Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This story is mine, as are the OCs. Getting closer to the end! The countdown has begun. Enjoy!

..:-X-:..

143 – Four

"Nowhere."

Aerith's eyes flew open as she awakened with a silent gasp. It felt as though an electric current passed through her spine at the sound of the voice. The plain ceiling of her hospital room stared flatly back at her. Her muscles throbbed and her joints ached, but she abruptly sat up in bed, out of breath and her vision sliding and out of focus. The window blinds rustled and the lights flickered in the lamps.

The voice…Aerith quickly looked around the room, but she was alone, except for Cloud, who was passed out on the small couch against the wall, looking like his vigil over her had finally sapped him. How long had she been unconscious? What day was it? What time was it? There were IVs poking into her arms and monitoring nodes attached to her skin. A clip on her finger relayed the constant beeping of her pulse on the beside heart monitor.

But she had heard someone, hadn't she? Aerith blinked several times, grimacing as a migraine ballooned through her skull. She lifted her hands to her temples to will it away. The voice hadn't been in the room. It had been in her head. It had echoed and resonated against the walls of her skull. She closed her eyes, trying to recall that sound. It had been soft like a whisper, but simultaneously it was roaring like a bear, intangible like smoke but with the impact of a sledge hammer.

"Cage."

Aerith lifted her face, eyes snapping open as the voice returned. She cried out in surprise when she found herself, not in bed in her hospital room, but in a stairwell. She looked down at herself; she was still wearing a hospital gown, but her arms were bleeding from where the IVs had been forcefully removed. How—How had she gotten here? A tremble shook her body, and Aerith turned to face the way she'd come. This was the hospital stairwell. She didn't remember walking here or leaving her room, not even getting out of bed.

The events before waking in the hospital returned to her: summoning the undercurrent, using the crystals, being overwhelmed, the backlash, the reaction, pain, the crack…Her eyes widened, and she involuntarily grabbed onto the banister to steady herself. She could hear her heart throbbing in her ears. Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum…

Her nerve endings were hypersensitive, and she was acutely aware of her surroundings. Everything felt…different. New. Strange. She had…she had done it. She had accessed the heart of Radiant Garden. She had faced it, in all of its enormity and complexity…and she had survived. She had seen the undercurrent, felt it, heard it, touched it. She had broken through the wall, pierced the veil, and passed the trial. She had witnessed Truth.

"Chasm."

Aerith spun around again at the sound of the voice, and her center of gravity shifted as she realized that she had moved again. No longer in the stairwell…She was standing on the roof of the hospital. The starry sky yawned overhead, and a whistle of night air raised gooseflesh across her bare arms. She gasped at the sudden change.

What was happening to her? Was she hallucinating? Had she really woken up or was this a coma dream? All of these theories…these impossible ideas…She had been having so many weird thoughts lately…Was any of this for real? Or not?

No…nonono, she had seen the Heart. She had seen Truth. She had passed the test and the undercurrent had opened itself up to her. It wasn't a collective of a thousand souls or a thousand minds or a thousand anything. It was one…one massive…entity. It was a stream of consciousness…enormous…unfathomable…A stream of…life…of green.

"A lifestream." She whispered, staring out across the Radiant Garden skyline.

She understood now. The undercurrent, this…this lifestream, was truth and eternity and life and death. Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum: her heart throbbed in her chest. She closed her eyes and listened to it. The heart of Radiant Garden was pure light, pure energy, pure force and fuel for the planet. That was why Darkness sought out Light. Light was just as dangerous as Darkness, because if that kind of power was used by corrupt hands, it would become a…

"Bomb."

Aerith opened her eyes again and found a young woman with wild, shock white hair staring at her, standing less than three feet in front of her on the rooftop. Aerith froze. The woman's pale blue eyes stared directly back into Aerith's green ones. Her eyes seemed to cut through into Aerith's very core, her pupils shrunken to pinpricks in the center of her irises and unblinking. She was the voice; Aerith knew it. She knew it like she knew this woman…inexplicably…somehow. They had met before…

"Who are you?" Aerith asked shakily.

The woman continued to stare unsettlingly at her, but she began to open her mouth to answer. Her jaw seemed to freeze for a moment, searching for words. Suddenly, her eyes widened impossibly and a scream tore itself from her throat, cutting across the night air like a knife. Aerith jumped away from her in shock, but the woman continued to scream.

"Aerith!" Cloud was shoving the rooftop door open, running toward her, security personnel and medics on his heels.

Lightheadedness swam through her then and her knees buckled out from under her. Cloud reached her in four long strides and caught her before she hit the concrete. He was muttering reassurances to her, but her eyes were glued on the screaming woman. Security quickly subdued the woman and the medics were immediately injecting her with tranquilizers.

The woman's screams faded as the drugs took effect, and her body went limp.

Aerith clung to Cloud as she stared, her heart hammering. Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum.

..:-X-:..

144 – Three

Leon was seeing red.

"You knew that this woman was loose, that she was dangerous, and you didn't think to let the Alliance know? To warn them? To warn us?" He snapped at Merlin, gesturing to himself and Yuffie, indicating the other members of the Restoration Committee who weren't present.

Merlin was unfazed by Leon's outburst. "She is not dangerous, Leon."

Yuffie was equally furious. "She kidnapped Aerith and took her to the roof. Aerith could have DIED! She had just woken up after being in a coma for TWO WEEKS, Merlin."

The three of them stood in the observation room of the psych ward of the hospital. After recovering from her shock, Aerith had been given a clean bill of health, astoundingly healed of whatever had put her in the coma to begin with, and, to Leon's knowledge, she was signing herself out of the hospital as soon as possible, against Cloud's arguments. The woman she had been found with turned out to be a missing person named Beth Marshall, whom Merlin and Cid had been working covertly to find, off Allied records.

Beth Marshall was currently in the adjacent room, visible through the observation window in the adjoining wall, giving Leon and the others a clear view of the woman. She was sitting up in bed, clicking through the channels of the in-room television at an alarming speed, too fast for most of the channels to make a proper noise before she was clicking onto the next.

"Where did she come from?" Leon asked, folding his arms. "Who is she? You said she escaped from an institution, after she was found from being missing for nearly 20 years."

Merlin watched the woman thoughtfully. "She hasn't aged a day since she disappeared."

Yuffie exchanged an incredulous look with Leon, stepping toward Merlin. "What is she?"

Merlin huffed and looked at them both. "She is a girl who has been through more than either of you combined."

Both Leon and Yuffie narrowed their eyes; that was hard to believe.

"What has she been through?" Yuffie challenged.

Merlin adjusted his spectacles. "I'm still working on interviewing her, but whatever it was, it has so traumatized her that her entire soul has been altered."

"So she's nuts?" Yuffie turned toward the glass, staring at the woman.

"No." Merlin countered. "She is…altered."

Leon clenched his jaw hard. "So say she went through Hell for 20 years—"

"There are more traumatizing places to be than Hell." Merlin replied quietly.

Leon glanced through the glass and pursed his lips. Just looking at the woman made him uneasy. Merlin was right about one thing: this girl had been through something, she had seen something, been exposed to something all those years, and it had…'altered' her. There was a broken soul behind those unsettling blue eyes, maybe damaged beyond repair. He could understand Merlin's desire to help her, but hiding it from the Alliance?

"Aerith said," Yuffie broke the silence, "That she only said four words the entire time. She started to say more, but she screamed her head off instead. Nowhere, cage, chasm, bomb: do those words mean anything to you?" She looked to Merlin.

Merlin sighed and slowly shook his head.

Leon rubbed his eyes and then ran a hand through his hair, looking away from Beth Marshall and back to Merlin. "She's still a danger to herself, if not others."

"She has been assigned to my care." Merlin gave Leon an even look. "She will be staying here until she can be properly evaluated, and we will go from there."

"I'm. Not. Dangerous." The breathy, halting voice penetrated the glass window.

The three of them turned in unison to see Beth Marshall staring at them from her seat on the bed. Leon's spine tingled. The glass was at least an inch thick and she was completely across the room from them; there was no way she could have heard them talking. What was more, the glass was one-way: they could see her, but she could only see her reflection like a mirror.

How was she staring directly at them?

"How is she—" Yuffie started, but her voice trailed away.

The woman tilted her head slowly to the side, those unnatural eyes staring.

"Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum." She whispered, her voice moving through the air and the glass like impossible smoke. "I can hear it. Your hearts are very loud. You'll find him Nowhere. She knows; she saw it. I was there…Light, the realm of light…locked away. They're all in cages. Tear open the sky; word like a ravine…Ravine-ravine-ravine…"

Merlin took a step toward the glass. "Tell us more, Beth. Please, let us help you."

Beth fidgeted with the television remote, averting her eyes and muttering. "Darkness has no cage. Put everybody to sleep."

"She's out of her mind." Yuffie exhaled, "Leon, tell him—"

"I'm. Not. Crazy." Beth's head snapped back up, her eyes hot and glaring.

Instantaneously, the glass of the window cracked. One long crack forked down from the top pane, slicing all the way to the bottom of the window. The three of them jumped back. Almost immediately, Beth seemed to lose interest in them, returning to her game of clicking through the channels. Leon released the breath he hadn't realized he had been holding.

Beth Marshall was dangerous, and he wanted to know why.

..:-X-:..

145 – Two

"You mentioned a 'vibe' in your report." Tifa asked, eyes staring upward at the dark ceiling of the inner chamber of the old castle ruins. "Can you describe it?"

This was the room where Aerith had had her experiment go wrong. This was where she'd been injured, nearly killed, and where, since waking up, she had sworn she had heard Beth Marshall's voice. The raised control panel area was wearing new scorch marks on its floors, but the gaping hole where the Heart of Radiant Garden had opened remained, still sealed.

Climbing the steps behind her, Major Valerie Banks huffed. "Just felt creepy as fuck, ma'am. Gooseflesh and the hairs on my neck standing up…that feeling like I had just swallowed an ice cube or something."

Tifa squinted, crossing to the middle of the floor where the scorch marks were the most prevalent. "I think Aerith was standing here when the reaction happened."

She squatted down and prodded at the blackened floor with her fingertips.

"You visited both sites of the worldwide blackouts. Did they feel the same?" She asked, back turned toward the soldier.

"Hardly. People of the Sun Kingdom didn't know what the Hell was going on. They were panicking and trying to scrounge up old protection spells…I talked to Rapunzel and her…and Eugene…Flynn, shit whatever his name is…Rapunzel's sidekick guy. They gave the same description of events as civilians did at Traverse Town. The difference was that people in Traverse Town are pretty used to weird shit. They adjusted pretty quickly after the blackout."

Tifa frowned. They still didn't know what had caused the two worlds, which were completely unrelated and had very little in common, to lose collective consciousness and power. Sunlight still hadn't returned to the Sun Kingdom, and, though Traverse Town was in perpetual night time, some foreign darkness was blocking out the stars from view. The Alliance had been running the tests: there was simply no explanation for it. It wasn't magic, it wasn't poison, it wasn't some mass hysteria…

With a sigh, Tifa stood again and put her hands on her hips, facing Banks. Beth Marshall was in custody currently, but everyone who went near the woman came away feeling uneasy and unsafe. Merlin was convinced, for some inexplicable reason, that the woman was significant to the blackout events. The Sun Kingdom was one of the farthest worlds in the Allied perimeter, but Traverse Town was much, MUCH closer. She didn't want to get caught off-guard when the next world experienced the phenomenon.

"What am I doing here, ma'am?" Banks asked bluntly.

"You've got a keen eye, Major, and I've been staring at this room for days." Tifa glanced at her. "I think a fresh set of eyes might dig up something new."

Banks regarded her flatly and looked close to arguing, but, with a full body shrug, she stepped closer to the reaction epicenter to look around. As she did so, Tifa backed away to give her space, mulling over those four nonsensical words.

Nowhere…Aerith had been developing a secondary theory about the existence of worlds that were taken by Heartless. She had theorized that a shadow of the world continued after the original world fell, like a human spawned a Nobody or something along those lines. Was 'nowhere' a place? Was it a metaphor for being too far away to be considered a place?

Cage…Along with her other mutterings about light and darkness, Beth Marshall had rambled about light being in a cage. Tifa had no idea where to start decoding that.

Chasm was a word like 'ravine,' which the young woman kept repeating in her madness. Somehow 'ravine' seemed to always come up after the woman talked about tearing open the sky. You couldn't have a ravine or a chasm in the sky. Maybe she meant a tear through the fabric of the impassable atmospheric walls?

Bomb. That just never led to anything good.

Banks straightened from where she'd been looking at the luminescent blue crystals that had sprung into existence around the base of the gaping hole in the wall. Tifa shelved her musings and looked to Banks, raising an expectant eyebrow.

The major lifted her shoulders. "I doubt I got much more out of this place than you did. The scorch marks look like they hit her pretty hard, the way they fan out around where the impact hit. It's almost like the energy flowed out like water.

Tifa narrowed one eye, "Out? From the crystal she was holding?"

Banks looked at her, confused. "No, from—" She gestured to the hole in the wall.

Tifa followed her pointing and then traced her eyes back to the scorch marks. She tilted her head and stepped around the marks, putting herself between the impact point and the sealed Heart of Radiant Garden. She had thought that the reaction had exploded out of the crystal, ricocheting off the crack in the floor that reached into the bowels of the castle. But…Banks was right, the scorch marks hadn't originated from Aerith's point; they had come from…

She looked back to the sealed Heart again. "It lashed out at her. You think the Heart attacked her? But it's sealed, it's—"

"Caged?" Banks lifted both eyebrows. "It was at least a few hours before someone found her unconscious here. Who knows what happened between the accident and then?"

Tifa glanced down at the crystal growths again. Was the Heart of Radiant Garden caged?

..:-X-:..

Preview for next week: "Let me make you better."