Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This story is mine, as are the assorted OCs that appear in it. Enjoy!

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013 – Stones Do Not Yield Flowers

Three meters: it was a new record, but Aerith tried not to think about that. A trickle of sweat broke free from the beads of perspiration on her forehead. It ran down her temple and cheek, curling under her jaw as she tried to maintain focus. The column of greenish blue vines in front of her was pulsing, like a beating heart, and yet undulating like ocean waves at the same time.

After four failed attempts, she had finally managed to separate the essence of the magic inside the concrete floor of the old castle ruins. The core energy and the potential power: in her mind's eye, they were two vapors, hopelessly intermingled and inseparable, but fundamentally individual.

She had to remind herself to breathe, and that tiny shift in focus was too much to maintain her hold on the spell. The three meter tall column collapsed. Like a mini-implosion, the vapor seemed to fall into itself until what had been the topmost point of the column hit the ground. Upon contact with the concrete, the energy shot out across 360 degrees from where Aerith had summoned it. A feeling like a bucket of warm water coursed from the top of her head to her bare feet, and Aerith gasped, staggering slightly from the sensation.

With a flash of light that she had become familiar with over the past month, the essence spent itself out and faded away. Once again, she was left in the dimly lit chamber of the old castle ruins. Once more, she had taken another precarious step forward in this…whatever this was that she was doing. Once again, she found herself standing in the middle of a field of white flowers that had not existed ten seconds ago.

Catching her breath, Aerith blinked and realized that her arm was still extended in front of her and that her feet were planted in a sort of warrior pose: the stance that she had taken to falling into whenever she was performing the spellwork. With an exhale, she dropped her arm to her side and stood lax again.

Just as before, she had pushed her mind down from her own core to the tips to her fingers and toes. Just as before, she had pushed deeper into the core of the concrete floor under her feet, into the air around her as well. Just as before, she had managed to tap into that collective energy that was teeming in everything. Just as before, she had called it forward into corporeal form outside of its natural state. Just as before, it had been short-lived. And, just as before, a raging headache slammed behind her eyes as soon as the flash from the implosion faded.

"Ugh." She grimaced, pressing the heel of her hand over her right eye, where the migraine seemed to be coming from.

This whole process was completely exhausting. She felt like she'd run a marathon without training beforehand. But that wasn't right at all. She had been training for this particular marathon. All of her magical experience, over a decade of rattling off spells and incantations, mixing potions and herbs: magic was her playground. From the moment that the other survivors in Traverse Town had started teaching her and the others how to harness magic and use it to defend themselves against the Heartless, she had been the fastest to learn it.

Before the Heartless, there had been no magic on Radiant Garden. Well, that wasn't true. The magic had always been there, but it was untapped. Radiant Garden had had no sorcerers, no wizards, no one who knew how to bend this raw energy to their will. And yet it had come like second nature to her. Like Leon with his eagle-eye aim and Cid with his piloting, or Yuffie with her ability to enter a room full of people, steal a cookie from the jar, and sneak back out without any of them hearing or seeing her.

So if anybody was going to figure this new power out, it would be Aerith, particularly since Merlin appeared to have no interest in it…which boggled her.

With a sigh, Aerith slowly sank down to the cool, fresh grass that coated a large swath of the concrete floor. Relief sang through her body as she reclined across the new garden of flowers, allowing herself a minute to relax after the little endeavor.

Sure, Merlin hadn't tried to stop her from pursuing her undercurrent theory, but he had passively tried to dissuade her. He had emphatically pointed out that he wasn't going near it. He, Merlin, the greatest sorcerer in Radiant Garden, who had singlehandedly created the Rising Falls, was refusing to do what Aerith was doing.

It was almost like he was…scared.

Aerith snorted and turned her head to look at the blooming white lily that was standing just inches from her face. She lifted a hand to it, gently strumming her fingers across the smooth edge of its petals. It was cool and balmy to the touch. Alive and fully matured. It should have taken weeks for a flower like this to get to this stage in its life. Yet here it was, in a concrete room where nothing had grown for hundreds of years. Where nothing should have ever grown.

She had created life in a barren place.

The idea was intoxicating.

Aerith swallowed and removed her hand from the flower, returning it to her side and turning her head to look at the ceiling.

Maybe Merlin was right. Something about this magic was dangerous. Maybe no one had attempted to tap into this raw collective for a reason. Creating life from nothing…It wasn't natural. But, she frowned, how could summoning fire from your hands or freezing objects solid be natural either? Besides, it wasn't like she was really doing anything with it. It was too difficult to isolate. The concrete floor was too…solid. Too dense. Too inhibited. Too…inorganic.

Aerith abruptly sat up. "That's it." She whispered aloud, looking down at the flowers around her.

That was the next step. She needed to summon the essence out of something organic.

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014 – Operation Paper Crane

The most recent recruiting season for soldiers into the Radiant Garden Allied program had brought in nearly 50 hopefuls. Hundreds of men and women signed up for the various sects of the armed forces under the Alliance each year, but the recruitment for Radiant Garden specifically was particularly intense and by far the most difficult to get into. This was primarily because Radiant Garden was the nucleus of the Alliance, the epicenter, the capitol, so to speak.

Of the six main departments of the Alliance, the Weapons Specialist program was the hardest to get into. Currently, it consisted of 17 soldiers, whereas the other five departments could boast numbers up in the 70s and 80s. This disparity had given birth to the idea that Colonel Leonhart accepted only the best, brightest, and most promising into his field. The immediate afterbirth of that was the challenge that it posed to all applicants. The thrill of the challenge, one could say. Private McCallister didn't like to agree with popular opinion, but this recruiting season was inadvertently maintaining that idea. Of those 50 hopefuls, 38 of them had applied for the Weapons Specialist department. Of those 38 applicants, Commander Leonhart had accepted three of them.

Said three new recruits were painfully and obnoxiously obvious during the daily training routines. When the Alliance had first begun to organize into specialization departments, the Commander had started with three interns, Tabaeus McCallister was one of them, notable because she was the first that he specifically plucked from the field. Now, four years later, here she was, having been delegated the task of 'breaking in' the new blood.

She had spent the past two weeks grinding the three recruits into the ground, running all of the drills and exercises that Commander Leonhart had unleashed on her and her two colleagues in those beginner days. Only after they had sweat, bled, cried—and thrown up in one case—all over the training field did she let them integrate into the group training with the rest of the department. All new recruits went through basic training with Cloud Strife in the general department before being sifted and sorted into the most suitable specialty departments. So these three—Privates Louis, Kemble, and Richards—were all in good physical shape, had impressive endurance, and kept up adequate stamina. But…

"Kemble!" McCallister barked, "Stop messing with the magazine! It's a gun, not a Friday night booty call: stop feeling her up!"

Private Kemble jerked at being called out, having been fumbling with the magazine of the weapon in his hands. On his left, Private Richards smirked, having armed her own weapon quickly and effectively.

"Wipe the smirk off your face, Richards. No one in this squad is impressed that you know how to make a gun shoot, princess." McCallister snarled at her.

Oh, she felt outside of her element. Meaning that Tabaeus felt like a moron, rattling on like some drill sergeant from a movie. When her superiors did this, it was always intimidating, but she just felt…silly. Though she'd be lying if she said it wasn't enjoyable when the new recruits shot to attention and tripped over themselves to make her stop yelling at them.

Heck, if she was going to stamp her name on their training papers and turn them over to Commander Leonhart, if these bozos were going to be traced back to HER handiwork, she would make damn sure that they looked amazing. She would reprimand the other soldiers in the department occasionally, but only if they really needed the kick. And vice versa of course.

Someone clasped her shoulder from behind. "Hey, Tab—"

Muscle memory kicked in and she pivoted on her heel, whipping her arm up to knock the offender's hand from her shoulder. She only just stopped her other fist from flying forward when she recognized the offender as Jake Alms.

"Bah!" He jumped back a step, lifting his hands to shield himself.

Tabaeus dropped her arms, "Jake?" She exhaled in exasperation. "What are you doing here?"

The man straightened, dusting himself off as he recovered himself. Sure enough, his cheeky grin was almost immediately back across his face. "And good afternoon to you too."

Tabaeus frowned, "I'm kind of busy right now." She gestured to the routine.

Jake shoved his hands in his pockets. "I know, but I have a query to pose to you."

If he was trying to waste her time, then mission accomplished. Her eye twitched.

"I heard you crashed Strife's training squad a few weeks back too. Is this your new thing now…black panther?"

Jake chortled sardonically, "No, no, just keepin' 'em on their toes…"

Tabaeus felt her patience wearing thin. Jake was amusing, sure, and a fun guy to waste time with, but she had no time to waste at the moment.

"Any-who, I was wondering—" Jake faced her again, that cheeky grin warbling a bit. "if you would like to go out sometime. With me."

Tabaeus chuckled at his little joke but stopped when he didn't join her. "Seriously?"

"Er—" He shifted side to side awkwardly. "Yeah."

"No." Utterly wrongfooted, she hastily looked for an exit strategy. "Um…Sorry, I…I have to go—"

Then, without waiting for his response, she marched stiffly toward Kemble, whose eyes widened as she approached, bracing himself to get yelled at. Her mind buzzed: what the Hell had that been about?

..:-X-:..

015 – Not that Kind of Therapy

With a hiss, Leon eased the weight bar back to the base of the machine.

"Dammit." He released the white-knuckle grip that he had developed around the edges of the seat of the machine.

Careful not to let his legs swing back from under the weight bar, he leaned forward and rubbed his knee. The physical therapist had told him to take it easy after the surgery, but he couldn't afford to just sit around on his ass when there was so much to do. The sooner his knee healed, the sooner he would stop being a useless burden on the Alliance.

It had been a little over two months since he had critically injured his knee during a campaign mission to a new world that had been under recent attack by the Heartless. Deployed with three squads under the Alliance's orders, he and his soldiers had barely managed to calm the storm and disable the Heartless long enough for King Mickey to magically seal the Heart of the world from the darkness with his Keyblade.

In return for that, he had had his knee wrenched out of joint, tendons and muscle bit through to bone by a Heartless that took the form of an overlarge wolf. Corrective surgery had only done so much. Every doctor he spoke to kept repeating the same words and phrases: like 'permanent nerve damage', 'almost full recovery', and 'recover most of the use of the knee'.

So here he was, hardly able to force his mending leg to lift a simple, easy weight. How was he supposed to fight Heartless if he couldn't even do that? At least he wasn't dependent on crutches anymore. That had been embarrassing. Now he was down to just a cane, and even then only when the knee was bothering him or he had taxed it too much.

Daniel King, one of Aerith's most accomplished interns and recently promoted head of the orthopedic division of her Medicinal Magic department, had offered his services as a physical therapist not long after Leon's surgery. And as much as Leon had huffed and griped about needing help, he had to admit that this rehabilitation would have taken much longer without the man's help. And he admitted it very quietly still.

"Congratulations." King said, standing by as Leon moved his legs away from the mechanism of the weight machine.

"Ten pounds doesn't call for congratulations." Leon grumbled, eying the pathetic weight ring on the machine.

King chuckled, unfolding his arms. "No, no, though that is getting better." He gestured to Leon's knee. "No, I meant about the baby. I see you four days a week, and I had to find out from Merlin."

"Sorry." Leon grimaced a little, bending and straightening the knee a few times to try and rid it of the soreness. "I've been a little preoccupied."

King gave an understanding shrug and sank into his swivel chair, lifting up the clipboard that he used to monitor Leon's progress. "Yeah, I guess between this and obstetric visits, you and Tifa are about tired of seeing doctors, eh?"

Daniel King was one of Aerith's older recruits, joining the Alliance when he was in his late thirties, putting him in his early forties now, complete with salt-and-pepper hair and just enough wrinkles around the eyes to look paternal to everybody younger than him. He had a full medical education in orthopedics, though, and even relatively un-versed in magic, he had picked up on it quickly. Unlike his younger, inexperienced peers, King was perfectly comfortable setting up shop on Radiant Garden and not being assigned to triage missions and battlefield situations. He had a wife and two teenage daughters, one of which was considering joining the Alliance herself. He said that he had enough stress to worry about without the bullets flying around his head.

"Still doing your exercises and stretches every day, yes?" King prompted. "Not skimping just because I'm not around to yell at you, right?"

Leon snorted; he would love to see the perpetually-smiling man actually yell at anybody. He doubted it was possible. "Right."

King bobbed his head. "Good, because you've only got about five months of freedom left."

"More like seven." Leon corrected. "Tifa's not quite that far along."

"No, I meant five." King gently chided. "You're not going to be able to play the 'my knee hurts' card to get out of stuff when she's seven months along. You need to start bracing yourself now."

Leon blinked, "Huh?" He waved him off, "Right, right, mood swings, food cravings, hormones. I've done my homework, Dr. King. I know what I'm looking at here."

King's face went unusually serious. "No you don't."

Leon paused, looking at him.

"You have no idea, son." King said somberly. "My advice? Never tell her no, no matter what time of day or night, no matter what she asks you to do. Midnight grocery run, four am baby-crying-stopper, impromptu foot massages, the works."

Leon squinted one eye at him.

Then, just as abruptly, King straightened with a snort, "I'm just kidding. Not about the foot massage though. Master the foot massage, and you will gain god status…which will quickly be revoked in the delivery room when you become the scum of the earth to her."

Before Leon could come up with a response for that, King was moving in front of him to inspect his knee. "Now, let's make sure you'll be able to chase after this kid when he or she learns how to run away from you."

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A/N: Sprinkled some new OCs in there for those minor-but-needed positions. I won't go overboard with them, but they are needed to get the more important characters going forward. Constructive criticism is always welcome and appreciated!

Preview for next week: This was Leon's territory. The two of them, while no longer hostile, had an unspoken truce between them to keep things civil: you stay in your zone, I stay in mine, no feet get stepped on. Now, not only was Cloud IN Leon's department, but he was reprimanding one of Leon's interns.