Hey all! Sorry this update took so long; work's been ridiculously hectic, and writer's block hasn't helped in the slightest. Also, holy design overhaul FFN, what the fuck are you doing. I have to relearn how to navigate you now. What is this.
Anyway, excuses aside, I hope I'm handling how everyone feels after Char's return well. Bah, whatever. I'll just let y'all read.
Enjoy!
"Ahem."
Sora jolted. Just like that, just with that already-hoarse attempt to clear the speaker's throat, the reality of the present made a jarring return: Merlin's house, the warmth of Char's frame pressed to his…
And dread of the others' response to Char's newfound presence began to trickle icily into him as well. Combined with the multiple gazes searing into his back, two of which belonged to Cid and Yuffie, fire and ice mingled uncomfortably inside him. More than likely, though, judging by Cid's muffled snicker and Yuffie furtively edging away, they would express no anger toward Char's return. Honestly, at this point, Sora was a bit more worried about Yuffie teasing them for the sudden closeness. After all, the last time they had visited here, secrets – Char's in particular – had formed a vast rift between the members of the group.
Their amusement made sense, though. They hadn't spent the last few days eyeing their unspoken leader worriedly. Exchanging glances when he expressed wistfulness, the likes of which had never before taken audible form, and bitterness at needing to find his friends.
Very reluctantly, he pulled back from Char. Only when her eyes opened to see why he had moved away did he notice she had squeezed them tightly shut.
He didn't realize how much he'd missed that shade of ice blue until now.
Yet at the same time he found himself resenting the eye contact, because the expression he could now properly see unleashed every question that had hounded him since her disappearance. Did you miss me as much? Where were you?
Was Riku the one who –
Her focus shifted, heralding a shift from confusion to mild annoyance. Sora turned, bracing one hand against the table's edge for support; unconsciously, he found his fingers dancing along the wooden surface, seeking a softer place to find purchase.
True to form, Donald had his arms crossed and was tapping one webbed foot. Char had become the object of his glare, and Sora fought back a grin at how she was matching Donald's anger just as easily as she used to.
"What's up, duck boy?" she asked. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I might as well have!" Donald exploded. Beside him, Goofy cringed back a little at his friend's outburst. "Where have you been?"
The question sliced much more sharply than it had in Sora's thoughts. Suddenly, he was fighting the desire to add to the multiple stares now directed in Char's direction.
In the end, though, he just looked at her with what he prayed was gentle curiosity. His fingers stilled in the journey he only now realized would have finished against hers.
Ask about Riku, his sore heart and the memory of Xemnas' taunting urged. He tried to push them back beneath the surface, which proved a frustratingly futile effort; his mind had taken it upon itself to gather every bit of latent bitterness toward Char's secret-keeping habits and shove it to the forefront of his thoughts.
Especially at the condemning hesitation he saw in her darting eyes and nervous fingers.
For a couple of seconds he wondered exactly what excuse she was formulating, and then it hit him that he couldn't even get an idea of what she was thinking about. She had spent three days just being gone, taken by someone whose identity still eluded him.
Sora abruptly found himself understanding Donald's frustration. She had left a Char-shaped void in the group, and while it wasn't near as bad as knowing an entire year lay blank to his memory, the feeling had much the same bitterness.
As he took in Char's expression, though, every lingering question of last year resided into the part of his mind reserved for uncertainties – a part that, until minutes ago, her location had occupied as well. He watched her panic grow and, unable to watch her in this much turmoil any longer, opened his mouth to speak.
Beep, beep, beep.
Sora jolted, bumped his hip into the edge of the table in the process. A pained hiss slithered to the tip of his tongue, but he managed to push it back down his throat before it could manifest. Wincing at the newfound ache in his side, he leaned away from the table to glimpse whatever made him start.
Cid swung back around in his chair. "See that?" He trailed his finger across the computer screen, where multiple lines of code had begun to stretch luminous white trails.
Sora frowned. They might as well have been hieroglyphics to him. "I guess…?" He tried not to let too much of a questioning edge into his voice, yet it erred on the wrong side of snide anyway.
Cid rolled his eyes and lowered his hand, where it joined its counterpart on the keyboard. His fingers tapped away at the keys as he spoke. "It means we're a step closer to gettin' the dang MCP out of this town."
"So it was the MCP?" Goofy asked from the other side of the room. Already, he was shuffling closer to the computer, presumably to get a better look.
Yuffie nodded, following him to where Cid sat. "At least, Leon and Aerith thought so. They went to the postern to try and hold him off while Cid here made the eradication program."
Donald broke his annoyed silence to speak up. "Eradication… program…?" he repeated, eyes narrowed in bemusement as he trotted up to Cid.
"We were planning on putting it on a disc and sticking it into Ansem's computer…" Although Yuffie explained confidently enough, she cast a mildly uncertain glance at Cid, whose broad shoulders were hunched in a solid white shield between chair and computer. Sora assumed she was just repeating what Cid had told her, which she confirmed by adding, "Or something."
Cid straightened then, just as the hieroglyphics burning white silhouettes into Sora's vision halted in their tracks. "You four," he addressed the group, who all perked to attention in turn. Just before directing his focus to Cid, Sora couldn't help one final glance at Char.
Relief's remnants had begun to vanish, their signs in her relaxing shoulders and stilled fingers.
"I need you to take the disc to Leon," Cid continued. No sooner had the Gunblade wielder's name escaped his lips did the computer screen suddenly turn dark. Panic flashed briefly inside Sora and he readied himself to draw his Keyblade in case the MCP showed his ugly face; but Cid only reached out and pulled out a small disc from beneath the monitor.
He offered it to Sora, who forced the adrenaline simmering in his veins to calm. Taking the disc, he eyed its green surface, ribbed with its own pale blue veins not unlike the color of the virtual world, with undisguised skepticism. This is supposed to stop the MCP?
"When you find Leon," Cid said, "get yourselves into the computer world and find Tron. We need a guy from the other side to help, and he's the only one who's willing."
"You can count on us!" Donald placed one fist over his chest.
"We know," Yuffie laughed, leaning down to ruffle the feathers atop his head. Sora glanced up and fought a grin when the duck squawked and swung the same fist at Yuffie. She only danced back in her patented style, grinning impishly all the time.
Beside him, Char breathed out a chuckle. Startled into looking over at her – she had maintained her silence so well until now, after all – Sora watched her shake her head. "Better not, Yuffie. You'll be coming away with a nub for a hand."
"Aw, come on! It'd be so worth it!" Yuffie argued playfully.
Cid growled and thumped his fist on the keyboard, sending a series of characters skittering across the screen. The abruptness of the movement startled Goofy, who still stood beside his chair, into stumbling back and almost into the wall. "That ain't the point."
"Sorry, Cid," Goofy said, speaking for at least Sora and Char. "We'll get that disc to Leon right away."
"Good," the blonde man huffed.
Donald pushed the mussed feathers on his head back into place, glaring at the still-grinning Yuffie all the while. His anger's target had changed from Char to the ninja, it seemed.
Knowing Cid had a point, Sora pushed his concern and wariness at Char's reappearance to the back of his mind as best he could. Considering how much of his thoughts she had taken up in the last few days, though, it was a little like trying to stuff his messy room's contents into his closet back at home.
She's back, he protested against his lurking suspicions, that's all that matters.
That was probably the moment he realized his fingers' pressure on the disc would probably snap it in half if he didn't let up.
He hastily pocketed the disc, almost dropping it in his desire to tuck it safely away from his frustrations. Once he did, though, with Donald and Goofy's stares on him, he started toward the door. "We won't let you guys down," he called over his shoulder.
"Just let Leon handle all the complicated stuff," Cid grunted, fixing a sardonic eye on him. "Wouldn't want things to go bad before they even started getting better."
Feigned as his causticity was, it still made Sora cringe and remember the last time he'd stood in front of Ansem's computer. He guessed that Leon had told the blonde man about what Sora had done in a fit of rage.
And Cid's pointed, albeit tacit, reminder had a point: nearly smashing up the keyboard out of sheer fury again wouldn't be good for their cause. But did he have to bring it up? The sound of Donald and Goofy's distinctive guffaws wrapped an embarrassed heat across his spine.
Glancing over his shoulder, he grinned sheepishly and rubbed one finger under his nose. "I'm not gonna break the keyboard. Trust me."
He turned back around and strode toward the door. Too late, just as his fingers grazed the knob, they recalled the weight of Merlin's floor pressing the Decisive Pumpkin's hilt into them and the flight from Hollow Bastion's twisted defense mechanism. As a result, the door swung open, and Sora was bracing himself for another line of light pedestals crashing down onto his head.
When he saw nothing, though, he found himself relaxing a little. Of course it's not gonna blast you, you haven't even stepped outside yet.
Or maybe the MCP knows we're coming after him, and he's scared. Yeah. That sounds pretty good.
As he stepped outside, multiple sets of footsteps followed him, footsteps whose tread he knew as well as his own after traveling with their echo constantly in his ears. When he listened more properly, though, he felt his forehead crease in a frown; he recognized Donald's lighter, slightly uneven stride and Goofy's lumber, but the third set of steps – the set he had longed to hear, despite what its occasional choppiness reminded him of – remained silent still.
Turning around fully, he finally saw why. Char still stood near the table, head angled down and gaze lingering on the ground. Only the sound of Cid typing away at the computer, doings gods knew what since he had finished the eradication program, permeated the silence – at least until Yuffie called from the other side of the room and eclipsed the tick-a-tack-tick of the keys.
"Char! Are you going with them?"
Donald and Goofy exchanged glances as Char jolted, one hand jerking up from where it had wrapped around the table's edge. Once she noticed just who had knocked her out of her contemplation, she hastened to stand up. Sora hated to call her expression guilty, even though the word trod closest to what it resembled. "Y-yeah. Sorry."
She almost ended up stuttering out the apology as well, even though her shoulders squaring from their pensive position as she spoke suggested an attempt to quell it.
Much as he loathed condemning her, he knew he hated the sight of her fear and vulnerability even more.
"Come on, Char," he tried to joke. "You just got back and now you're not following us? I thought you said you would."
He meant to cheer her up. Teasing her had managed to draw out that once-elusive smile from her in the past, once he had broken through her shell enough to find it. Now that he'd spoken up, though, he abruptly wished he had just kept silent and waited for her to stalk after them like always.
Annoyance flashed briefly across her face in the brief union of her eyebrows over narrowing eyes; then immense surprise and relief ushered out the dread in Sora's heart when one side of her mouth twisted upward.
"Yeah," she acknowledged, "I guess I did."
The trio watched her stride past, crossing the threshold where her uncertainty had halted them, with differing expressions. Donald glared after her and tightened the grip of his hands on either side of his ribcage. Goofy had one hand raised, fingers curled inward against his chin, before lowering it and tilting his head to the side in acceptance.
As for Sora, he observed the confidence in her tread, unimpeded by the blow she had taken for him in the Underworld, and felt warm at how at least something hadn't changed about her.
Of course, she only reinforced that realization when she glanced over her shoulder and saw him staring at her. A single eyebrow vanished into her bangs, and Sora abruptly jogged after her, warmth suddenly stemming from a different source entirely. Only after the initial attempts to douse the fire swirling in his cheeks failed did he realize he had left the door to Merlin's house wide open; then a solid thump proved his fears unjustified.
Yuffie must be laughing so hard right now. The thought flitted across his mind before he could stop it.
The footsteps he had heard earlier signified Donald and Goofy moving up to stand beside him. He could almost feel their gazes boring into him.
"Good job," Donald muttered, elbow poking hard into the meat of Sora's bare calf.
"I know you missed her, Sora, but…" Goofy trailed off, then shook his head.
"I wasn't looking at anything!" the Keybearer protested.
Behind them, Char listened with no small amount of amusement, fighting the strings tugging her lips upward in a pleased grin. Gods, she hadn't realized how good it would feel to hear this particular group squabbling again.
Especially knowing they meant none of the acerbity they teased each other with, and that no tension permeated the air and impeded Char's ability to breathe.
It's good to be back.
Pink and white had become Kairi's world in the last few days. The former marked her prison's floor and the walls surroundings her, while just beyond the jail cell's bars a view of off-white tantalized her: so close, yet frustratingly out of reach.
Honestly, she might have succumbed to fear and pain right after Axel had emerged from the darkness inside the cell, deposited her and the yellow dog on the floor, and promptly walked back through the portal. Purpose had marked his stride, the brisk tread of someone accomplishing one errand and setting right off to another, as he had left her staring despondently after him.
Her chest began to ache, the feeling just as raw as it had been then, at how many of her tears had soaked into the yellow dog's fur.
Yet somewhere deep inside her trembling heart, a flame of hope flickered: faith that Sora and Riku would arrive here and save her. I didn't just remember Sora – someone who means so much to me – for nothing. I have to have faith.
Time wore on, though, and eroded the wick holding that flame until only the good grace of her loyalty to her friends kept it burning – her loyalty, and, ironically, the man who had spirited her away from home in the first place. Not long after he had abandoned her in the cell, he'd reappeared just outside the cell, taken the brunt of her fury as gracefully as he could, and then introduced himself and his purpose.
She remembered verbatim what he had said. Name's Axel. I'm part of the Organization. They don't want Sora here. I do.
At first she had bristled at her unwilling role as bait, but then her indignation had melted away in favor of hope. If Sora showed up, maybe Riku would be with him, and they could all go home together. Desperation rode that thought, yet she clung to it with all her strength. The last time she had seen Sora, he had promised to return to her.
Besides, he still needs to bring my lucky charm back to me. I'll be really mad if that doesn't happen.
Even in her thoughts, the playfulness she would normally have used for Sora felt strained. It had felt strained back then, too, that day in the tunnels when her voice had echoed and she'd nearly winced at how hollow the teasing sounded. She had already lost one friend to the darkness of the unknown; not knowing whether she would see the other again had shadowed the light she would have tried to cast on the situation.
Before the sad smile could even touch her cheeks, something cold and wet nudged under her palm, the one resting on her crossed legs. She glanced down and let the smile manifest at the dog resting his head on her lap, staring up at her with pleading eyes.
"I'm okay, really," she said, rubbing one of the velvety, dark ears between her fingers. In response, the dog grunted and darted his tongue out against her wrist, as if he didn't quite believe her.
That made two of them, honestly.
She watched him for a few more seconds, his black, thin wire of a tail twitching idly against the pink floor. When he shifted to get more comfortable, the half-light caught something, making her glance down at his collar.
Reaching forward with her free hand, she angled the charm attached to it to get a better look. Pluto, it read simply, and she realized she hadn't thought to check for its name.
That should've been the first thing I did, when it ran up to me on the beach. Check to see if it had a home and a family that missed it. Geez, I was out of it. Just went to show how much the resurgence of another best friend had thrown her – and, moreover, a best friend that meant so much to her.
Suddenly Pluto's ears pricked. His head shot up from its makeshift pillow and he stared intensely at the white wall across from them. Although he remained silent, the hackles rising in a furry line along his back betrayed his agitation.
Before Kairi could speak, the white wall trembled with a surge of its polar opposite. Her eyes widened as a lanky, dark-clad shape freed itself from the undulating portal that had just appeared. The vibrant red hair gave its identity away in an instant.
"You," she hissed.
Axel lifted a hand to the portal behind him without breaking his stride; it vanished in response to his unspoken command as he came to a halt in front of her cell. "Can we not go through this now?" he sighed, leaning his elbow against one of the bars and rubbing his forehead with the palm of that hand. "Yesterday was kind of rough."
Pluto's tense body relaxed, though he still kept a steady gaze on Axel. Kairi narrowed her eyes. "Well, excuse me if I don't feel very sorry for you."
Axel grinned; the gesture startled her, but if he saw as much he said nothing. His teeth glinted, expression almost feral. She recovered just long enough for her annoyance to twitch anew at his blithe manner. Nothing caught this guy off guard, ever. "Didn't expect you to. It's a nice thought, though."
As quickly as the amusement had manifested in his smirk, though, it slipped off the edge of his returning frown and crashed silently to the floor. He withdrew from the cell and took a couple of steps back, coat sweeping over the whiteness in an inversion of light casting shadow.
A few moments passed, during which Kairi felt Pluto move his head from her thigh and her toes twitch in her shoes' confines. Her fingertips tangled together on her lap, only noticeable to her when she felt them clashing together. Quickly, even though Axel's back was turned and he could hardly tease her, she calmed her fidgeting and focused firmly on her hands so she couldn't start again.
Then he spoke, without looking at her.
"I'm just gonna get to the point. I met up with Sora yesterday."
Kairi's mind went blank and then filled up in the span of about three seconds. "You what?" she managed at last, shocked at how she stayed calm and didn't shout over the questions clambering over each other inside her skull.
Glancing up revealed that Axel still had his back to her, though the way his elbows jutted out on either side of him suggested he had folded his arms. As she watched, eyes wide, he raised one hand and gestured vaguely at the air. "Yeah, he's probably on his way here right now. I can't blame him if he doesn't trust me, but he knows at least that he has to come here and stop us. So odds are he'll be making a pit stop here."
I'll come back to you! I promise! Sora had screamed across the void to her, the last time she had seen him. Donald and Goofy had stood in the background, anxiously twitching every time a piece of land around them fell away.
Blood had marred the white glove on his hand clutching hers, and multiple wounds and bruises had mottled his body. In particular, a nasty cut on his forehead had set off the earnest eyes he had fixed on hers.
Sora would trust Axel, if he wanted to keep his promise to her.
Then Axel's words caught up to her. In the rush of emotions brought on by his news, anything beyond Sora's impending rescue had been drowned out. As a result, she found herself breaking the hope-infused bonds of her silence not to express that hope, but to address the bitter afterthought Axel had spoken about himself.
"Stop you?" she repeated. "If he's going to do that, then why bring him here at all?"
He didn't respond immediately. Instead, his shoulders gave a minute twitch, the tiniest shift, enough to show her query did have some visible effect on him. Beside her, a flash of yellow announced Pluto sitting up, as if he wanted to hear Axel's reasoning as well.
Although the sigh that ultimately resounded added little more to the silence than a quiet puff, in the quiet that enveloped the cell so thickly, Axel might as well have screamed. He brought up one fist to rest, gently, against the wall.
"Because I'm getting a little sick of living like this," he said.
Kairi looked at Pluto and heard the dog whine softly.
"I have to say," Char remarked, "I didn't think I'd be coming back here so soon."
Sora looked over at her. She still held her swords close to her sides, even though Donald's thunder spells had taken out the last, motorcycle-like Heartless not minutes before. However, contrary to what her tense stance implied, she was not craning her neck over her shoulder and regarding every corner of the postern's corridors as a potential hiding spot for Heartless. She was facing the white door that led to her former master's study.
"Why's that?" Goofy sidled up to stand next to her and cocked his head to the side.
Char shrugged. "Multiple reasons. The last time we were here, I kind of…" She paused, hesitated really, and stared at where she gripped the hilt of one blade.
"Spilled everything?" Donald quipped dryly.
The redhead turned her head just slightly enough so the duck could glimpse her own wry expression. "Wow, you're actually talking to me now? Didn't think you'd cave so soon."
At her words, the duck's transgression became obvious to him, and he quickly jerked his head away to glare at the ground. "Well, you did," he grumbled. "Anyway, don't we have to give Leon the disc?"
Sora nodded, at the same time fighting a smile. While he knew Donald had a point, at the same time, he couldn't quite duplicate that suspicion. Wariness of her sudden reappearance still itched at the back of his mind and buzzed, mosquito-like, within his heart. Yet he couldn't help the warmth he felt at those two bickering like normal.
It still felt surreal to have her back with him, but this made it feel a little less like a dream to him.
"You're right, Donald," he said. The mage puffed out his chest triumphantly, at which Char rolled her eyes. Goofy just stifled a chuckle, which proved a futile attempt.
Taking a deep breath, Sora pushed the door open before the memories of what Donald referred to could crowd in on him and bring doubt on its poisonous wings.
Only a few days had passed since the Heartless invasion had summoned the group here, to the haven of the true past. For Sora, though, the last few days had seemed to contain a year within its grasp, and as a result he found himself briefly startled at how little had changed within Ansem's study. The same papers were still scattered on the floor; the same painting of Xehanort still hung on the wall; the chair on which he had sat while Char explained how her origins were entwined with the Organization's was still pulled out slightly. Seeing that, Sora had a sudden, Char-like urge to push it back to the table again.
He almost laughed. Even absent, her influence remained engraved inside him, as deeply in his heart as Riku's sardonic moments or Kairi's playful remarks.
Thinking of Char, he glanced over at her, trying to gauge her reaction to returning to her master's former sanctuary. When his gaze landed on only the papers on the ground, he blinked in confusion, but then movement nearby drew his eyes toward her. She was carefully skirting a pile of books, which had begun to fall askew in its stack, and picking her way across the mess toward the door to Ansem's computer room.
"Don't we have a town to save?" she asked them over her shoulder, though she did halt right where the beige beneath her feet darkened into cerulean. One foot tapped right at the threshold, the only evidence as to how impatient she truly felt.
Whether that impatience arose from wanting to leave the nucleus of so much nostalgia, or from wanting to help Hollow Bastion, Sora wasn't sure.
Donald had been glaring fiercely at the picture of Xehanort, as though hoping the fires he controlled could amass into his eyes and incinerate the source of their troubles. When Char spoke, though, he shook himself out of his angry trance. "Yeah, you're right." His voice practically dripped with grudging agreement.
"Leon's probably in there, and we can give him the disc," Goofy added, with considerably less venom in his voice. Gratefulness for the knight's ability to push any wariness beneath the surface washed over Sora. At the very least, he wasn't alone in how uncomfortable the memory of mistrusting Char made him.
Taking his place at the front of the group, he rounded the corner into where the hall widened out.
He got all of about a two-second glimpse of the bright screen stretching out against the wall. All at once, silver flashed into his vision and blotted out everything else.
Surprised into crying out, he summoned the Decisive Pumpkin to his grasp in an instant. Its red-and-white blade intercepted his assailant before it could cleave him in half.
"Leon?" he grunted out, arms trembling beneath holding the Gunblade wielder's attack at bay.
Leon blinked. Just blinked. However, Sora knew him well enough to detect the true extent of surprise behind that simple action. He lowered the Gunblade, and Sora nearly fell forward with the lack of support beneath his formerly-straining arms. "Sorry about that."
"Sorry?" Donald demanded behind him. Sparks emitted from the bristles atop his staff, calming only at the mage's unspoken command. "Cut the Heartless, not us!"
"Seriously, Leon, calm down," Char said. "Are things really that bad?"
Leon stared down at the ground, before looking back up again. "I'm assuming you're here about the eradication program?"
"Don't answer us or anything," the redhead muttered under her breath. Sora saw the older man's eyebrows jump up on his forehead.
"Y-yeah, that's why we're here," he hastily cut in. He dug around in his pocket for a few moments; any alarm that crept up on him at possibly losing the disc in the hectic battles faded when his fingertips caught a round, smooth surface.
Withdrawing the disc from his pocket, he extended it to Leon. "Here."
"Gawrsh, Sora, for a second I thought you'd lost it," Goofy remarked.
"I don't think that would have happened," came a soft, feminine voice from behind Leon. Moving his head to see around the Gunblade wielder's solid form, Sora spotted Aerith walking toward them. Behind her, a dark blue door was sliding closed with a whoosh.
He heard Char draw in a sharp breath behind him and would have whirled around to ask about it, had Aerith not spoken up. "I checked the Heartless manufactory room," she said to Leon.
Leon folded his arms. "And?"
If his terse question annoyed her, Aerith said nothing of it. Her expression of defeat, however, stemmed from what she said next. "Everything's still lit up. The MCP is still using everything in there."
"Still using my master's research to terrorize the town," Char muttered. Sora's eyes widened.
"Your master's research?" Goofy echoed. "D'you mean it ain't just responsible for the Organization?"
Char cringed. Clearly, she hadn't meant for her thoughts to cross the barrier between her mind's darkness and reality's light. If she'd had her way, Sora thought, they wouldn't even know as much about her and the Organization's past as they did now.
The notion should have angered him, a feeling that her unexplained absence and possible association with Riku would have amplified. Now, though, he just felt a drained sense of exhaustion.
"In a manner of speaking," was all she said in the end.
"Is that really the point here?" Leon asked.
Sora had never felt so immensely grateful toward Leon in the last month or so as he had now.
Something tugged at his still-outstretched hand, and he looked away from Donald's renewed rage, Goofy's innocent curiosity, and Char's desperate discomfort to see Leon appraising the disc.
"So that'll stop the MCP?" the Keybearer asked, grasping at a change of subject.
"It'll at least weaken him so you and Tron can fight back," Aerith explained. Although she kept her tone brisk enough, her emerald-surrounded pupils lingered on Char with unquestionable concern before returning to Sora. He remembered they had become friends when Char had been recovering from Hades' fireball attack.
And now that he was thinking about it, he realized she had been leaning on her good leg this entire time.
"But we need Tron's help from the other side," Leon said. "You all need to find him and head to the nearest terminal. That's where we'll upload the eradication program."
Sora nodded. "All right. Got it." As long as all they needed to do was head into the virtual world and meet Tron, he could manage well enough. Even though the worry for Char lingered in the back of his mind, he knew that helping Hollow Bastion took precedence.
Aerith turned to Leon. "Say, Leon, why don't you go help Yuffie and Cid? I've got things under control here."
Leon raised an eyebrow. "All by yourself? What if the MCP figures out how to get Heartless in here?"
His voice trailed off when she fixed a determined stare on him. Sora fought back a shiver at just how much fierceness the normally-calm healer could muster. Note to self: Aerith can be scary when she wants to be. Donald and Goofy voiced their mild discomfort as well.
Sora felt even more unsettled when Leon immediately handed her the disc. "Er, sorry. It's all yours."
Aerith's beatific smile slid back into place with a little too much ease. "Do what you can in town, all right?"
"Yeah," Leon muttered, still abashed by her swing from ferocity to serenity. He recovered some of his composure when he looked at Sora. "Just remember: as soon as you get to a terminal, have Tron send a signal pulse out to us. Aerith will take care of the rest."
"Signal pulse. Got it!" Goofy gave a nod of understanding.
The Gunblade wielder strode past them, stopping beside Sora. "By the way," he said, "I found this in some rubble in the bailey the other day. You can make more use of it than I can." He reached into a pocket of his fur-lined jacket and slapped something into Sora's hand before resuming his departure. As he left the room, Sora opened his palm and saw a charm in the shape of a lion's head, mane sweeping back behind its head as it roared.
A Keychain. Thanks, Leon.
He turned back around just in time to see Char walking toward Aerith. The original trio watched in rising bewilderment as the redhead stopped right in front of the healer.
"Nicely done," she said, raising one hand. Aerith smiled a bit wider and tapped her own hand against Char's.
"It's really not that difficult," she chuckled. "Leon can be a big softie when he wants to."
Sora shuddered. "You guys are scary…"
"I'm gonna take that as a compliment." Char turned back around, a smirk still tugging at her lips. Seeing the amusement playing across the lines of her face, spiteful though it looked, the Keybearer suddenly needed to hold back a smile of his own.
At that moment, the dream-like nature of her return – the surreal feeling of standing outside his body every time she had made a dry remark or sliced a Heartless to pieces – twisted and stabilized into something more like reality.
"You all right, Sora?" Donald was suddenly standing next to Sora and poking his leg to get his attention. He squinted up at his leader, who realized he had failed in keeping his expression neutral when he had to force his mouth back into a straight line.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm just really glad she's back." And honesty resonated in every word.
Goofy nodded and leaned closer so they could keep the conversation relatively private. Sora risked a glance over his shoulder, suddenly panicking at the thought of Char possibly overhearing, but she was still laughing with Aerith. "Me too, Sora," the knight said.
Donald snorted, folding his arms. "That makes two of us, I guess."
"You're not happy she's back?" Goofy asked, without a trace of acrimony in his voice. Despite the innocent nature of the question, Donald seemed to pick up some kind of accusation in it, for he immediately brought his hands up and shook his head.
"W-well, I missed the extra fighting power…" he stuttered.
Sora grinned freely, putting his arms behind his head. "Sure, Donald. Sure."
He slid an absent-minded glance over at Char again, only to jolt and drop his arms with enough force to audibly slap against his pants. She was looking straight at him, as was Aerith. The latter's knowing expression almost crumbled Sora's dignity entirely.
Char just smiled, though, making him relax slightly. In the end, she said nothing of whether she had caught earshot of the trio's words. Sora liked to think he'd perfected his stage whisper, but Donald was a different story entirely, so she'd probably at least caught the duck speaking.
"I'll go ahead and get ready to put you four in the computer," Aerith said, a bit of laughter still embedded in her voice. She strode gracefully across the room and swept her fingers across the keyboard. An answering beep ensued, followed by the computer screen lighting up into life. "Go ahead and stand in front of the wall over there."
As one, the group followed where she was pointing with their eyes. The crimson, eye-like portal on the wall caught Sora's eye, and he remembered the MCP forcing them into the virtual world.
He also remembered how weird it had felt, having lasers dissemble him into data and then deposit him into a computer. Probably what getting eaten alive by ants felt like.
Stifling his discomfort, he steeled himself and nodded to the others. They followed him as he stepped in front of the portal, though not without casting an apprehensive look over his shoulder at it. The red sphere had multiple veins surrounding it, the main one of which was white and curved around its yellow and orange counterparts. Really, it resembled an inverted version of an eye.
Of course, his mind chose that moment to wonder exactly whose eye was watching them right now. The MCP?
No time to think about that. We just have to find Tron as soon as possible. Dread simmered deep in Sora's belly; if the MCP had found his way back into the system, then Tron, as the only accessible accomplice in hindering that, had to have taken the brunt of his rage.
The next thing he knew, he was squeezing his eyes shut against a sudden influx of light, and any form of fear for his friend ebbed momentarily. Whiteness bathed the insides of his eyelids for a few overly-long moments; he tried to focus on its color instead of the itchy trails it was marking across his body. It occurred to him to strain for his friends' responses, to know he wasn't alone in just how weird this was, but the light had stretched thick silence across his ears and rendered him unable to hear anything.
At long last, though, the curtain wrapped around his body dimmed and let him hear again. The first sound the virtual world let him hear was a distinctly female humming noise. Tentatively, he opened his eyes.
Dark blue. Of course. They were definitely back in the virtual world.
He glanced around, wincing at the effect his surroundings' palette change had on his eyes. Through the glaring spots still lingering in his vision, he saw a window looking out to the bleak, red-rimmed sky; just next to the window, a yellow computer monitor leaned against the wall.
Three very familiar shapes stood in front of it, nearly obscuring the screen. Donald had somehow managed to balance himself on the very tip of his webbed feet and had his bill poking up above the keyboard, being careful not to jar anything. Goofy had more luck seeing the terminal's screen and was simply craning his neck to see better.
Sora's eyes found the tallest of the three, who was leaned over and still making contemplative noises under her breath. He got to his feet – when had he fallen, he wondered – and walked over to stand next to Goofy. "Any luck?" he asked.
Char's shoulders jerked and she whirled to glare at him, fists clenching at her sides. "Don't do that!" she shouted.
Sora lifted his palms in a placating gesture. "Sorry! I was just wondering…"
Her glare softened slightly at the look on his face. She sighed, bringing one hand up to massage the part of her temple not covered by her helmet. Sora lowered his hands at her gesture of defeat, at the same time remembering he wore a helmet as well. He resisted the urge to tug at the spikes now angled differently on his head.
"Whatever," she said. "To answer you, no, I haven't found anything useful."
"This is the pit cell, right? That Sark jerk threw us in here when we tried to fight back," Donald said. At first, Sora didn't understand why Donald was explaining what he already knew.
"This was where we first met Tron," Goofy cut in, looking at Char as he spoke. Oh yeah, Sora remembered, she wasn't with us when we got thrown in here. She had torn herself free of the Heartless holding her, jumped onto one of the glowing white discs that served as this world's teleportation device, and escaped the self-named Heartless commander's arrest.
Char nodded in understanding. That understanding quickly morphed back into thoughtfulness, which frustration tinged in the furrowing of her eyebrows, when she turned back to the terminal. "I know messing with these things is a bad idea," she muttered, "but I don't know how else to find Tron…"
"Well, we can probably figure it out, right?" Sora said. "If the MCP found Tron, then what would he do with him?"
He folded his arms and stared at the ground, while Donald and Goofy did the same. Not three seconds had passed before Char suddenly gasped.
"Do you know where he is?" Donald growled. Sora resisted the urge to remind him how Char hadn't even known about this world until a few days ago. Even though her master's computer housed this place, even Ansem had his secrets that he had kept from his only remaining apprentice. Just thinking about everything he had hidden from Char made anger flare within Sora's heart.
Char braced her palms just beneath the keyboard and looked over at them, with not so much fear as exasperation on her face. "I think I have an idea. And we're not going."
Sora's jaw dropped. "But we need Tron!" he cried.
"He's in the game grid, Sora!" Char barked. Donald and Goofy exchanged glances, and the former opened his mouth to speak, but she barreled on. "You know, the place the MCP sent me? I would've died in there if a Heartless hadn't blown a hole in the wall for me to get out!"
"The game grid…?" Goofy repeated, one hand against his chin. "Didn't Tron say somethin' about a game grid?"
Again, Sora felt like he was slogging through a year's worth of memory to find what Goofy spoke of, rather than the comparatively smaller bog of just a few days. Eventually, though, he pinned down the recollection of Tron's explanation about the game grid.
The place they send errant programs who stray from the MCP's system. There, the programs are forced to fight until…
And now Sora remembered vividly the thought he had attached to Tron's distressed words trailing off. Until they die.
"If he's going to die in there, though, we should try even harder to save him!" he protested, swinging his head toward Char.
"I'm sorry," she said, enough sarcasm in her voice to indicate she wasn't sorry at all, "do you not remember what happened the last time one of us got stuck in there? I had to learn to drive a motorcycle. Do you know how damn hard that is?"
"Motor…?" Sora blinked, then shook his head, anger rising and replacing his brief bemusement. "Just because you had to learn to do something, it doesn't mean we can just let one of our friends die!"
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he understood that arguing was only prolonging things, and that every moment they spent debating this was one in which a Heartless could be cutting Tron down. Not only would they lose their last hope to save Hollow Bastion from the MCP's machinations, but they would lose a friend.
Sora had lost enough friends already.
For half a second – just half a second – Char's own rage flickered. Something he had said must have sent a powerful gust of wind across the fire he could see reflecting from her heart into her eyes. In that instant, a different kind of reluctance entirely had replaced her refusal to head back into the game grid. Honestly, he was experiencing that reluctance as well.
The last thing I wanted was for us to be fighting when you came back, too.
"Besides, isn't it your problem anyway?" Donald's hoarse voice cut through the tension, making both teens whip their heads to look at him. Sora's mouth fell open in an unconscious attempt to breathe harder through his fervent desperation. The duck's glare slid across to Char, every bit of latent anger toward her channeling itself into his next words and making them rough. "Your master made this place. He made the MCP, too."
"I don't live to correct his mistakes, all right?" Char spat, temper flaring up again at once.
"We should help, though," Goofy pointed out. His mildness sounded almost obscene in comparison to his comrades' fury. "Your name was in the password Tron made, too, Char. Remember? He put all of his new friends' name into that."
Char's eyes widened beneath her still-furrowed brows. Through the heartbeat roaring in his ears, Sora detected her own ragged breathing. Hearing that, hearing the effect this argument wreaked on her, he felt his own anger falter as well.
"You… you're right," she said. Her shoulders slumped. "Looks like I'm outvoted." Stepping away from the terminal, she laced her fingers together behind her back. "But I'm not gonna be the one responsible if something goes wrong. Someone else hit the button."
Sora nearly rolled his eyes, but stepped forward and crooked his wrists over the keyboard. Multiple smooth, square-shaped surfaces caressed the pads of his fingers as they settled against the keys – almost too mechanical, too unfamiliar to the touch. All of a sudden, nostalgia's ache toward his island's simplicity was throbbing as steadily as his heartbeat in his chest.
It also hit him that he had no idea what he was doing.
"I think you put where you wanna go with this," Goofy said. His cyan-clad arm, starkly visible against the yellow terminal, appeared in front of him and extended toward the keyboard.
"Well. I did not think you foolish Users would return so soon."
Donald squawked in surprise and Goofy all but fell against the terminal with how badly startled he was. Sora's hands dropped from the keyboard at once as he jolted. To his relief, he recovered from nearly stumbling backward fairly quickly.
He narrowed his eyes; he remembered that deep voice all too well. "Show yourself, MCP!" he demanded, glaring around the room. Only when a chuckle rumbled out from somewhere overhead did he realize the MCP wasn't nearby.
"And why would I show myself to ignorant life forms such as you?" the MCP asked, lazy amusement oozing from the rhetorical question.
"Give Tron back!" Donald stomped one webbed foot to emphasize his words.
The computer program paused at first, as if honestly contemplating Donald's order. Sora couldn't resist a small growl that emitted through clenched teeth at that bit of mockery. "Tron?" the MCP purred. Donald jumped, bravado immediately tarnished in the face of his fraying nerves. "Oh yes, that program who assisted in holding me off the DTD. I'm afraid he's in the middle of a game right now and cannot assist you."
"A game?" Char repeated, incredulity warring with rage in her tone. Her next words trembled with the weight of suppressed anger straining at its self-imposed bonds. "I'm sorry, I didn't know fighting for your life was considered a game."
Another pause. Sora could almost imagine the MCP gazing down at them, had Ansem designated him a human form like Tron and Sark and the other programs he held at his whim. Ansem created this place, he thought, and he created the MCP too. So why…?
His thoughts halted in their path when the MCP spoke again. Rather than long for freedom like Char's fury, his ire sounded more contained, only creating the smallest ripples in the otherwise-calm flow of his voice. "Ah, you again. Sark has yet to repair the game grid where you damaged it."
"Damaged it?" Goofy glanced at her, mild alarm in the arch of his wide eyes.
Char just shook her head, even though Sora got the feeling the story behind this involved her mentioning a motorcycle earlier. For some reason, his mind chose that moment to plant an image of her cackling and blazing a cyan trail through a high wall, and he had to fight back a grin.
However, the redhead herself smirked at the invisible presence. "Oh, really? There's still a big hole in the wall? Looks like I left my mark here after all."
Suddenly her eyes widened and the smugness sluiced off her face in an instant. The Keybearer caught a murmur of "hole in the wall" from her – and little more warning than that – before she whirled on her heel toward the terminal. "Goofy!" she shouted. The knight shot to attention, staring at her in unabashed confusion; Donald squawked again and staggered back against Sora's leg. "Hit the button!"
"Huh?" Almost the moment the word escaped Goofy's lips, an expression of realization lit his face, and he promptly obeyed, smashing a couple of buttons on the terminal keyboard.
Light flared up around the four of them, pushing the pit cell's mixed blue surroundings behind an endless curtain of white. The MCP's furious snarl evaporated as well and left little more than an echo rattling around their ears as the terminal's light consumed them.
Confined was the only way Sora could describe how the game grid made him feel. All around, high walls loomed up into the virtual world's dark skies, swallowing even the red glow emanating from the horizon. Even though that red reminded him of the dying stars that Sora's science classes always depicted, at least it also spoke of some connection to the outside world. The game grid didn't even allow that much.
Maybe that was where its sense of doom came from.
He looked around, desperate to find something else to think about besides his sudden, budding claustrophobia. Ironically, the shade of blue he found to focus on instead soothed him: Goofy kneeling down, extending one hand to Donald even though the duck stubbornly refused any help getting to his feet. As he rose, he swayed a little, and Sora's leg twitched in preparation to move toward him, but Donald steadied himself in time.
"Where are we?" Goofy asked, looking around nervously.
"I guess the game grid," Sora said. A guilty rush of gratefulness washed over him that he wasn't the only one uncomfortable with this place.
Char confirmed as much with a nod. "This is the place," she said. "Now if we could find –"
Light flashed in Sora's periphery then, and he turned just in time for that whiteness to bathe his entire vision. He barely rolled away from the deadly energy in time, using the momentum from dodging to spring back up to his feet again.
"What was that?" Donald cried.
Then another disturbingly familiar voice echoed from above. If ice could have an audible form, the man whose words made Sora remember luminescent red and electric light illuminating a wall would be spitting shards of it at them.
"You again," Sark hissed.
Although Sora didn't know if he referred to all four of them or just Char, the girl herself responded. "Yeah, me again. Guess I just love your little games that much."
Goofy suddenly shifted in response to some invisible stimulus, one that became clearer as he pointed ahead. Sora followed his gaze and spotted a swarm of dark red and purple growing closer. "Uh, guys? We got company," the knight said urgently.
Donald cast an expectant look at Char. "Well? You brought us here," he pointed out scathingly. "What's your plan?"
"Well," Char said tensely, "I was going to find Tron and use that hole in the wall from before to get out of here. But…" She shook her head in lieu of continuing and simply summoned her blades in dual flashes of light. It took that, and seeing Donald and Goofy brandishing their own weapons, for Sora to bring Leon's gift to its true form in his grasp as well.
You didn't anticipate this. Any emotion that might have accompanied his silently finishing her plan - dread, fear, annoyance – halted in its proverbial tracks. Tron.
He scanned the flat, blue expanse, heart beginning to pound in his chest. Just as panic began to escalate inside him, he spotted what he was looking for beneath the heaving form of a purple, quadruped Heartless. Tron was lying on the ground, bruises speckled darkly across his body; the Heartless rose up, clicking its pincers in satisfaction, and scuttled off its prey to join the others.
Sora almost dropped the Keyblade. Oh, no.
"Sora? Sora!" He realized the violent trembling of his vision originated from one hand seizing his shoulder, and he recovered in time to see Char staring at him.
Seeing the desperation on her face, the Keybearer quickly shook his head to clear the panicked haze permeating it. "I'm fine," he said, "but… Tron…"
"He's alive," she said, "but he won't be for long if we don't hurry up. Let's grab him and go."
Mild impatience edged the concern in her voice and cut through the final strings holding his fear in place. He gave a single, fierce nod, stepping away from her grip. Belatedly, he realized her fingers had left tingling imprints that radiated into his skin from the outfit this world gave him.
Focus.
"You're right," he told her aloud. "Let's go help Donald and Goofy."
Just beyond, the two Disney residents were keeping the swarm at bay as best they could. One dark red, motorcycle-like Heartless lunged forward, single wheel first, intending to crush Goofy's ribcage beneath it; the turtle shell shield flew up to intercept it, but as the wheel began to spin faster against the surface, it began to yield to the pressure. Donald was casting frantically on one of the purple quadrupeds not far away, oblivious to a droid rolling forward with sparking mitts.
With a nod to each other, the two teens darted off in opposite directions. Seeing Char make a beeline for Goofy, Sora couldn't help but utter a sigh of mock resignation. "Leaving the hard one to me? Thanks a lot," he joked.
He looked back in front of him and, using his speed as leverage, leaped high into the air, Keyblade out. The Heartless jerked, light sputtering and then sparking into nothingness between its pincers, when the jagged silver edge collided with its shell. Before gravity tugged Sora back down to the ground again, he managed to carve a spiral into the purple foe's side. "Behind you, Donald!" he shouted.
The duck whirled around, instinctively casting with his staff again. At point-blank range, his electricity mingled with the droid Heartless' own voltage and threw dancing light against the walls. A pink heart floated up from the droid to the monochromatic sky, making Sora wonder briefly if Kingdom Hearts existed even here.
Before he could descend further into that unwelcome notion, though, he heard Char's voice from far off. "Well," she called back, "I've gotta give you something to do." A grunt of exertion, and then the sound of steel crashing into metal, told him she had just finished off the Heartless attacking Goofy. The pink heart twining with the droid's own confirmed that.
Sora felt a grin tug at his face. The full weight of the crippling worry caused by her capture seemed to release, then: left his step feeling stronger and his heart almost deliriously lighter. He had missed this – the bantering and her eternal dryness that not even friendship could dampen.
Spinning back around, he dashed toward the purple Heartless, which was just recovering from his Keyblade having battered its body. He destroyed any attempt the enemy might have made at attacking him when he jumped up and delivered a flurry of blows to its side. Within moments, it yielded to the assault and dissipated under his Keyblade.
As the surface beneath his body vanished and left him little choice but to hit the ground again, Sora reflected on how this Keyblade easily conveyed its ferocity beyond the lion-head shape of its charm. Like a lion, when you wake it up.
However, he could do little more than christen Leon's gift the Sleeping Lion in his head before he hit the ground. The impact jarred him much harder than he had expected, making him wince as pain zigzagged through his ribs. Jafar's pillars had sliced more deeply into his side than he had thought; not even applying healing spells to the wounds could halt the sharp aches before they reached him.
"You all right, Sora?" Donald's question was punctuated by a startled grunt as he swung away from a motorcycle Heartless' wheel. It still bounced off his side, though, eliciting a snarl as it jarred his side.
"Yeah," the Keybearer called back. At the same time, something bright heaved in the corner of his eye, and he narrowly avoided two droid Heartless' glowing fists. They left conspicuous spots dancing across his vision in their wake, which impeded his vision only slightly. Those spots eventually vanished, clearing the view of their golden forms writhing beneath the Sleeping Lion's counterattack. "Just the injuries from fighting Jafar acting up, is all."
"Wait a minute." Somehow, in the midst of the chaos, Char had wound her way through the masses of Heartless to them. Goofy followed close behind, oddly bereft of his shield; for a moment, Sora wondered whether the wheel had destroyed it.
Then one of the droids gave a heaving convulsion, vanishing and revealing the source of its demise. Goofy's shield whirled through the air, sought out the droids' companions approaching and tore through them before returning to his grasp.
"You guys fought Jafar. And you did it without me?" Char went on. "What the hell else happened while I was gone?"
At first, he regarded her with confusion; the extra bit of red right above her raised eyebrow had certainly not been there before. Then that red spot caught the light and he realized a Heartless must have cut her there. Combined with the line he could now see stretching across the opposite cheek – an injury whose source he didn't know – her skepticism created much more austerity than she felt.
Whether Sora's response would have contained a sheepish confession as to how Jafar had injured him, or a playful promise to fill in the gaps later, he never knew for sure. A shadow suddenly stretched across in front of him, dulling the bright blue lines radiating from the game grid's floor.
Even before their unspoken leader turned to see the shadow's source, Donald, Goofy, and Char gasped aloud and set into attacking the Heartless: the mage with flame coalescing at his weapon's bristles, the knight with his shield spinning back into the air, and the latter with her blades preceding her in her charge.
The quadruped Heartless lifted up its legs, which were beginning to spark with electrical energy. Before it could attack, though, Sora intercepted it in midair with the Sleeping Lion, which miraculously remained unscathed even at point-blank range of that electricity. In the same moment, Char sliced across the other leg with her swords and landed with her weapons unharmed as well.
"Nice hair," she tossed over her shoulder at him. It took him a couple of seconds for logic to catch up to her words – anything that would have induced the jab was already apparent in his messy hair – and then he realized the electricity must have seeped into the spikes poking out from his helmet. Sure enough, when he reached up to confirm as much, his hair felt rougher under his fingers.
He grinned and smoothed the unruly locks down as best he could. "It's the best way to do it."
Her answering smirk vanished almost instantaneously when Goofy's voice rang out. "There's too many Heartless!" he cried.
Glancing around, Sora realized his companion was right. The focus necessary for the battles at hand had kept him distracted from his surroundings and muted any worry at whatever Heartless might be approaching. Now, though, bereft of that filter, he saw crimson mingling with gleaming gold: motorcycle and droid Heartless alike wheeled toward the group at a steady speed. Far above, the quadrupeds moved just as quickly, pincers creating a click-click-click sound that somehow dug under Sora's skin and pulled an impulse to shudder free from beneath his resolve.
There's no end to them, he thought, Sark just keeps them coming, and his determination recoiled tangibly at the knowledge that they had to retreat. Even though they had defeated higher numbers than this – Hollow Bastion's cliffs flashed across his memory – at least that gray sea had had an eventual end to it. Somehow, he couldn't see Sark ceasing in his relentless stream of enemies until the group got too exhausted to fight back.
"Let's go!" he called to the others.
"What about Tron?" Donald hissed the question out while staring tensely ahead.
In the desperate knowledge that flight meant surviving, Sora had all but forgotten the reason they had come to this gods-forsaken place at all. He hesitated, scanned ahead for a break in the heaving sea of red, yellow, and purple; couldn't find it at first and had to force himself to seek out bruise-patented blue-black against pale skin as well –
Then Goofy shouted "Look!" and pointed ahead, finger marking a straight line toward a gap in the ocean. Sora traced the invisible thread with his eyes, past the advancing wave of Heartless and to the horribly still form prone on the ground.
He gripped the Sleeping Lion tighter and turned to the others. "All right, I'll distract the Heartless, and –"
"Relax, we've got this," Char interrupted, but her deceptively blithe dismissal of the plan that formulated as he spoke sounded taut with concern. "Goofy and I will grab Tron. You and Donald just steer us toward that gap in the wall." She bobbed her head to the side, drawing the others' attention to the wall in that direction. Sure enough, a yawning, jagged hole greeted Sora's eyes – where, apparently, Char had made her escape before.
He found himself clinging to that fact: that if she had fought her way through by herself, impeded by her questionable vehicle propensities as she was, then the four of them working together could do it while saving Tron.
Instead of arguing with his role as Heartless patrol, Donald narrowed his eyes and shook his staff. "Piece of cake."
Sora watched Char and Goofy nod at each other before darting behind them. That telltale crimson ponytail had just finished marking a fiery trail in Sora's periphery when he faced the foes in front of them. We can do this.
Dear action-writing skills, where tf have you gone? Love, Saf. Ugh.