Namine: "We apologize for the interruptions in your semi-regularly scheduled updates, and thank you for your patience. Now for some good news!"

So as it turns out, I'm not actually dead. As it turns out, there's something to the whole Murphy's Law thing. Computer problems stacked on top of finals and the need for a replacement hard drive to delay my beta and I for a while.

But, here's a new world arc, which should be a good one. Plus, the first chapter of my Skyrim fic goes up tomorrow. And, a Batman one is in the works. So without further adue, let's get started!

Namine: "DarthKingdom does not own Kingdom Hearts, Disney, Square Enix, or anything else he might use that exists in other media. Enjoy!"

!

Chapter 120: The Planet's Past

The world far below the Unity was composed mainly of dry, rugged desert, interspersed with forests and sprawling urban centers. From where Sora sat at the pilot's seat of the ship, there seemed to be three large continents, along with a few large islands sitting in the ocean.

"Interesting place." Sora observed. Most of the party was assembled in the cockpit. Axel was the only one not in attendance yet. They had only exited warp space moments ago.

"So what is this world, Donald?" Kairi asked.

The duck looked into one of the screens on the consoles around him. "Um, it's called 'The Planet.'"

"Really?" Riku asked. "That's kind of unoriginal."

"Where are we?" Axel asked sleepily as he walked in. Apparently the entrance into the Planet's orbit had jarred him from a nap.

"A place called the Planet." Goofy relayed.

Axel's eyes suddenly went wide, and he sprinted up to Donald's console, pushing him aside to look into his console. It confirmed what they had told him, as did a look out of the forward view port.

He half-smiled. "No... freaking... way."

"Um... Axel?" Bariss began, tapping him on the shoulder. "No freaking way, what?"

"This is my world!"

"Really?" This came from Roxas, who rushed out of Sora without warning. "Dude, I tried to get that out of you for months! Why didn't you ever tell me?"

Axel shrugged. "Well, I didn't feel like talking about my old life then."

"So... Does this mean you'll tell me your old name?"

"Ugh... Fine." Axel grimaced slightly. "It was 'Ale.'"

Things were totally silent in the cockpit for several seconds, while the others tried to gauge whether or not the former Nobody was joking. When he merely continued to grimace, they all laughed.

"Suddenly it all makes sense!" Sora was holding himself up on a nearby console and Kairi was writhing in silent laughter on the floor next to him. Riku was clutching his sides.

"It's how he was conceived!" Roxas said through his laughter.

"When you've gotten it out of your system," Axel muttered darkly, walking from the room, "I'll be waiting at the transport pads."(1)

!

The black clouds poured water and fire as the city fell apart all around them.

Great, burning chunks of rock fell from the stormy sky, colliding with buildings and reducing them to piles of debris instantly. Those that collided with the streets themselves crushed panicking civilians under hundreds of pounds of burning rock.

Many of those who weren't smashed under the meteors were overtaken by the horrifying black creatures below, and had their hearts forcibly ripped from their bodies.

The sounds of screams, explosions, and gun fire echoed through the air.

Cloud did his best to block it all out.

His opponent was fast, powerful, and highly skilled. It was taking every bit of Cloud's years of SOLDIER training to hold him at bay. The fact that this man had once, a long time ago, been his friend and brother-in-arms wasn't helping him much, either.

"Pathetic, Cloud." Sephiroth said, his cold grin firmly in place as always. "Just pathetic."

The man had yet to acquire the black angel wing that would earn him his infamous title 'One-Winged Angel', but the jacket he wore was the same, as was the seven-foot long katana he wielded.

Musamune sliced toward Cloud's face, and only desperate parries of the large, bandage-covered Buster Sword. He was forced into a desperate retreat across the rooftop they were fighting on, until he came to the very edge. Sephiroth lunged forward and Cloud leapt nearly twenty feet backwards, landing heavily on the next rooftop.

His eyes caught sight of one of the meteors shooting down toward the building he had just left, where Sephiroth still stood. A small flicker of hope entered Cloud's heart. If he stayed where he was for just a few more seconds...

The meteor struck the roof of the building head on, sending burning bricks and chunks of rock everywhere.

For a moment, he smiled –one of the last times he would do so in a long, long time- not having seen Sephiroth leap from the building. He almost didn't see the man flying toward him with his blade aiming for his throat until it was too late.

Silently cursing, he lifted his sword to block it, stumbling backwards a few feet. Sephiroth smiled cooly, and pointed the blade at him, forcing Cloud to take a few steps back to keep out of range of its tip.

"The world will fall, Cloud. I've gone to great lengths to guarantee it. Once the heart of the Planet is taken by the Darkness, I'll be there to collect the remains of the Lifestream. There's no stopping it, Cloud... Just stand down, and I'll make sure the Heartless finish you quickly."

"Shut up!" Cloud roared, slapping his sword aside with his own, and rushing to behead Sephiroth with the Buster Sword.

He slipped to the side, just out of reach of the oversized blade. He kicked off from the roof, and floated in the air about ten feet above him. He still didn't attack.

"Does it make you angry, Cloud?" He taunted. "Thinking about all of those who will die and vanish today? Zack, Barret, Ale, Rude... precious, precious Tifa?"

"I said SHUT UP!"

Cloud shot into the air, swinging his sword in a ferocious horizontal strike that could have cut Sephiroth in half had the blow connected. Instead, the swordsman turned it aside in an almost casual manner, and soared higher into the air, smirking down at him.

The battle continued to unfold for several minutes, moving in the general direction of the massive building in the center of the city. It was made of a rough assortment of towers, one of which stretched higher than the rest, pointing into the stormy sky. Several large smoke stacks surrounded the building.

Cloud and Sephiroth were soon dueling over the high central tower, their very different blades meeting with sparks and clangs of metal, travelling at such high speeds that they appeared as blurs.

Sephiroth twisted his wrist, causing his blade to come in from a seemingly impossible angle. Cloud hadn't seen it coming, and was caught in the side. A narrow gash opened up in his hip, and he fell toward the roof of the tower.

He landed roughly on his feet, and leapt backwards in time to avoid the descending strike of Sephiroth. The man didn't immediately follow him, however. He merely adopted his fighting stance again, holding his sword by the side of his head with both hands, pointing it toward his opponent. He was still smiling coolly.

Cloud realized with burning anger that Sephiroth was toying with him, in the fashion that a cat would play with a mouse. Though in this case, the mouse still had some fight in him.

He was about to move again, when he saw something astonishing behind Sephiroth's shoulder. An entire section of the city had suddenly disappeared; Not in the destructive fall of one of the numerous meteors. It was just gone.

Sephiroth barely looked over his shoulder. His smile grew by a fraction of an inch. "Ah... they've found the heart. Time's running out, Cloud."

With a cry of rage, Cloud sprang forward, his sword slashing back and forth with blinding speed. Sephiroth intercepted nearly every blow, and nimbly wove around the strikes that he didn't catch with his blade. The duel moved all over the rooftop, and Sephiroth didn't strike back against Cloud's ferocious offensive. He merely allowed him to vent all of his fury at him. He waited...

And finally lashed out, his blade cutting deep into the meat of Cloud's left shoulder.

Cloud shouted in pain, and dropped the Buster Sword. Blood poured from his shoulder as he collapsed to the ground at his opponent's feet. Musamune was at his throat the moment his knees touched the roof.

Sephiroth gazed down at his seemingly beaten opponent with a horrible smile. For a moment, he resembled something inhuman.

"You've lost, Cloud." He taunted in a soft tone that was somehow worse than a shout. "You're a failure. And you've always been a failure. You failed as a SOLDIER. You failed as a hero. And you've failed to save this pathetic world. And due to your failure, everyone will perish."

"Because you were just too weak to protect them."

He shouldn't have said that.

Mustering strength seemingly from nowhere, Cloud plucked his sword from where it had fallen. He slashed at Musamune, coming out of his crouch, and then swung hard at Sephiroth's head.

The silver-haired man barely escaped the unexpected attack with a fast leap backwards, which put nearly twenty feet between them. Cloud hefted the Buster Sword before him, with his firm, two-handed grip. He no longer seemed to notice the deep wound in his shoulder.

"I'm not weak." He said. "And I'm not a failure. Even if the Planet vanishes, there's still hope for survival. And hope never dies, Sephiroth!"

With his last sentence, he charged forward at a higher speed than ever before. He struck vertically, then horizontally. For the first time, Sephiroth stumbled slightly as he gave ground.

Cloud continued to pound away at his defenses, driving him backwards. His onslaught came too quickly for his opponent to counterattack. Sephiroth could only back away at high speed, and search in futility for a chance to end the fight quickly.

He never found one.

Cloud pumped his legs, and passed completely over Sephiroth's head. He flipped once, parrying Sephiroth's strike at his head. He landed on his opposite side, and slashed at his back, driving it deep into the flesh of his lower back, spilling blood onto the building rooftop.

Sephiroth fell forward with barely a groan, dropping his blade, and pitching face first to the ground.

Cloud stood over him, looking wearily down at his defeated enemy. "Stay where you belong: in my memories."

He was dying, but Sephiroth's words were still somehow clear, despite the fact that he had face-planted with the roof. "I will never be a memory."

As if reacting to the man's dying words, the massive building beneath them disappeared without warning, as many of the others in the city had already done. The two swordsmen fell fifty feet, streaking toward the ground below.

The only one that still was capable of movement; Cloud tried desperately to right himself in midair. He spun in the air, and saw to his horror that the largest meteor yet was shooting from the sky directly at him. At its current speed, it would crush them long before the impact with the ground would.

What happened next was a mixed blessing. As Cloud and the dying Sephiroth plummeted to the ground, the Planet was seconds away from destruction, as the Heartless Sephiroth had brought discovered its heart. As was the norm for such things, random corridors of Darkness tended to pop up all over the vanishing world.

A particularly large one formed beneath the falling warriors, and they fell right into it. It closed, just as the huge meteor fell into the space where it had been.

The world vanished seconds later, taking several people with it into the Darkness. Some, like Tifa and Barret, were fortunate enough to be spirited away to other far-off worlds. But none of them had an experience quite like Cloud did as he plummeted through the Darkness through space, toward the world of Traverse Town.

He gritted his teeth as he soared through the blackness. The Buster Sword passed by his head, and he immediately reached out to grasp it by the hilt. He was dimly aware that Sephiroth's unmoving body was next to him.

Pain suddenly shot through his injured shoulder. Through the almost nonexistent light, he saw what looked like tendrils of Darkness seeping from his wound. Slowly, they migrated through the heavy air toward Sephiroth's body, and flowed into the massive wound on his back.

That was the last thing that Cloud saw, because suddenly there was a blinding light, and he was falling directly toward the ground.

Below him, he saw what looked like a quiet, peaceful little village. The only illumination came from the moonlight above, and the golden glow of street lamps. Directly below him was a large, plaza-like area. A golden fountain sat in one corner, and there were elevated walkways leading to other sections of the town.

He hit the ground hard, getting the breath knocked out of him, and losing his grip on his blade again. He heard something beside him –which he assumed was Sephiroth's body- hit the ground with a loud thud.

"How many times do I have to fall on my face today?" Cloud grumbled, as he got to his feet. He took a moment to observe his new surroundings. This was definitely not Midgar.

He rubbed his aching shoulder, wincing at the pain. He needed medical treatment, and information. He had seen people nearby, while he had been falling. With any luck, they'd be able to help him. He picked his blade up and turned around.

For the first time, he noticed Sephiroth. To his utter terror, he was moving.

The silver-haired man got slowly to his feet, facing away from Cloud. The wound in his back could no longer be seen. A large plume of Darkness formed at his right shoulder, gradually taking shape, and solidifying into the form of a black angel wing. Similar wings appeared on his legs.

The sound of low laughter floated to Cloud's ears.

!

Cloud jerked himself awake, sweating and breathing heavily as though he had just run a marathon.

He sat on the seat of his motorcycle –dubbed Fenrir- still hearing Sephiroth's laughter echoing in his ears. He gazed up at the full moon overhead, trying to catch his breath.

His bike was sitting in the desert that surrounded the partially-rebuilt city of Midgar for miles upon miles. There were several rocky cliffs all over the area; most of them extremely high. Small plumes of sand were blown across the landscape every few minutes whenever a breeze came along.

Cloud put his head in his hands. He had that dream every time he was near. Each time, it felt worse. He had created Sephiroth. The Darkness in his own heart had escaped over to his enemy's dying form, re-kindling the tiny spark of his life back into a flame.

The two of them were destined to fight for the rest of their lives until one of them finally died. Cloud was starting to think that he'd never know true peace again.

Yet, his own words bubbled back to his consciousness, "Hope never dies..."

He was starting to wonder if that was indeed true. When his fate was dominated by the next time Sephiroth would show up with his blade at his throat, there seemed to be little chance for hope.

Meditating on his future wouldn't change it. Action, however...

Cloud strapped on a pair of goggles that he wore when he drove. He gassed up Fenrir, relishing the sound of its powerful engine breaking the silence of the night. He throttled it, and rushed through the night in the direction of Midgar.

If he rode fast, perhaps he'd reach the city by the next day.

!

So, that's my theory on the KH version of Sephiroth. What do you think?

Hope you enjoyed it! The next gap won't be so long, I promise.

(1) This was obviously written before Axel's actual origins were revealed. I still prefer 'Ale' though…

Please leave a review!