(A/N: I am really good at writing entire chapters of fanfiction during slow days at work. Why can't I do that with my serious fiction writing? Going to have to work on that.

Anyway, this chapter is that obligatory let's-explain-the-world-of-KH-to-the-newcomer chapter, so I tried to make it a little more interesting and add a flashback... but I'm pretty sure I'm just going to add a flashback to every chapter. It's kind of what my writing style has turned into; I don't like telling a story in only one period of time. I feel like flashbacks really help fill in gaps while still allowing you to conceal anything you want.

Ramble aside, ta-da.)

CHAPTER III

JUSTICE

Do you feel any better now?
Your father is lying where the bones are,
A little lost colony from the start.
I can't forget the skin pulled tight, every letter read.
Is it your justice we never see?

Kauf, "Relocate"
As Much Again

Araceli and Dylan guided Silas into a small house in the first district. Dylan had mused aloud that maybe Silas scared the rest of the Heartless away with his Thundaga, as the third district was peaceful for the remainder of their time there, though he had never seen anything like that before.

Silas was still trying to figure out what the other boy meant by "Thundaga." Was he trying to say "Thunder?"

He couldn't help the small smile that sneaked onto his face. That would bother Nico so much. "Thunder" and "lightning" aren't the same thing. What Dylan meant to say was "lightning." Silas couldn't care any less, but he cared because he knew Nico cared.

His smile faded by the time they reached the tiny home. Nico. He couldn't be dead. He wouldn't allow the thought to take root in his mind and dig its way to the very center, though it was a battle in and of itself to keep the suspicion away.

Thundaga. What did that even mean? He didn't do anything. He sat there, helpless, with a broken leg, and just tried to cover as much of his upper body as possible as the black creature tried to attack him the way it had attacked Nico.

The house was no larger than his bedroom back home, and everything, from furniture to supplies, was sparse.

"Sit anywhere," said Araceli, so Silas stood with his back to the rectangular, light-wood table in the center of the house and pushed down with the heels of his hands, taking a seat atop the table. She did say "anywhere." Besides, Silas was too busy marveling at the state of his leg and trying to calm swimming thoughts about Nico, thunder, and shadowy creatures to care too much about his etiquette.

"Do you live here?" he asked neither of them in particular.

For a moment, neither of them said anything. Then, seemingly realizing the other wasn't speaking, Dylan said, "This house has been empty for a while. Some puppet maker used to live here. I think."

That, alone, was baffling to Silas. Nobody back home kept any door unlocked when they weren't home, because if they did, it would, sure as shit, be tagged with various graffiti art and ransacked for anything valuable.

It's not that most people in his hometown were criminals, it's just that the few criminals it did have were thorough and unquenchable.

He couldn't put off talking about it any longer. "So, you know Nico?" Silas asked.

Araceli raised her left eyebrow, leaning against the wall perpendicular to him and crossing her toned arms over her chest. Her staff seemed to disappear into thin air shortly after the fight, much the same way his giant key had. Silas had no doubt this girl knew how to summon and dispel her weapon at any given moment. Silas's key came and went as it pleased.

"You know Nico?" she asked.

Silas's fingers were fidgety. He was rarely fidgety; he was known in school for being the calm and collected one, the one who wouldn't let a failed test or a detention threat faze him. It was that very fact that made people, in general, like him so much. It wasn't that he had many real friends aside from Nico, but he certainly didn't have any enemies, even in the teachers.

His own anxiety made him feel like a fraud which, in turn, gave him more anxiety.

"How do you know Nico?" Silas asked, channeling all of his energy into keeping his voice steady.

Araceli squeezed her arms tighter—a minute motion her expression implied she didn't want or expect him to notice, but Silas noticed things about people. He didn't notice a lot of important things, but "people" was one subject he could always ace. Too bad it was never on the list of classes to take, year after year.

This is why his dad didn't worry about his grades. He was convinced Silas's people skills could take him places. His father never specified which places it would take him, but the ambiguity was a comfort to his son. Silas's mother, on the other hand, was the parent who stressed out about his grades, attendance, and record. Whenever he needed a parent to sign anything, he always went to his dad. In eighth grade, his science teacher began to catch on, and started calling his mother directly. Fuck her.

Thinking about school and his parents hurt and terrified him almost as much as thinking about Nico. Wipe the slate clean, he reminded himself, and imagined his thoughts as jumbled nonsense in black marker on a whiteboard, before erasing it all in four clean swipes.

The girl let out a long sigh.

"We don't," Dylan finally said. "We met with a wizard who said a boy named Nico who could wield the Keyblade washed up in Traverse Town. We need help, so we went looking for him."

"Nico's here?" Silas asked. "In Traverse Town?"

Araceli said, "You're the only person we've encountered, and we've been searching for hours."

Silas's hands curled into fists. "You weren't looking hard enough."

"Hey," said Dylan, "we searched every nook and cranny, alright? Nico isn't here." He paused a beat. Silas tried to keep his thoughts clear. "We can ask the shop owners if they've seen anyone, but that's all we can do."

"Are you worried about him?" Araceli asked.

Silas thought for a second, and nodded.

"Don't be. He probably woke up long before you and found his way out of here. The wizard said he was here hours ago. There's a gummi ship shop a short distance from here. He could have gathered enough money to leave, or, heaven forbid, stolen a ship, if he's no longer here."

Despite having no clue what a gummi ship was, he could infer that it was something that took you places based on the context. Between gummi ships, Thundaga, a wizard, and a Keyblade, Silas was only half-certain he understood what they were talking about.

But he could guess. Gummi ship must be how you leave this place. A wizard was, hopefully, not the same kind Nico played as in his tabletop RPGs. A keyblade must be his weapon—it's a giant key, after all.

"I wonder why he didn't mention you," Araceli considered, "when he saw Nico's arrival. Since you have a Keyblade, too. Did you come after him?"

"About the Keyblade," Silas said, ignoring her question as he felt she was wondering aloud more than directly asking him, "is that what I had?"

Dylan and Araceli exchanged a nervous glance they didn't even try to conceal. Didn't they know things like that just made people more nervous? "Did you just get that?" Dylan asked.

Silas nodded.

Araceli uncrossed her arms, and hoisted herself up onto the table to the right of him. Dylan, apparently feeling awkward standing in the corner of the room, followed shortly after and sat to his right as Araceli said, "Tell us exactly what happened. How did you get to Traverse Town?"

He didn't really know the answer to that question, so he backtracked to the night before. "I'm supposed to graduate tomorrow—or maybe today. I don't know. It was storming out, so I couldn't sleep. Storms make me uneasy. So I drove to pick up Nico so we could hang out."

Maybe he went into too much detail about the drive to Nico's place; the two of them lived literal cornfields apart from each other, but they were actually some of the closest neighbors in town. He didn't know how or why Nico was awake; he slept like a baby in storms, but he was relieved he was. Silas didn't know where they were going that night. He just wanted to drive.

Dylan was a great audience. His eyes widened at all the right parts of the story, and he asked questions to keep it moving. Araceli, however, only nodded thoughtfully and screwed up her forehead when the creature attacked Nico.

"And I woke up here… well, in the third district."

"Okay," Araceli started. "Good thing you're sitting down." She swung her legs a little bit before saying, "Hard part, first: your hometown is gone."

Silas laughed. Did she really think that was news? "I saw it crumble under my feet," he murmured. "I know it's gone."

"But it's not gone forever," Dylan interjected. "Worlds have been restored before. And, odds are, most of your friends are alive."

Araceli side-eyed Dylan, to which he replied in a grunty, "What?" but Silas didn't really care about the state of anyone except Nico, his mother, father, and sister.

"Secondly," Araceli continued, "those things you were fighting are the same things we were fighting here, just in a different shape. They're called Heartless. They're what happens when a heart is completely overcome by darkness. When another Heartless steals the heart of a person and corrupts it. Though some are manmade."

Silas blinks. "So, hearts can be taken and… overcome by darkness. Does that mean they become evil?"

Araceli swung her legs once more. "More or less."

"And the person dies?"

She shook her head at this. "Not quite. Their bodies, their empty shells, become an entity known as a Nobody. Like Heartless, they come in different shapes, and are stronger or weaker depending on the state of the person whose heart was corrupted. Nobodies don't tend to linger here."

Heartless. Nobodies. Silas was only half-sure he was following along, though it all felt stranger than fiction. "Can they be put back together?"

"Under certain conditions, it's possible," Araceli informed him with the patience of a saint. "If you manage to reunite the Heartless with its respective Nobody, and simultaneously pull that heart out of the darkness, you can make a person whole again. Some Nobodies have even been known to grow a new heart altogether. On rare occasions, a person's heart has been restored, but their Nobody still remains."

Silas decided to stop asking questions. He was barely managing to keep up with this walking encyclopedia's explanations, so he thought it better to quit while he was ahead. "Is that what happened to Nico?" he asked instead, dreading the answer.

Araceli shook her head. "It's impossible. The wizard saw him touch down on Traverse Town. I think you mistook what you saw; he probably fell beneath the cracking earth before the Heartless could get at him."

Silas wanted that so badly to be true, but knew it wasn't. "I know what I saw," he said. "The ground didn't start breaking apart until after his body disappeared."

"The wizard got a clear reading of him, dude," Dylan said. "Name, and everything. He made it out of your town."

Araceli blinked once, twice slowly. The silence was so thick, Silas was sure he could feel it on his fingertips, dense and rubbery. "Unless," she said, "you took his heart into your body."

xxx

Silas's fists curled into red, trembling balls.

Sure, he had expected his cherry red pickup to be tagged someday, but not in the middle of the parking lot of the fucking skate park earlier than ten pm. It was just him and Nico there; he knew that. There wasn't anyone else in sight.

As if reading his mind, Nico said, "They must have come up when you were on your longboard. It can be pretty noisy."

He didn't want to hear about how noisy his longboard was, and shrugged off Nico's hand when he placed it on his friend's shoulder. Silas couldn't get a good look at his friend, with his eyes so glued to his baby, but knew that he wouldn't be hurt by the gesture. Nico knew how much that shitty old car meant to him.

Silas had gotten it as a sixteenth birthday present not a half year prior. His dad managed to hide it in their garage covered up in a tarp for two days before, claiming it was his mom's car that she was keeping at his house for a couple of days until she could get it repaired. The story didn't make a lot of sense, and his mom's little sedan wouldn't have taken up so much floor space in the garage, but Silas never quite grew out of accepting everything his father said without a word. He trusted him.

Even when his dad betrayed his trust, he did it in the best way possible. He couldn't wait to see his son's face, so he woke him up at six in the morning on his birthday, which landed on a Saturday this year, and listened to him bitch the entire way down the stairs until they reached the garage, and he pulled the tarp off of the car.

The ratty old thing, already with over a hundred thousand miles on it and rusting in the corners, couldn't have been worth more than a thousand dollars, but Silas loved it. He loved the splitting polyester interior, with yellow foam cushions poking out of the seams, and he loved the faint smell of skunk and spit that lingered behind every single air freshener. He loved being able to toss his skateboard and drum set in the back, and loved that he was the first person in school anyone called when they needed something big moved across town. He loved the stupid, plastic hula girl suctioned to his dashboard, and he loved that Nico cut out a picture of his own face and taped it over the plastic figurine.

"No girls in the car," his dad had said when Silas finally snapped out of his reverie, "and no pot."

Of course, he broke the second rule religiously, but only managed to break the first once. Her name was Maria, and she was cute. She had curly, shoulder-length hair, a dusting of freckles over her nose and cheekbones, and big, sweet brown eyes. He could still feel the hard metal of the bottom of the cab beneath the ratty, flannel polka-dot throw blanket he'd swiped from the living room as he rushed out the door, and imagined it was only worse on Maria's spine, but she was a good sport about it.

She called him the next day, and he didn't answer. It's not that he missed the call; he stared at the phone, and watched it light up with her face and name, before turning over in his bed and staring out the window.

Three months later, and he still didn't understand why he did that. Silas wasn't a player. He was a lot of things, and he had a lot of the same qualities as a player, but he wasn't one. He didn't like knowing that he hurt such a kind girl that way.

He reminded himself, as he stared at his truck, to scrape up some money and send her some flowers. Silas still had her address written down somewhere; he wouldn't have them write his name down.

"We have to go," said Nico. "We can probably catch up to them."

"Why?" Silas asked.

"Retribution."

He was silent for a moment, slowly turning his head toward his friend. He didn't need to ask.

"It means justice," Nico answered.

He didn't expect this from Nico, whose timidity was only outshined by his anxiety, but knew he only said so much because he understood. Besides, seeing a freshly-painted red car defaced with a stupid smiley face with "x" eyes and its tongue sticking out in white spray paint would piss off just about anybody.

They said no more, and hopped in the skunk, spit, and tropical breeze-scented hunk of metal. "It was probably Jason," Nico suggested, buckling in as Silas turned around in the parking lot, tires screeching. "We should go to the park by Randall's house."

"The park?" Silas asked, as he was about to make a left out of the lot, but quickly turned the wheel, tires screeching, to make a right instead. "Wouldn't he be at home?"

"I heard them talk about smoking cigarettes in the park in the locker room, once," Nico said. "It's not much to go off of, but I also heard them talk about how they always need a smoke after tagging another time."

Nico was scary-good at putting two and two together, and in no time flat. He had no choice but to trust him.

They sped down the country road at twenty, thirty miles over the speed limit (which they could argue they couldn't see without streetlights, anyway, and that's if the police gave a damn in the first place). In fifteen minutes, they reached the dark park, with the sign reading "Eurydice Community Park" lit with a sputtering single lightbulb at its base. A long, black drive wound into the park, which was actually quite an impressive collection of monkey bars, swings, teeter-totters and plastic, springy animals, despite the town's budget.

This was where Silas and Nico met. He'd almost forgotten.

Since that day, his dad developed a phobia of parks and never took him there, instead electing to take him to a community pool some thirty minutes away, where Silas begrudgingly learned how to breaststroke as a first-grader.

They parked the car, driving up as silently as possible, and slowly made their way down the black tar walkway, until they could just barely see a small, flickering, burning light just beneath the monkey bars. The contours of three faces lit up briefly in the night before disappearing back into darkness with the release of the lighter. The stale stench of burning tobacco wafted through the warm mid-May breeze to where they stood. Nico wrinkled his nose.

"Yo, Jason!" Silas shouted, lengthening and hardening his steps.

The other boy threw his smoldering cigarette into the woodchips and crushed it out with the sole of his boot before it could ignite the whole park. He and his two friends, Randall and Mark, were all huddled in a stupid little circle. They seemed to wear the same tool uniform that every douche in town wore: some sort of flannel plaid button-up over a black or white wife beater, and jeans that were supported only by the fat on their asses, revealing their clashing plaid boxers.

Jason had this ridiculous swirl design shaved onto the side of his black hair, serving in stark contrast to Mark's long, blond bangs and snakebites, which he was pretty sure the boy had dyed and pierced himself, respectively. Randall could have been any other respectable guy in town, with brown hair maybe a little too long and greasy, but otherwise completely plain looking, were it not for his association with Jason and Mark. Silas always thought Randall was only caught up with those other two because nobody else gave him the time of day, not because he actually liked vandalizing and smoking cigarettes. He saw the kid's grade on a book report once, and he'd gotten not only an A+, but a little golden star sticker and a teacher's comment in red reading "Beautiful work, as always!" underlined twice.

He'd seen Randall smile before quickly tucking his report away in his half-open backpack.

"What're you gonna do?" Nico mumbled, having apparently not thought this far ahead, but Silas was still moving up to Jason. His speed and refuse to veer from his course stunned the other boys into petrification.

"Retribution, motherfucker," he said, and split his knuckles open as his right fist collided with Jason's jaw.

xxx

"Is that even possible?" Silas asked.

"Actually, yeah," Dylan said. "This legendary Keyblade wielder, he once restored a ton of dead worlds back to life after closing the Door to Darkness." He didn't stop at Silas's confused expression. "A Princess of Heart, one of seven legendary women with entirely pure hearts, she chose his body as a vessel for her heart for safekeeping."

"His heart might have reached your body before it could be eclipsed by the darkness," Araceli suggested.

"Did this Princess become a Nobody?" he asked, finding himself worried for Nico.

"No, but she was a Princess of Heart, so the rules are… different," Araceli said, choosing her words carefully. "Unless this Nico is the first ever Prince of Heart in recorded history, he very likely has a Nobody out there somewhere."

"And… he can't be whole without his Nobody?"

She shook her head. "Unless he manages to grow a whole new heart on his own." She paused. "We need to talk to the wizard. He would know what to do. But, first, we need to be absolutely certain that Nico's heart is in your body."

Silas, with caution, put his hand to his chest and felt for beats. He already had a hard enough time feeling his heartbeat, and could barely feel it now, but there was unmistakably only one heartbeat in there.

"Hey, it's not a physical heart, dude," said Dylan. "It's more like… I don't know how to describe it. It's not the thing with the aortas."

He kept listening, just in case. Maybe they were wrong. Maybe, assuming they weren't completely crazy and Nico's heart did make his way into his body, there was a way for him to know.

Silas must have felt fifteen heart beats before, either his dazed and confused brain conjured up the word, or he actually felt it, in his being, rippling through his chest and down his limbs: retribution.

"He's here," said Silas, never so sure of himself. "Nico's here."