Ventus immediately realized that they had been made out of the pieces of the window Terra had shattered a few days earlier.
Aqua passed the first one, orange, to Terra, then she put a second, vibrant green one, in Ventus's hands.
«I get one too?» the boy asked, surprised. He wasn't going to be tested for the mastery the following day, and he had expected more waiting before having his own.
«Of course. One for each of us!» Aqua held up the last one, the blue star she had kept for herself.
«Knowing you, there's also another for sunshine here, right?» Terra bounced Shiro on his knees.
Aqua smiled.
«There is, but she'll have to wait before she can have it. Let's say… until she knows what she can't put in her mouth!» She ran a hand through the little one's hair, while Shiro was trying to take the orange trinket from her father's hands.
They still hadn't forgotten what had happened the previous Christmas, that had also been Shiro's first birthday. Terra had carved a toy Keyblade for her and the first thing she had attempted to do with it was to leave a mark on the toy with her baby teeth.
«Somewhere out there, there's this tree with star-shaped fruit,» Aqua explained, looking up at the sky. «And the fruit represents an unbreakable connection. So as long as you and your friends carry good luck charms shaped like it, nothing can ever drive you apart. You'll always find your way back to each other.»
She gave the boys another glance.
«Technically… I think you're supposed to make them with sea shells… but I did the best with what I had.»
«Oy, sometimes you are such a girl!» Terra hinted at a smirk.
«Hey!» Aqua immediately replied. «What do you mean "sometimes"?»
They seemed about to discuss more about that cutting remark, but Shiro started blabbering and reaching out for the bottle, breaking the moment.
«Unky gots this.» Ventus raised his shoulders, took the bottle from Aqua and the toddler from Terra, and started giving Shiro the bottle.
When the little one, finally calm, started focusing on the milk, Ventus tried to expose another of his doubts.
«So this isn't a real good luck charm?»
It was rather sad to think about it, but the scavenged pieces from the broken window weren't exactly the best surrogate for sea shells.
«That's yet to be seen.» Aqua ran a hand through his hair, then did the same to Shiro. «But I did work a little magic on it.»
«Really? What?» Ventus grinned.
Aqua returned the smile and held her blue charm up.
«An unbreakable connection.»
Ventus wasn't able to say for how long they stayed on the summit, on the bench gazing at the stars. Shiro was the first to start yawning, and immediately after he, too, felt his eyelids getting heavy, and before he could notice how really tired he was, Terra's big hand shook his shoulder and his friend's voice told him it was bedtime.
Aqua took Shiro from his arms and Terra took his hand, and the four of them walked the mountain path that would have led them to the castle and their rooms.
Everything was silent around them, they could only here their steps and some li'l old cricket bug chirping.
The only lights in the night came from the castle windows and the stars.
They were almost at the staircase that led to the main door when Terra stopped them, still holding Ventus's hand tightly in his (Ventus was pretty dure he had made a few steps with his eyes closed during the walk back home) and heaved a sigh.
That would have been the last time the three of them would have crossed that door as apprentices. Ventus tried to imagine how many years it would have taken before his turn, if his friends would have helped him, if he would have been allowed to rush into things with more than a master in the castle, whether he had changed and how much since his former master had left him there, and if the old man would have noticed it.
It was then Terra spoke.
«You folks…» The young man murmured. «You're the most important people in my life.»
He was holding his head and shoulders low, as if he was ashamed to say it out loud.
«Tomorrow… so much is gonna change…» He looked at Aqua. «You'll be a Master for sure, you're way better than me. I'll do my best… It's our dream after all. And sooner or later it's going to happen to Ven and sunshine here. But as much as things will change… remember what I said, because that never will.»