Kingdom Hearts: The Girl Who Stole the Star

by Lacan Shinn

Sequel to KH: SEOD. Sora is restored from The Final World to find that much has changed since he vanished. Sora's death has devastated Kairi and Riku; Roxas, Xion, Anna, and Elsa are faced with nightmare destinies; and the mysterious Master of the Foretellers, adumbrated by shade, is on the verge of completing his millennia long plan. The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

18. Fractured Mirrors Reflecting Shades of L

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CHAPTER 17:

FRACTURED MIRRORS REFLECTING SHADES OF LIGHT

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Author's Notes: The music for this Chapter is, in order of scene: 'Within the Giant,' from FINAL FANTASY IV; and then 'Moonlit Night Theme,' from the SUIKODEN II Original Soundtrack, Volume Two, Disc One; and then 'Lost… Broken Shards' from the XENOGEARS Original Soundtrack, Disc One; and then 'Fragments Of the Heart,' from the VALKYRIE PROFILE Original Soundtrack, Disc Two; and last 'Heart-Softening Background Music One,' from the SUIKODEN II Original Soundtrack, Volume Two, Disc One. The third and fourth Tracks can be found on KINGDOM HEARTS Insider's MP3 section, and all three of the other pieces can be found on Zophar's Domain's MP3 section.

---

Anna started as Donald, sitting on the floor of the cockpit of Radical Dreamers, Unstolen Jewel to the left of Sora's pilot seat because she had needed to take his seat, quacked furiously as an enormous crimson construct that might have been another Gummi ship, or that might have been something alive; or both, for all Anna knew; rocketed diagonally upwards from the left in front of the cockpit's windshield and passed before Radical Dreamers, Unstolen Jewel, whirling and gyrating like a careening spinning top.

Sora went white, and gripped the handlebars of the Gummi ship Mickey had improved over the last year, and that Anna was still indescribably relieved and incomprehensibly disappointed that they'd been able to board on Destiny Islands without running into anyone.
She'd been so worried about what would happen if Sora did or didn't run into Kairi, or one or more other people who he knew, before they boarded his Gummi ship, that she'd barely been able to enjoy the sights and sounds and smells and tastes and sensations of a world different from her own, and she hadn't made any effort to immerse herself in them.

To her partial surprise, she'd actually felt an indescribable amount of eagerness and excitement and joy and wonder surge in her when she'd walked out of Arendelle through the portal to Destiny Islands, but she'd pushed it all down before it had cleared from her visions.

It wouldn't have been right to enjoy seeing another world, when, even with Marshmallow and Olaf and Kristoff and Sven with her, she was still abandoning Elsa after what the Foretellers had done to her, and Sora, and Kristoff, and Anna herself.

It wouldn't have been right to immerse herself in the experience of another world after what she'd abandoned Sora to well over a year ago, and what she still couldn't protect him from now.

So she'd refused to even let that joy and eagerness and wonder and excitement rise once more when she'd first seen Radical Dreamers, Unstolen Jewel; and she'd emptied her heart and mind of all feeling as best as she could to keep herself from feeling the least amount thankful at beholding the ship Sora had named for her for the first time.

She'd been focusing on keeping any of those emotions away for the hours since then, as they'd soared through blue and wisps of clouds, and then stars strewn with clumps, or single, asteroids of numerous composition and size.

But now that Sora was in pain, Anna couldn't afford to be distracted by the need to do so.

None of what she shouldn't, and w–

didn't want to feel

manifested inside her.

"A Hunter X!" Goofy commented. "Be careful, Sora!"

Sora twisted the control bars that Donald had told Sora that Chip and Dale had installed while he'd been d

imprisoned in another realm

and sent Radical Dreamers, Unstolen Jewel into an acute turn left and down in the direction the Hunter X had rocketed from, soaring along an opposite path.

"Maleficent must have deployed it here!" Sora cried. "The Foretellers want us alive, and as badly as they want to break our hearts, Hunter Xes outside of a keyhole in the Ocean Between, are overkill for that!"

"I take it Hunter Xes are very dangerous, then?" Anna queried.

"That's putting it mildly," Donald answered angrily. "They're perhaps the deadliest space voyaging Heartless that we've run into in a Gummi ship during all of our adventures," Anna felt her own blood drain out of her face at the knowledge Heartless could take forms capable of contending with Gummi ships, "With the possible exception of two living freak factories who we had the displeasure to run into in the Ocean Between during the quest when we met you. They're literal flying weapons caches of firepower and durability."

"How often have any of your enemies unleashed Gummi ship scale Heartless against the worlds themselves?" Anna asked quickly.

"Never, to our knowledge," Donald replied. "I extremely highly doubt it's because they want to, however. With the air superiority space voyaging Heartless have, our adversaries would have little to no problems defeating Keyblade wielders, or opposing forces, on the terrain of each world. The space voyaging Heartless most likely refuse to land on a world no matter who is controlling them because they prefer the hearts of people traveling in craft similar to their size that they can more easily pick out of their surroundings, not the hearts of a lot of relatively small people with a minority in craft similar to their size who they'd have a harder time picking out from the relatively small people."

Anna pushed her terror away to the extent that she could.

Sora, Donald, and Goofy had been doing this for years.

They knew what they were talking about, the Foretellers' experience and genius and the impending interstellar war or not.

"That Maleficent, or perhaps the Foretellers, are deploying uniquely deadly Heartless away from exceptional worlds such as End of the World, Twilight Town, or the Keyblade Graveyard, is bad in and of itself," Goofy pointed out. "The stronger the Heartless, the stronger the darkness that they usually prefer. If they're willing to fly this far away from exceptional worlds now, it could even be because the Foretellers, or more likely, Maleficent; are so adept with darkness that the space voyagers that are flocking to locales such as Twilight Town or the Keyblade Graveyard now are at least to regular space voyagers what Dark Infernos and Dustfliers, and Dark Followers and Darksides, are to Shadows. Or worse."

Anna pushed all emotion away this time at the memory of how Maleficent had taught herself her new skill with darkness.

As revolted as she was at herself for thinking it, Anna actually wanted to not just hurt, but murder Maleficent for what she'd done to Elsa by improving her magic based on Elsa's example.

What the Foretellers were putting Elsa through was so terrible that Anna couldn't define whether or not she wanted to hurt them, or murder them.

Maleficent hadn't gone that far, so Anna could define how badly she h–

disliked

Maleficent, and direct anger at her, and her anger at the Foretellers at Maleficent, as well.

"It doesn't matter if it helps someone," Sora spoke up, clearly knowing how she was feeling, his tone understanding and empathetic and sympathetic and knowing. "It's still darkness."

"I know," Anna answered, and she suppressed the urge to ask, 'Does that matter if it does help someone?'

"This raises the chance that, whoever deployed the Hunter Xes, you weren't just able to open a path to Toy Box by letting your heart be your guiding key as you did when we sailed from the Mysterious Tower to Olympus," Goofy continued. "Even with your connection to Xion, you mighta' been able to do so because even this is a piece in the Foretellers' game so that you can counter Maleficent's new Heartless forces better, or Maleficent can counter the Foretellers' Heartless forces better."

"We're soldiers serving King Mickey and Queen Minnie!" Donald cried. "We don't follow their orders, direct or indirect!"

Anna frowned, and a mixture of her anger at Donald and Goofy for betraying Sora's feelings earlier today, or yesterday, by deferring to him when he didn't want them to; and her irritation at Donald from the last time she'd seen him before he'd left Arendelle the first time for treating Sora as a child he needed to make decisions for, rose.

"Stop trying to make decisions for Sora," Anna said, and Sora's eyes widened. "Particularly when you hypocritically won't make the choice to be there for him yourself all the times that you should. He's not an oblivious serving child, or an omniscient leading adult. He's your friend, and a person.

"And last time I saw, he isn't as willing to hurt or kill other people as you are, and maybe Goofy is, so you have no justification to talk about him as though he's a soldier without his permission to do so."

Sora gave her a grateful smile.

Donald huffed, though he at least had the decency not to cross his arms this time, as he had over a year ago, and looked back out the canopy.

Goofy looked as though he wanted to say something, not to smooth things over between the three of them, but to speak up on Sora's behalf himself, but he didn't.

Anna sighed. This was the second time she'd seen Goofy, too, not be there for Sora when he should have, and, unlike with Donald, she didn't understand why.

She needed to figure it out very fast.

It couldn't just be that Goofy wanted to try to do what was best for everyone, or that he didn't have faith in himself because a lot of people most likely didn't take him seriously. He most likely had the same problems with people taking him seriously that she'd had, but whether he lacked any faith in himself or not, he was too sharp to not say something when a friend needed him to stand up for that friend due to lack of confidence or a desire to do what was best for everyone.

Anna knew why she couldn't be there for Sora, and a small amount of why Donald wasn't doing so as much as he should, but she didn't know what was keeping Goofy from fully being the friend that Sora needed and wanted.

Sora needed her to understand.

For that matter, if Kairi and Riku still saw Sora as too willing to live by his heart, even though they obviously did love his wish to do as it felt a lot, Sora needed Anna to figure out why they didn't fully support Sora's dreams of following his heart, as they should be.

She opened her mouth to ask Sora if Kairi and Riku still criticized Sora for feeling and supposedly not thinking as adroitly as they did, but Goofy preempted her.

"You aren't required to understand everything about everyone important to you from the get go," Goofy said, and Anna pushed her emotions away another time. "Yeah, you shouldn't have trusted Hans, or believed that you could get through to Elsa when she was pushing you away as easily as you did. But that doesn't mean that you need to try to atone for that by chasing the opposite extreme, and attempt to learn what makes everyone important to you tick when you've just met them.

"I'm not saying that you're still taking people at face value, because you clearly aren't. But you can't learn all that you need to if you try your hardest not to judge people by first impressions, as well. You're not omniscient yourself. I'm not sure that you can even learn anything and everything there is to know about someone no matter how long you've known them."

She should be.

She should be able to understand everything about anyone's heart the instant that she met that person, so she'd know how to avoid hurting that person herself, and how to keep anyone else from hurting her, him, or it.

Kingdom Hearts was the heart of all worlds, and the hearts of worlds could feel and think and understand and know in ways that people couldn't.

Did the culmination of uncountable world hearts, themselves hearts that Mickey had told them felt so brightly that they could shine on worlds hundreds of millions or billions of light years away without their light needing to take light years to travel there, possess all of the understanding, wisdom, perception, and knowledge of all people and the totality of existence that she needed to understand everyone?

If so, and she opened the door to it with the Kye-Blade, could she then become omniscient, and able to avoid hurting anyone, or letting anyone else in all reality, be hurt, forever?

Anna pushed the feelings and thoughts away.

She was not going to re-forge the Kye-Blade a second time.

She was not going to open the door to Kingdom Hearts.

She was not going to abandon Elsa, and Sora, and Kristoff, and anyone else.

She was not going to betray Elsa, and Sora, and Kristoff, and anyone else.

You already have.

Anna pushed that feeling and thought away, too.

"I'll keep that in mind," she told Goofy.

Goofy gave her a skeptical look, but he returned his attention to Radical Dreamers, Unstolen Jewel's flight.

Sora pressed a button on top of the right side of the handlebars, and twin streams of blue-white cohesive light shot out to strike two megaliths of stone orbiting each other in front of them and shatter them into pieces in a series of consecutive detonations of fire.

"Have you decided what weapon you want to learn to wield?" Donald inquired.

Anna considered one final time, and then she pushed her doubts aside.

"What did Mickey call Leon's weapon?" Anna questioned. "A mortardagger?"

"A gunblade," Goofy supplied.

"That's right," Anna recalled. "Nothing else sounds as versatile as a gunblade. I'd like to try to become proficient with that, if it's okay, and you have any in the armory."

"Sure thing about it being okay," Donald responded. "And we have several." Donald looked at Goofy briefly before looking back at her, and Anna assumed it had something to do with why Goofy didn't use a weapon and battled with a shield. "Goofy's and my late instructor, Disney Kingdom's sole Knight-Sorcerer, Oswald, is the person who conceptualized the gunblade, and the person who taught Leon how to fight with it. All Disney Kingdom Gummi ships carry six gunblades as detachable wholly combat effective ornaments decorating their armory, in honor of Oswald.

"There are two regular swords that fire penetrating shells from medium range, two rapiers that fire regular bullet shells from long range, and two broadswords, such as Leon's, that fire heavy cannon shells from close range.

"Which would you prefer?"

"The rapier version," Anna answered, not needing to think about that one. "The lighter the blade, the more dexterous, and the swifter, it is. I have no knowledge of how fire arms work, but I assume that a regular long range weapon is also more adaptable than a specialized one."

"Combat tactics and combat strategies with fire arms are similar to combat strategies and combat tactics with bows, crossbows, arrows, javelins, and the like," Donald informed her. "But it's easier to engineer different kinds of fire arms for a wide variety of purposes than the types bows and arrows, or the types of javelins, and so on. Regular shells have as many drawbacks and limitations as piercing shells, heavy cannon shells, and the rest, but they arguably are more adaptable than other shells in that they don't have as much weight. So you're right in a sense, though not that many.

"On the topic of adaptability, laser fire arms have the same strengths and weaknesses, and gunblades can fire them, in addition, or surround themselves with an armor of laser energy that also enlarges a gunblade's defensive abilities. The three versions of gunblades in Gummi ships distribute their laser utilizing capacities in the same ways. But this means that your version of the gunblade has the capability to generate the widest defensive laser corona around itself, but the weakest one. The piercing gunblades generate the thinnest, but most focused and mightiest, shields, and the heavy cannon gunblades form the most balanced coronas.

"Do you still want to wield a rapier gunblade?"

"A wider ranged defensive shield might give me the best capability to defend another person, or other people," Anna answered. "It will be easier to reach one or more of them with the shield that way, and I can potentially compensate for not being able to block as well by deflecting better.

"And it's not myself that I'm concerned about protecting."

---

Sora started, and he pressed the two buttons on the tops of each of the two handlebars in a particular pattern, then he let them go and whirled towards her.

The Gummi ship continued soaring along its vector, obviously locked in its course somehow.

"You should be," Sora said, suppressed terror and worry in his voice. "Looking out for your comrades in arms is the most important part of adventuring as a group, but you need to take care of yourself, too. You yourself are a member of our team."

Anna saw Sora's point, but that was irrelevant when Elsa and Sora and Kristoff and the others were in danger, as well as Arendelle's people, Arendelle, and countless other people and worlds.

"You know that I'm not," Anna disagreed. "I'm accompanying you because I'm a danger to Elsa if I don't. I'm not a true part of your team, and even if I was, it wouldn't matter. I'm a Princess, not a combatant of a fellowship. You can share responsibilities with yourselves as well as others, but I can't. I have no responsibility other than to the people who I'm supposed to provide for."

Sora looked as though he was trying to think of a good counterargument to this, but Donald beat him to it.

"You're wrong," he objected. "Take it from Yen Sid. The first responsibility of royalty, or anyone with power, is to ensure that you don't assume too much responsibility. Otherwise you'll cause more problems than you solve, if you solve any problems. It's okay to ask others to help people from time to time, but you yourself shouldn't do so too much."

"Then Yen Sid has no justification to advise Mickey," Anna argued, and Donald scowled. "If you have any ability to govern anyone, or any form of power, you need to make use of it to cherish and protect your loved ones and the people who need you and want you. You shouldn't utilize your position or power to exploit others, but not using it to try to cherish them is just as irresponsible. And one of the last things that you should do when you have authority, or any other form of power, is ask someone else, or other people, to provide for others. That is exploitation."

Donald's beak dropped open and moved quietly.

"If you're not going to support others when you have the capability of doing so yourself, you have no justification to request others to solve the problems that you refuse to tackle. If you don't have the ability to solve problems yourself, then there's nothing wrong with asking for assistance, but if you can, you need to do so without seeking help from anyone else. If you do, you're requesting them to shoulder burdens that you yourself won't because you want problems that you're unwilling to confront to become someone else's, or other people's, problems. You're dragging them into messes that they don't want to be dragged into when you should be solving those messes yourself. Elsa and I disagreed about a lot until I got through to her, but one core value our parents taught her that she believes, and that she taught me as a child, is that helping others should always come before asking others for help."

For a reason that Anna didn't know, Donald began shaking with fury.

"I refuse to do any of this. I'm not asking for help for myself from you, or myself."

"But if you don't look out for yourself, you'll need it anyway," Goofy interjected. "We're not just going to let ya' be hurt because you're willing to be, or worse."

"Which will, I'll add, make you a liability," Donald snarled.

Anna couldn't remember, and didn't know, and couldn't imagine, whether or not reality, or she herself, existed.

"Donald!" Sora and Goofy both shouted, and Donald's eyes widened.

Anna forced herself to remember what existence, and she, were.

"I'm sorry," Donald said, and he sounded as though he meant it.

"But lay off of Yen Sid. He lost both of his own fellow Keyblade wielder brothers in arms, Eraqus and Xehanort. The former to death and the latter to darkness. His Majesty believes that Yen Sid made his own share of mistakes, and still is, including what you objected to. I agree.

"But you used words that His Majesty used when he realized that he'd made one of Yen Sid's mistakes himself, by asking Sora and Riku for help around the time Xehanort first started ruining their lives as opposed to helping Sora and Riku, and the people of the realm of light, himself.

"His Majesty feels guilty enough about that already. He doesn't need you to think badly of him and add to it."

Anna pushed away the impulse that told her that Mickey deserved to be thought badly of for what he'd done, and not done.

Mickey had learned from his mistakes, even though Yen Sid hadn't.

But that wasn't important.

She wasn't going to cry.

She had no justification to feel hurt.

Sora got up out of his seat, walked over to her, put his warm right hand on her shoulder, squeezed it comfortingly and reassuringly, and he didn't relax the squeeze.

"You're not a liability," he spoke. "You enabled me to understand Riku a lot better by what you told me about Elsa when we first met."

Anna wasn't going to cry from relief, as well, and she especially wasn't going to feel pleased or accomplished because Sora had said that she'd done something very important for him.

Then why was her vision watery now?

"You don't drag anyone into any messes," Sora was going on. "Even when you didn't understand how hard it can be to mop them up, it was because you were so inexpressibly convinced that they should be, or prevented from happening at all, that you believed that cleaning them up was as simple as snapping your fingers. Then, after you learned otherwise, you've loved and lived with all your heart to try to clean them up no matter how much hardship it puts you through, and to prevent them from taking place through similar means.

"You're not irresponsible. I can't just not remember meeting anyone who loves someone as much as you love Elsa any time in my life since I was born, I couldn't even begin to imagine the most frayed threadbare surface of the barest amount that anyone would be willing to love someone as much as you love Elsa. You redefined my whole awareness of what love and warmth and home and life are, and showed me that their light burns immeasurably more blindingly incandescent than the most radiant world heart."

Her cheeks especially weren't heating.

Then why couldn't she see through her tears?

"Don't let what the Foretellers want to do to Elsa and you get you down, or cause you to believe that you drag people into messes and you don't clean them up. Elsa and you are stuck in a very lousy darkness, yes. But there's always a light somewhere in the darkness, and if anyone can light up a mess that has lasted as long as theirs has, it's you."

"If anyone can help her, it's you."

Sora had been right then.

Under most circumstances, if she didn't believe that Sora was right now, and believe in herself, she'd stop believing in him. But this wasn't a matter of belief, or destiny. This was a matter of reality, and history.

She'd let Elsa be tortured in a night lacking even the oblivion for years and had barely been able to light Elsa's way out of it before it was too late.

Anna had almost been the reason that it had been too late because she'd selfishly gotten upset with Elsa for all the ways that Elsa had shut her out when Anna should have just cared about how Elsa was feeling spending true time with her for the first time in years and facing countless other people who she'd pushed away, and then because Anna had trusted Hans when she shouldn't have.

Anna had known how horrifically Elsa had been tormented for years, and she'd still intentionally and actively selfishly and apathetically almost murdered and destroyed Elsa anyway, and the rest of the people of Arendelle who Elsa loved along with her.

And then she'd left Sora to fly off and watch the girl he loved murder all the other people he loved, Kairi's father murder her with his own hands, and Sora die to protect them all.

While she hadn't returned Kristoff's love for her because doing so had risked hurting Sora too much.

How could you believe in yourself, no matter what anyone felt or thought or said or did, after that?

Especially when Elsa was in danger of losing all of her memories, and even her awareness that she'd once had them, that Anna had truly loved her and Elsa hadn't been alone in the darkness?

If she didn't believe that Sora was right about her, she wouldn't stop believing in him. She needed to not believe that Sora was right about her, otherwise she would stop believing in him, because he had flaws as anyone else did, and to believe that he was right about her and he wasn't mistaken about her due to the flaws that he possessed, was to believe that his flaws were so great that he'd genuinely misunderstand an anathema abomination unendingly and not unendingly incomprehensibly and comprehensibly worse than anyone who had lived since what was before existence had never come into being, for a decent person.

No wonder Hans must have been attracted to her because she must have been the one who had taught him how to betray people and their feelings and thoughts by abandoning them, and betray people and their feelings and thoughts by inflicting death and pain.

She couldn't protect, far less love, Elsa this time.

Or Sora.

Or Kristoff.

Or Olaf.

Or Sven.

Or Marshmallow.

Or any of the other people of Arendelle.

Or any of Arendelle itself.

Or anyone else in existence.

Or any of existence.

If she didn't light up this crazy eternal darkness this time, Elsa would lose all memories that she'd known true love, and anything but despair and loneliness for all of her life, or die.

Something similarly horrific would happen to Sora and Kristoff and Olaf and Sven and Marshmallow and the people of Arendelle and Arendelle and the people in reality and existence.

There was no way that Anna could light up this crazy eternal darkness this time, when Elsa, and Sora, and Kristoff, and the others, and all of the people of Arendelle and reality, and Arendelle and reality, were confronted with stakes like this.

Not after all that she hadn't said and done, and all that she had said and done.

Why was she refusing to rob the star of Kingdom Hearts from the Foretellers by opening the door to it with the Kye-Blade?

She should just stop denying the incontrovertible truth, submit to the darkness that she had no choice but to give into, by wielding it or by letting it wield her, and steal the star of Kingdom Hearts from the Foretellers by opening the door to it with the Note Blade.

She pushed the feelings and thoughts away.

She knew better than to believe that they wouldn't return this time, so she'd just need to keep doing so.

Kairi had returned to Sora.

That was proof that things could still work out even with Elsa and Sora and Kristoff, and the others, even submerged in this much black danger.

She couldn't give up, and even if she lost all proof that things could still work out, she still couldn't give up even then, or she'd abandon and betray Elsa and Sora and Kristoff, and the others, and their feelings and thoughts and who they were and what they lived for.

"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."

"I can't!"

"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."

"I can't!"

everywhereeternaleverywhereeternalcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcant'can'tcan'tcan'teverywhereeternaleverywhereeternaleverywhereeternaleternaleverywherecan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan't

Anna pushed this away, in addition.

"Whether that's true or not, I needed to hear what Donald said anyway," Anna said to Sora.

She wanted to take his hand off of her shoulder, but she knew that would hurt him, so she didn't.

She looked back at Donald.

"There's no need to apologize," she said. "At least you were honest about me being mistaken. I'd rather that you told me so honestly than sugarcoated it."

Donald looked unconvinced, but he nodded thankfully.

"And don't forget," Goofy put in, "You don't need to feel bad because Yen Sid let us down, to an extent. He did travel to the Keyblade Graveyard to protect His Majesty, and, by extension, Sora and Kairi and Riku and Donald and I, from Riku Replica's Heartless throng."

Donald scowled, and he crossed his arms defiantly and challengingly. "Because His Majesty was in danger. It's never about people, or even the world order. I don't want to challenge him to a duel and beat the stuffing out of him like Lea and Kairi do, and maybe Merlin, but while Lea and Kairi and Merlin might still have a little faith left in him, I don't have any left. He can sit comfy in his tower studying magic and matter, and the ethereal and the scientific, and wag his tongue all day and night about obeying the will of the stars and fate and staying out of what's going on, so his intervention, or telling other people what he's learned about the astral and the material," Anna pressed her lips together tightly and suppressed a surge of sadness, anguish, anger, and disgust at that, "cause nothing untoward to happen to the balance of space and time.

"But he's posturing. If he truly believed in that he wouldn't have advised His Majesty not to try to rescue Aqua for over eleven years," Sora's eyes went wide in shock and too many other emotions to count, "Because of the danger that that might put Mickey in. Nor would he have interfered in our battle with Riku Replica's Heartless. He would have remained neutral about those matters, as well.

"He cares about His and Her Majesties, you, Dale, Chip, Pluto, and I, but we're the sole people who really matter to him. His other friends are important in a reserved, distant way, and if any of us might get hurt, we take priority. We learned that we were wrong to care about the greater good more than our friends, but caring about our friends so much that you let anyone else, or the greater good, rot, is just as bad.

"Lea and Kairi are too polite enough to say it, or at least anywhere I've heard it if they've said it to each other after Sora faded away, but after what we learned yesterday," Donald must have been keeping track of time, so a new nightmare had begun, "This has gone on long enough.

"Yen Sid is as bad as Xehanort. The only difference between them is that Xehanort abandoned individuals for the greater good, while Yen Sid abandons the greater good for individuals. Otherwise, they're just the same.

"Yen Sid might even be worse.

"Xehanort might not have given fully into the darkness if Eraqus hadn't tried to murder him by attacking him from the back when he was just walking away to research the darkness due to the potential crimes that Xehanort hadn't committed, and Xehanort avenged this by turning two of his apprentices against him and then successfully cutting down Eraqus from behind. Eraqus learned that he'd been wrong in the process, and then Xehanort partially learned that he'd been wrong from what Sora and Eraqus' heart said and did.

"But did Yen Sid show up when Eraqus reconnected with Xehanort, directly or indirectly admit to, and apologize for, his own mistakes, and keep them company as they died?

"Nuh-uh. They weren't part of his exclusive coven, so they could partially patch up their argument and die in pain and alone without him."

"Come on," Sora protested. "He's told us a lot that we didn't know, and that put us in a better position to deal with Xemnas, Young Xehanort, Terra-Xehanort, and the genuine Xehanort. He felt bad that the Xehanorts sabotaged the Mark of Mastery Exam, and he was relieved when we called Aqua and Ven home."

Anna felt terrible about disagreeing with Sora after what he'd just said to her, but he was overlooking something vital that might hurt him sooner or later.

"Donald's not saying that Yen Sid doesn't care at all," she put in. "But, from what he said, so did Xehanort and Eraqus. The problem is that Yen Sid has a lot of knowledge and power, but he doesn't use it to protect anyone but the people who he's personally connected to. That's negligent, and apathetic, and exploitative, and irresponsible. When you're that learned and that capable, you have a responsibility to share your wisdom and knowledge and skill and power with as many people as possible, to try to improve their lives. You don't just hoard it, for those close to you, and for yourself.

"Yes, forms of wisdom and knowledge and skill and power are double edged swords, and if they're misused, they can kill people or hurt them, and not sustain them or help them. But the potential for something to be harmful when it can also be of great assistance doesn't justify not harnessing it in helpful ways. My parents kept needing to put their foot down about this to a lot of people in Arendelle who wanted Elsa banished or executed because her power might hurt them, and remind them that Elsa's talents have as much capability of protecting them and improving their lives as threatening them and worsening their days. Wheels move carriages and battering rams. Wood can be carved into houses and deadly stakes. Fire can warm up cold nights and burn down guild halls. Herbs can function as medicines and poisons. There's not a single scholarly breakthrough in history that can't be used to both help and hurt.

"Because Yen Sid is so learned, he should walk down out of his tower and tell people what he's learned, so that they can apply what he knows to preserve and enhance how they live."

Sora looked to be thinking that over, though he also appeared that he didn't want to.

Anna didn't cringe, or wince.

Sora would feel her do so beneath his hand if she did.

"You don't know the half of it," Donald snarled. "Yen Sid could have been one of the best Keyblade Masters of all history. You saw how many Heartless he held back with his magic. He can move the Mysterious Tower and the hovering island that it's on anywhere in the realm of light that he wants to much more quickly than the fastest Gummi ship can fly. He can separate whole seas and small oceans from one side to the other," Anna's eyes flew wide. Even Elsa probably couldn't affect that large an area with her magic, "From the surface of the waves to the ocean floor or sea floor. He parted thousands of square kilometers of Ivalice Zodiac from it into a separate space time pocket, the real version of the Symphony of Sorcery that you and Riku visited. He can give legions of inanimate objects hearts simultaneously, while fairies like the Blue Fairy can just vitalize one at a time." Sora's eyes widened another time. "He can't create pocket space times that follow a different flow of time, but that's because he wasn't interested in learning how to; if he did, he could likely create not a Secret Forest, but a Secret Continent.

"Maleficent is most likely trying to teach herself how to cast magic coeval with him."

Sora clenched his teeth together, but it didn't reach his hand on Anna's shoulder.

"If Yen Sid had remained a Keyblade Master, he could have defeated Luxu, Xehanort and his selves, Maleficent, and their other allies by himself, and little to nothing that you or Kairi or Riku or anyone else went through would have happened, so he wouldn't have even needed to let Aqua suffer in imprisonment."

"Why did he stop being a Keyblade Master, then?" Sora questioned. "Lea's Gummiphone stories said that he retired, so what drove him to give up the Keyblade?"

"That's just it," Donald scowled blackly, and Anna barely remembered to keep herself from stiffening as she felt every single drop of blood drain from her face.

No way.

Anna knew what Donald was going to say, and she reached up with her left hand, covered Sora's hand with her own, and gripped it with all the unromantic love and warmth and sustenance and protectiveness that she could feel and think of.

Sora blinked, but, thankfully, he wasn't aware what Donald was about to reveal, and at least a small amount of his innocence and faith in a better world would still last for a brief period of time.

"I didn't want to talk about this before, because I know how both of you, Sora, and Goofy, will take it," Donald said. "But this, too, has lasted too long. His and Her Majesties still refuse to believe this, but I know better. Chip, Merlin, and Dale have repeatedly given Yen Sid pieces of their hearts and minds after Sora faded away, and from what Yen Sid said to endeavor to justify himself, and what Merlin told me during this last year, I can tell.

"Yen Sid retired around the time of Vayne's death, and convinced Cloud to reverse his Bequeathing Ceremony and lock his heart from going through it twice, and he said it was because he believed that he could better serve the realm of light by studying the currents of space and time through researching the hearts of stars, both stellar and planetary.

"I've been skeptical of this for a long time, because, so far as I know, wielding the Keyblade shouldn't have prevented Yen Sid from researching star hearts and world hearts. It should have made it easier for Yen Sid to do so. Nor would ceasing to study stars and fate to wield his magic to defeat Luxu, Xehanort, and Maleficent have imperiled his purported altruistically important studies, too much.

"Yen Sid gave up the Keyblade, shut his heart away from taking it in his hand once more, and he didn't stop most or all of what happened since then from happening with the Keyblade or his magic, because he just didn't want to trouble himself with the responsibilities or effort that doing so involved."

Sora's eyes flew wide and his mouth opened, and Anna tensed.

But then, to Anna's shock and astonishment and surprise and uncertainty, a look of so much relief appeared on his face that it caused her heart to squeeze and contort painfully and twist in a steel hard vise.

His legs started shaking, and she gripped his hand tighter, and kept it that way, to attempt to keep him on his feet.

Sora gripped it back tighter, and kept it that way, himself, as tears brimmed in his eyes and spilled down his face.

"Now I understand," he breathed in such an incomprehensible amount of relief that it brought more tears to Anna's own eyes. "I did call Xehanort home sweet home out of the darkness, and give Kairi back her dad."

Anna's own mouth opened, and her own eyes went wide again.

Sora sounded as relieved that he'd protected and redeemed Xehanort, even after all that he'd said and done, as that he'd given Kairi her father back.

She needed to stop being surprised, to any amount, in any fashion, at how unbelievable Sora was.

"Even though he died without having a chance to reconnect with her.

"He might even have realized who Kairi was before he died."

Donald's beak opened.

"What do you mean?" Goofy queried.

"Xehanort gave into the darkness because hatred and despair, and revenge and exploitation, were all that he had left. You and Donald and Anna," Anna forced herself not to wince, "and I, and Kairi and Riku and I, and Riku and Mickey and Namine and Ansem the Wise, and Roxas and Xion and Lea and Pence and Hayner and Olette and Isa, and Ven and Aqua and Terra, strained and severed their connections, but they kept repairing them and keeping them together, no matter how many times they needed to.

"Eraqus and Xehanort and Yen Sid didn't.

"With them, it all went wrong.

"They severed their connections, and kept them apart. Yen Sid, probably due to Yozora stringing him around by tricking Vayne into giving into the darkness, lost sight of his responsibilities and duties as a Keyblade Master and the light, so this caused Eraqus to partially lose sight of connections and the light himself. Thus, because of how potentially dangerous Xehanort was, Eraqus tried to murder Xehanort from behind for sins Xehanort hadn't committed. Xehanort had just wanted to peacefully research Kingdom Hearts and the Kye-Blade, and maybe not even truly, if at all, research darkness then; but because Eraqus abandoned him and betrayed him, he lost sight of a lot of the light himself and truly started giving into darkness then, too. Then Luxu murdered Kairi's mom and Xehanort believed that Kairi was dead, so he gave in the rest of the way."

A chime that sounded like a warning rang from the board of buttons and keys and other contraptions at the front of the Gummi ship, and two more series of laser lances streaked out and incinerated a clump of asteroids in the Gummi ship's way into explosive rubble without anyone touching the controls.

"Xehanort believed that he'd lost everyone who he loved," Sora was going on, "Through betrayal and abandonment, or through death and bloodshed.

"So he believed that, because he was convinced that he'd lost everyone to betrayal and death, that was what having a heart meant. That's why he believed that darkness is the heart's true nature. In the end, every heart he loved descended into darkness, so he took that as meaning that was whence hearts came, and what they, and reality, were. So he was convinced that people who trusted the light were deluding themselves and hurting themselves, and he needed to harness the darkness to teach them otherwise to stop them from continuing to hurt each other and one another." Had it genuinely been wrong of Xehanort to try to do that? "He believed a World of hatred and apathy and exploitation and revenge where you seek to control destiny; endeavor to hurt people to protect them; try to trade an eye for an eye, a finger for a finger, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life; and attempt to compel them to do as you wish; were the means of keeping people safe and calling them home sweet home from hurt. He cut Kairi, and other people, down from the back because, as Eraqus, and Yen Sid, did that to him, that's how he felt that you enable people to pull through hardship.

"Maybe he even realized in the depths of his heart, if not consciously or fully consciously, who Kairi was as soon as he met her in person when we landed at the Keyblade Graveyard. So he became determined to strike her down from the back as Eraqus had tried to strike him down from the back because he felt that, by doing so, he'd at last give his daughter happiness by enabling her to be the reason that he finished re-forging the Kye-Blade, opening the door to Kingdom Hearts, and creating a New World that he believed would be paradise for all hearts and all people."

Anna knew that Sora wanted to say that maybe Xehanort had fully, and consciously, realized who Kairi was as soon as he'd met her in person, if not earlier or much earlier, but he'd been lost so far in darkness by then that even knowing that his daughter was still alive hadn't been enough to light his way out of the night and convince him that he didn't need to wield the darkness for her sake. And that learning that she was still alive might have even made him more determined to wield the darkness, because he saw it as a far better means of protecting her.

Anna understood why he might have felt and thought those ways.

But Sora was refusing to speak of any of this because he knew that Kairi would feel particularly horrible if anyone brought any of it up directly.

"One of the largest reasons that I made sure that I was the one who took on Xehanort," Sora was going on, "And that I didn't argue with you two not to accompany me in doing so, was because I knew that the others, even Riku and Mickey and Terra, were unwilling to see past their issues with him. Even Mickey was willing to seek revenge if someone he loved was hurt; as when you got knocked out in Radiant Garden, Goofy," Goofy jolted violently, "Or when Xehanort killed Kairi. So I knew that even Mickey might, at least a little, give into the darkness to defeat Xehanort. I was furious with Xehanort myself, but I'd learned what was wrong with being mad at people by the time Riku and I first beat Xemnas.

"It looks like I did the right thing for reasons that I've felt too discouraged to look at until now.

"Xehanort believed that, once I beat him, that I'd finish him off as Eraqus, and perhaps Yen Sid, if he'd been willing to combat Xehanort, would have, to try to inflict revenge on him for his sins.

"But I didn't.

"I accepted him with mercy, and I didn't dismiss him with revenge.

"I tried to light his way back to a world of warmth and kindness. And I made it clear that, if he could have been healed of his injuries after you two and I beat him, I would have been okay with it, and I wouldn't have even tried to stop him from living the life that he wanted to live afterwards if I'd been able to trust that I'd shone his way home and that he wasn't going to keep attempting to hurt people.

"That showed Xehanort that he'd been wrong to believe that hate and fury and indifference and dominance were all that there were to hearts and life and the World, and finished showing Eraqus how wrong he'd been as well. The others reached us then because I called Eraqus the rest of the way home sweet home out of his darkness. So that brought Eraqus to our side, and because of what I'd said, Xehanort was willing to listen to Eraqus now.

"Then Eraqus and Xehanort, and light and darkness, reconnected and stopped rejecting each other, and made peace and returned to loving and protecting and cherishing and caring for each other.

"All this time, I believed that I couldn't light Xehanort's way out of the darkness because he tried to ambush me when I stopped paying as much attention to him, and Eraqus needed to catch him when his body gave out.

"But I was wrong myself, about that.

"That was what finished convincing Xehanort that he'd been mistaken.

"Even after what Eraqus and I had just said and done, Xehanort believed that we'd reverse our stances if he still kept living by his belief in darkness, but we didn't, so that proved to him past any doubt that darkness wasn't the heart's, and the World's, true nature.

"I didn't end the Second Keyblade War, and the second war of light and darkness, by defeating my, and our, dark enemy.

"I stopped it, and made peace between Eraqus and Xehanort, and the guardians of light and the seekers of darkness, and the rest of we wielders of light and darkness with the exception of Yen Sid and Maleficent and Pete, and light and darkness itself."

Then Sora staggered, but he tugged his hand gently backwards to tell Anna that he wanted her to let it go before she could hold it even more tightly, and his legs weren't shaking any longer.

Anna's eyes flew wide, and she was aware that her lips weren't just curving up slightly in a smile now, but a wide grin, as she became aware what Sora now knew.

She let go of Sora's hand, grinned widely fully, reached up, and wiped away as many of her tears as she could.

"Xehanort did realize who Kairi was as soon as Eraqus and I finished reaching him."

Donald grinned himself now, and Goofy jolted violently.

"He wouldn't have been as happy, and at peace, as I can now tell that he was, at the end; if he hadn't.

"And he was smiling at me partially the same way Riku did when he admitted that he'd been mistaken to seek the darkness to try to keep Kairi safe. He didn't want to say anything about Kairi out loud, because he knew that that would hurt her even more, but as Riku did, he was asking me to do what he'd been too pained and sad and silly and mad not to, and take care of her as he hadn't."

Goofy was smiling as well.

"You got it," Goofy said. "Though Donald and I didn't figure out that Xehanort had realized who Kairi was until you brought it up. But Donald and I meant to tell you about the rest as soon as you revealed yesterday that you hadn't understood what you'd done for Xehanort and Eraqus, for the Second Keyblade War, for the two wars of light and darkness, and for light and darkness. We were trying to think of the best way to bring it up.

"How did you at last pick up on it?"

"How else? Basking in Anna's blinding incandescence."

Sora said it as though it was the most obvious and natural thing in all existence, in the same, and far more, heartfelt ways that he'd told her, 'If anyone can help her, it's you,' with the same, and far more, earnestness and purity and sincerity and honesty, as he'd said that, and without even gathering himself, and by just saying it.

The pain and the unimaginably incomprehensibly desperate singularity of black ebony starfire and pitch ivory night faded, though they remained as distant, muted, quiet, weak aches.

She had loved and protected and cherished and cared for Sora, as well as Elsa.

Even now, even in darkness as hopeless as this, even after what Luxu and Lauriam and Elrena and Yozora and the other Foretellers had done to all of them yesterday.

And Kristoff, too.

He'd have been devastated if he'd hurt Sora by her choosing him. As soon as he'd seen how enraptured she'd become with Sora, and how much Sora admired her, he'd gone to a lot of effort to keep from coming between them.

If she'd chosen him after all that he would have felt the same way she had for years; that his efforts to love and protect and cherish and be there for Anna had been futile.

If she'd been able to do all that, she could call Elsa and Sora and Kristoff, and Olaf and Sven and Marshmallow, and the people of Arendelle and existence, and Arendelle and existence, home sweet home out of the darkness.

Without seeking it herself.

"You kind of set off an eternal winter, and people who are rejecting your heart and you and your feelings and thoughts kind of set off an eternal darkness, everywhere," she spoke silently with her mouth closed. "Well, it's okay. I can just unfreeze it, and light it up."

Anna didn't care whether or not the doubt remained or returned.

If it did, she'd just ignore them.

Everyone was flawed.

Everyone had doubts.

It didn't matter that you had flaws or doubts if you didn't live by them.

She still wouldn't let herself enjoy traveling on Radical Dreamers, Unstolen Jewel through the realm of light and to other worlds until she was sure Sora, and Goofy, and Donald, had cheered up enough that she could risk distracting herself from them.

She hadn't left Arendelle to see other worlds, or to go on an adventure.

She'd left it to attempt to ensure that Elsa and Kristoff and the people of Arendelle and Arendelle itself didn't lose her, and each other and one another and the people of Arendelle and Arendelle, as a refuge and a sanctuary of love and warmth and safety and home.

And to attempt to ensure that she could give Sora and Donald and Goofy a refuge and a sanctuary of love and warmth and safety and home now that they'd lost theirs for the third time.

This wasn't about setting off on a new journey, or continuing one, or giving people love and warmth to return to, or light and home to return to, for others, and especially not for herself.

This was about setting off, and continuing, to bring love and warmth, and light and home, to Elsa and Sora and Kristoff, and her other loved ones, and other hearts and other people, and Arendelle, and all space and time, to them while they drifted and wandered stranded and apart from it.

"Thank you," she said to Sora.

"And thank you for naming this Gummi ship Radical Dreamers, Unstolen Jewel for me, too," she said, too.

"I'm very sorry for not thanking you for that when you first did. But I was afraid if I didn't let you have the last word about that, and leave as much as I could on your own terms, that it would hurt you more."

Sora grinned, and it was the partially open mouthed, closed toothed grin that he'd given her before he'd left Arendelle, but Anna's heart squeezed further and twisted further in a vise at how much uncertainty and agony was still in it.

"Then you're welcome.

"And then thanks a bunch yourself, and lastly, but not leastly, no problematic."

"We need to phone His and Her Majesties on the Gummiphone," Goofy interjected. "The Foretellers must have been behind Yen Sid, and thus Eraqus, losing sight of the light. They turned Yen Sid and Eraqus against their best friends while they still loved them. As Luxu murdered Kairi's mom to send Xehanort the rest of the way into darkness, Yen Sid, Eraqus, and Vayne were puppet weapons for beginning Xehanort's real descent.

"But it can't have just been to string up Xehanort. They'd have ignored two other people who they would have seen as extremely useful toys if they had. They had one or more other goals in mind for dropping Eraqus into darkness, and for Yen Sid, that we need to uncover.

"Eraqus is dead, so he fulfilled all of his roles, whatever they were.

"But Yen Sid isn't, and he hasn't even fully given into the darkness, as Eraqus did before Terra knocked him out of it, and Xehanort did before Sora and you, Donald, and I, and Eraqus, lit his way out of it."

Even after what Donald had just said about Yen Sid, he jolted violently and his eyes widened in terror, and he held out his hand to Sora for Sora's Gummiphone.

"Yozora and Luxu and the Foretellers have a plan in mind for tricking Yen Sid to fully give into the darkness," Goofy finished unnecessarily, because he knew that it needed to be said, while Sora quickly took his Gummiphone out of his right pocket and handed it to Donald, "As Xehanort and Eraqus did, and we need to prevent that, or at least stall it."

"Why Mickey and Minnie?" Sora queried as Donald turned the Gummiphone on.

"They're the only two people Yen Sid might listen to," Donald snarled in irritation, terror, worry, and fury. "He won't listen to us, as much as he does care for us. He'll just tell us that he's no longer part of the conflicts of light and darkness, so the Foretellers won't be able to break his heart. But he might pay attention to what Mickey and Minnie say."

He began pressing a sequence of keys, and then he snarled viciously and savagely and threw the Gummiphone to the floor.

"The signal was jammed," Donald snarled, and Sora jolted violently, his blood drained away once more, and now his whole body started shuddering and shaking and trembling. "That must be why Maleficent deployed such deadly Heartless, or the Foretellers did. The huge darkness of the space voyager Heartless is intended to block a Gummiphone's signals."

"No," Sora breathed in horror and terror, and more tears fell. "Kairi, and Xehanort, and Eraqus, and Yen Sid himself, deserve better than for Xehanort's and Eraqus' other best friend to be tricked into giving into the darkness.

"Not Yen Sid, as well. Why can't I give love and warmth and light and home and safety and protection to anyone?"

Anna had no choice now.

This would hurt Sora, and Kairi, but she finally needed to tell him the truth about what he'd done for her when he'd given her the strength she needed to believe that she could love and keep safe and cherish and protect Elsa, and light Elsa's out of the darkness to the warmth of home sweet home.

But before she could, Sora clenched his right hand into a determined fist.

"Enough of this," he said through clenched teeth, and, for the first time since they'd reunited in Arendelle's castle, his voice held all of the earnestness and vitality and life and strength and conviction and confidence and resolve and determination that it had during their first shared quest.

Anna couldn't breathe, or be sure that she knew or remembered what it was for her heart to beat.

She couldn't hope.

Sora faced Donald and Goofy, while including Anna in his gaze.

"They're not going to break my heart any further, or any longer," he spoke, and Anna forced herself to register and recollect what a heartbeat and breathing were about.

But she couldn't see him, or Donald, or Goofy, through the tears now obscuring her vision.

"Not while all of you need me, and want me, to be your friend, or love you in a different way.

"That goes for you, two, Donald and Goofy.

"You as well, Jiminy."

Anna started as a two-legged cricket with a green, humanoid face and head and wearing an officiary's or servant's formal garb and a top hat, jumped onto Goofy's left shoulder from inside his collar, looking as though he wished that he could have stayed inside it.

Donald glared at Sora, but Goofy didn't react.

"I've been tracing my feelings about Yozora's and Luxu's and the Foretellers' tactics and strategies while piloting, and I know how they wage war now.

"They don't treat hearts as bottles on a shelf, or trample on them.

"They treat the actual hearts as the shelves, and squish them.

"To Yozora and the Foretellers, hearts aren't toys to be dismissed or exploited, they're equipment to be rearranged or paid no attention to. They learn our weaknesses and strengths before they even launch their strikes, and they tailor their thrusts and deflections to how we feel and think within our hearts as opposed to our hearts and minds and bodies themselves, and impale us where, and how, we hurt the most, and for the longest amount of time. They don't want us doing what they say unwillingly; they want us doing it willingly, resigned to the conviction that anything and everything but obeying their destiny is futile, so we've even lost sight of any reason to challenge what they see as the heart's true nature.

"This isn't a full scale war, it's total war.

"They didn't just string up Xehanort to provide Kairi and I a backdrop for learning Yozora's lines. They did it because they wanted us to feel as accomplished and raised up into the skies as much as we could by defeating Xehanort, so when they pulled the rug out from under us we'd fall from that much higher in the light and land that much harder at the foundation of darkness, and we'd have even more reason to believe that anything but their roles are all for nothing. They turned me and Kairi and Riku against each other and one another without tricking us into ceasing to care about or disliking each other first, as Maleficent attempted to do with Riku, because she didn't want Riku to be hurt relatively too badly by seeing us as enemies and treating us as foes. Ava loved her best friends and other people so much that she, unlike the other Foretellers, wouldn't take her eyes off the light; so Yozora endeavored to, and may have, broken her heart in perhaps the worst way, through tricking her into becoming the person most responsible for ruining her loved ones' lives and the lives of everyone in the realm of light, as well as the realm of light itself. Luxu and Young Vanitas did the same to Ven, Aqua, and Terra. Young Vanitas used Ven's fears of being a liability to Aqua and Terra to convince him that Terra was going to abandon him and thus increasingly caused Aqua and Terra to distrust each other, without convincing any of them to cease to care about or dislike each other or one another ahead of time, so that Ven would lose so much faith in Aqua and Terra and himself that he'd let Young Vanitas turn him into the Kye-Blade.

"Xehanort himself was actually one of the reasons that this didn't work. He did want Terra to stop caring about, and feel and think badly of, Eraqus, at least, and two front wars are harder to win. Xehanort isn't willing to sink as low as Yozora and Luxu, and the rest of the Foretellers, are. Young Vanitas and Luxu most likely wanted Ven to believe that Aqua and Terra had fully betrayed and abandoned him, so when he returned to Eraqus at Xehanort's behest and Eraqus betrayed him and abandoned him as well, Ven would give into the darkness himself, defeat Eraqus himself, and then let Young Vanitas reconnect with him and re-forge the Kye-Blade. After which Aqua's destiny and Terra's destiny was probably to destroy the Kye-Blade and shatter Ven's heart themselves while they still loved him, and then give into darkness because they felt terrible that they'd done so.

"Yozora and Luxu most likely believed that Xehanort would fall so far into darkness that he'd want to ensure that Young Vanitas kept his memories when he removed him from Ven's heart, so Vanitas would be more capable of maneuvering Ven, Aqua, and Terra. Or Xehanort wouldn't remove him at all, and Luxu had been assigned to do all of Ven's, Aqua's, and Terra's maneuvering; with the exception of reconnecting with Ven; because Ven wouldn't have needed to merge with Young Vanitas to re-forge the Kye-Blade.

"But they underestimated Xehanort, as they did Vayne, who Mickey said was trying to defeat them, or at least keep them out of the realm of light or contain them.

"Yozora and Luxu broke Xehanort's and Vayne's hearts, but they couldn't convince them to give up all belief in connections, love, friendship, and trust."

Donald's beak was now hanging, and Goofy's eyes were very wide, while the cricket known as Jiminy looked shocked and surprised, but Anna gave Sora a proud, approving smile set in such a way that he'd hopefully know that she'd had no doubts that he was this sharp as soon as she'd met him.

Sora looked at her and smiled back in thanks, and then he looked back at Jiminy and Donald and Goofy, though he kept her in his line of sight again.

"Xehanort and Vayne refused to fulfill their roles," Sora went on, "Even though they held onto their hearts and selves with darkness and not light, and they sought black answers to how to establish connections and create New Worlds that could defeat the Foretellers.

"Xehanort had figured out, or learned, what Luxu was up to when he removed Young Vanitas from Ven, and just played along with it to try to convince Luxu to drop his guard. Xemnas almost certainly didn't, or I extremely highly doubt that he'd have let Luxu trick him into betraying his friends; and Terra-Xehanort after he lost his memories, and when he was just feeling and thinking from Xehanort's heart fragment, might not have.

"I extremely highly doubt that Xehanort's Heartless and Young Xehanort were as in the dark as Xehanort and the Terra-Xehanorts.

"Xehanort's Heartless refused to tell Riku and Mickey and I specifically how Ansem's other apprentices betrayed him and thus convinced him to give into the darkness, or even if it was just Ansem's other apprentices who betrayed him. This might have been because he believed that it was self-evident, but Xehanort's Heartless likes to be wordy and eloquent to the people he talks to, perhaps much more than any of the other Xehanorts. So I extremely highly doubt it. Xehanort's Heartless wouldn't have passed up on a chance to wane poetic about what his betrayal constituted if we'd known what it meant, especially because he was letting his walls down and truly connecting with Riku and Mickey and I for the first time. Xehanort's Heartless was attempting to shield Riku and Mickey and I from what that betrayal had involved; he believed that it was better that we didn't know. Luxu or Yozora or one or more of the other Foretellers hurt him in ways that we're not yet aware of.

"Young Xehanort was fully resigned to living out a dark destiny, unlike Xehanort, Xemnas, the two Terra-Xehanorts, and Xehanort's Heartless.

"He wasn't in the dark. He knew what Luxu was up to, perhaps because he'd learned it from Xehanort's Heartless.

"But Xehanort himself refused to be strung up. He strung up Yozora and Luxu and the Foretellers back, to maneuver them as puppets as they were playing and using him, and to try to control their destiny as well as ordinary destiny.

"He wiped Young Vanitas' memories, or removed Yozora from Ven's heart when Yozora and Luxu hadn't wanted him to, to stop or stall or hinder him and Luxu. As well as to save Ven from becoming a Heartless; Vanitas very likely planned to trick Ven into giving into the darkness the rest of the way of his own choice once the Neoshadows pounced on him so he'd become a Heartless with his memories and form intact like Xehanort's. Then Vanitas, whether he separated from Ven or didn't, would use his influence over Ven's heart and body and mind to enable Ven to keep his body even though he was a Heartless. But Xehanort still cared enough about his apprentice to keep that from happening, and he saw the child Vanitas as enough of his own person he taught Young Vanitas to assume Xehanort's less painful version of a lousy identity and not seek his lost memories. Then he sidelined Luxu as much as he could and assigned Young Vanitas, and later, Maleficent and Isa, the responsibility of serving as Xehanort's secretaries and advisors. Xemnas had enough of Xehanort's memories back by the time Terra-Xehanort separated into a Heartless and Nobody that he knew that Luxu couldn't be trusted enough to be assigned as Xemnas' second, so he gave Isa that position, and Xehanort's Heartless, or at least Xemnas, partially through letting Luxu retain a decent amount of influence in the first Organization Thirteen when he could have sidelined him as much as Demyx and thus keeping Luxu busy, shoved Luxu as far away from Maleficent and her Organization Six as he could.

"Xehanort's Heartless went so far as to admit that he'd been posturing about darkness the whole time, so, even if Luxu or someone else did one or more other horrible things to him, Riku and Mickey and I beat him.

"But Young Xehanort really bothers me. He didn't care about anything but destiny, just as Yozora and Luxu want their puppets to feel and think and talk and act, and Luxu talked down to Xemnas and set him up against me because he didn't like how Xemnas was actually listening what I was saying about Nobodies being capable of feeling more than pain or sadness or anger or hate. He wanted Xemnas' pride in his Nobody abilities humiliated a fourth time to keep Xemnas' eyes off of the light. But Luxu didn't treat Young Xehanort as an inferior, and Lea said in his Gummiphone catch-you-ups that, when Young Xehanort freed himself from Mickey's Stopza, Mickey referred to him in a way that he's seen reason not to inform the rest of us about. Mickey knows something rotten about Young Xehanort that none of the rest of us do. Young Xehanort also saw reason to try to get under my skin after I at last finished off Kairi's Lich, but none of the other seekers of darkness involved themselves in our face off with the Demon Tide and the Lich.

"Young Xehanort is what Xehanort himself was supposed to become in accordance with Yozora's script, but Xehanort refused to submit to that destiny. He figured out, or learned, an amount of what Yozora and Luxu are striving for, so he ensured that Xehanort's Heartless knew about it when he split into a Heartless and Nobody, and then he sent Xehanort's Heartless to the past to warn his younger self about it as one of Xehanort's contingencies for defeating, shutting out, or containing Yozora and the Foretellers. But this backfired. Xehanort's Heartless wanted to defy both Yozora and Xehanort, if not all of the darkness, so Luxu or one or more of the other Foretellers broke his heart, and then he willingly or unwillingly assisted Luxu or Yozora or another Foreteller or Foretellers in breaking Young Xehanort's heart so that he'd submit to becoming the seeker of darkness that they wanted him to become. Then he was supposed to supplant Xehanort and carry out the role as Yozora had designed it for him. But Xehanort knew that Luxu had outmaneuvered him with Young Xehanort while he was undergoing his recompletion ended, so he told Xehanort's Heartless and Ansem, if not Isa or one or more of his other seekers, to convince Young Xehanort to defer to his future self, so that he'd lose his memories of the future when he returned to the past.

"But Young Xehanort can't be both down and out. He'd learned how to Formchange No Name in multiple ways, while it looks like Xehanort didn't unlock a single one of No Name's Formchange capabilities. Yozora and Luxu can't have been willing to see a supposed toy as valuable as Young Xehanort as useless now. He's just down, but not out, and Xehanort didn't fully fulfill his destiny when I beat him. Yozora and Luxu want Young Xehanort to voice over Xehanort's lines.

"Xehanort further sidelined Luxu even further in the Real Organization Thirteen, and treated Luxu as mostly expendable baggage, but he knew better than to cast him aside as a benchwarmer; that would have left Luxu with too much freedom to outwit Xehanort. But otherwise, Xehanort wasn't willing to take as many, or any, other chances with Luxu at that point, after Ven and Aqua and the rest of us had beaten him three times by then.

Sora pressed his lips together.

"I'm way more worried about why I found Kairi's heart fragments inside and outside of his portal. She might not have just been a contingency to ensure that we put the finishing touches on the re-forged Kye-Blade.

"Xehanort might have had one last contingency that we don't know about in mind for her.

"Or maybe even one or more that we don't know about yet.

"Vayne, too, in addition to the 'that time' contingency that Mickey won't tell us about.

"The unknown New World of Synchronicity Perceptual is something so nightmarish that it's anathema to even seekers of darkness, and I doubt there's a single depth of darkness to which Yozora and Luxu and the other Foretellers, including or excluding Ava, won't plummet to attempt to bring it about, with the exception of how they'll treat Faerie, and maybe Luxu.

"We can't let them get to us any more than they already have.

"Donald, one of your greatest weaknesses is that, while you value letting people know how you're feeling and thinking, you won't stand up for your feelings and thoughts when you, or others, are confronted with rules." Donald looked like he wanted to open his mouth, but he just nodded, though irritatedly. "I'm not going to get into another argument with you about the world order, but whether or not you want to believe in it, don't let values hold you back from being yourself, so long as you're yourself in ways that don't hurt people.

"Jiminy, stop leaving things to us unless things really get bad because you're afraid that we'll see you as too pushy like Pinocchio did and drive us away like you did him, and that will make things worse. We're not Pinocchio, we're ourselves." Jiminy's face became a mask. "And, while I can't speak for Donald or Goofy or Anna, I don't care how pushy you are about me not hurting people as long as you don't try to hurt me in the process of rebuking me for saying doing something bad, or reminding me to do something decent." Donald slid his eyes away from Jiminy, which Sora and Goofy saw and got him slight glares, but Goofy nodded to show that he felt the same way as sorry. "And I do know that Donald, just as the rest of us, don't want you to merely chronicle our good deeds so people can know us and remember us by them and learn from our examples, and they'll immortalize us. Whatever Donald's ego takes issue with, we want to learn from you, and yours and Pinocchio's legacies and examples."

Donald nodded at this, but Jiminy didn't, and his face didn't stop being a mask.

He just inclined his head, though he didn't hop back out of sight.

"Goofy, I can tell now that you're not just trying to complement and compensate for Mickey's and Donald's and Jiminy's and my, and most likely Minnie's, flaws, but Yen Sid's, too. By, unless we really need it, refusing to stand up for what you feel and think and perceive and believe in," Anna suppressed the surge of self hatred and despair and guilt and horror and terror and agony that she hadn't realized this after what Donald had said about Yen Sid, "because you're afraid that we'll see that as you bugging us to help others on your terms, rather than you asking for help. Mickey and Jiminy and Donald and Minnie and Yen Sid and you yourself, and I, have own own qualities and flaws and light and darkness that the seven of us can't imitate, and we all have things that no one else have as each other's, and one another's, friends. You're your own person as much as any of us. As with Riku and Donald and, to a lesser extent, Jiminy, you'll be happier and better able to be a friend to us if you're yourself.

"I also advise you not to start doing this with Anna," Anna kept herself from wincing, "Or stop if you've begun."

Goofy thought this over, and then he faced all four of them and nodded.

"I'll give it a shot," he said. "And I'm sorry to all of you if how silly I was before caused you or anyone any problems, or hurt you or anyone else."

Donald flapped his left hand dismissively. "What I told Data-Sora about how I like being dragged into my friend's messes is true for all of my friends but Yen Sid. Yes, you could have done better, and it bothered me at times, but so what? Live and learn."

Anna refused to let Sora carry the burden of endeavoring to spur his friends to overcome their weaknesses by himself, so she nodded quickly and firmly.

Sora's eyes widened, but then he smiled gratefully at her and did the same.

"I'm of a like heart and mind," Jiminy said, and then he grinned in a way that showed that he was pretending to be someone else who Anna hadn't met without seeing it as not being himself. "Got it memorized?"

"Way ahead of ya'," Goofy smiled back.

Sora now turned to look mostly at Anna, and Anna forced herself to meet his gaze.

She knew what this was going to be about, and that she now did need to tell Sora the truth, and she refused to hurt Sora by running from it.

"Can I please talk to Anna alone now?" Sora asked.

Jiminy nodded. "Sure thing," he said. "Let's shoo, all of us."

Goofy turned and headed for the door in the back of the cockpit while beckoning with his right arm for Donald to follow, and then opened it for Donald and stood aside to open it for him. Donald left the cockpit through it, and Goofy followed with Jiminy on his shoulder and closed the door.

---

Anna didn't know whether or not Sora wanted to speak up first, so she held her tongue as he knelt at the left of her chair do they were closer to eye level and then, his own tears at last no longer brimming or falling, he turned to look at her.

"Can you please not?" Sora asked. "I can't love you the way that you want me to regardless of whether I'm with Kairi or not, and Kairi probably knows that I received her message by now, so I see us as back together now.

"But I'm still your friend, and I'm still here for you, and that will never change."

Anna made her face a mask, and then she reached up and brushed away her tears to the extent that she could.

This looked like as good of a place to begin as any.

"I know that I can love you the way that Kairi does," Anna said, and Sora didn't refrain from wincing. He was fully aware that he couldn't fool her. "But I don't know. I don't want to talk about it unless it's relevant to what we need to discuss now, but I learned the hard way from Hans that you can't love someone that deeply unless you've gotten to know a person well."

Sora kept his face neutral.

"I have no doubts that the potential is there," Sora continued, "So I don't want you to feel or think for an instant that I see you as unworthy of as much love as I can give you in any way,"

Sora's expression of neutrality didn't shift,

"But I don't know your heart and mind enough to be able to extend that kind of love to you yet.

"I should be able to. You deserve it. Elsa deserves it. Kristoff deserves it. Everyone deserves it. I wish that the World was a kinder place where people could understand each other without having any misconceptions about each other, and connect as deeply as possible, as soon as they met. But that's no more than a whimsical daydream.

"I'm very sorry."

Sora grimaced.

"Do you remember what I said about how we're still connected even when we're apart?" he asked her. "I don't need all your love to feel cared for. I just need the love that you're willing to, and capable of, extending, as the imperfect person you are; friendly, romantic, or even as a surrogate brother, if you come to see me that way one day."

Anna pushed aside as much of the terror and horror of the concept of seeing Sora as a brother, and abandoning him and betraying her as she had Elsa, that she could, as far away as possible.

"And if you come to see me as a brother one day, I won't feel any less loved than if you see me as a friend or a boyfriend. Not with how much you cherish Elsa."

She wished that she could believe that Sora's acceptance of what love and care she could give him was okay.

"I'm the one who should apologize," Sora disagreed with what she'd said before. "I've known that Kairi had chosen me over Riku since the first time I reunited with her after the first time we departed Destiny Islands. We didn't get together until shortly before we reunited,"

That did not hurt. At all

"But I couldn't tell that you were starting to feel the same way. It turned out that you were right about how I'm smart, so that makes it even worse. I should have caught on."

"I made it a point to keep it from you," Anna informed him, and Sora's face became neutral once more. "I trusted you with my feelings, and I still do. I hid this because I could tell that you were in love with someone else, and I didn't want you to feel torn between fear that you were a bad friend to me because you couldn't return potential feelings, and feelings that I was just beginning to develop and that would take a long time to wholly manifest, and the person who you wanted to be with."

Sora's face lost its neutrality, and he looked understanding and sympathetic.

"That might have been another mistake. I just hurt you in the end anyway."

"It's fine with me," Sora replied, and he sounded as though he meant it, but that didn't reassure Anna the tiniest bit. "But I was learning to carry hurt then. If you'd told me, I'd have been able to deal with it."

"You kind–"

Anna ignored it, and looked Sora directly in the eyes.

"You're lying to yourself. You couldn't have carried that, whatever else you were learning to carry. It would have wrecked you. You love Kairi, and your friends, and whatever family of your own who you have, so much that your inability to return even likely potential feelings would have shredded you.

"And if you've learned to carry other hurt, why did you ask Donald or Goofy to murder you and commit suicide by their hands, and then say that you'd try to wipe yourself out from an afterlife?"

"Because I was – was"

But Anna was looking for his voice to waver even a small but as he said this, and though he attempted to conceal any uncertainty, his voice did waver a very minute amount as he said the second 'was.' Anna hoped that she was keeping her awareness of this from showing. Sora didn't need this brought to his attention now.

"– afraid that I'd hurt Kairi or Riku or Donald or Goofy or you.

"I–"

Uncertainty appeared, and he sighed heavily.

"All right. I won't lie to you, so okay.

"I learned to carry other people's hurt to try to keep them from needing to. I didn't learn how to carry their pain without it causing me to hurt a lot.

"I'll discover how to, though, sooner or later. You don't need to worry about that."

Anna reached out with her left hand and flicked her pinkie lightly into his nose, and then pulled her hand back.

"Don't be silly," she chided him. "If you stopped feeling bad, or sad, because others are, you'd stop being Sora. You're talking about stopping caring."

Sora brought up his right hand and poked her lightly in the own nose before pulling his hand back. "Like you are, you mean?" Anna smoothed her face. "You're convincing yourself that you can't."

He grimaced once more.

"So am I, and that's causing you and Kairi"

She did not care that he'd used her name before Kairi's. She did not

"pain in their own forms. In that case, I need to stop, and you need to stop, too. How about, in addition to not forgetting each other, we keep reminding each other that we know how to love the people who we care about?"

What in the stars was so hard about keeping herself from feeling embarrassed?

"Will it cause you to feel guilty that you can't love me back in both of the ways that I'm trying to learn to love you?" she questioned.

"Not any more than anything else," Sora answered.

Anna still didn't know if it was a good idea, but she nodded. "Let's do that, then."

"That leads me to another important matter," Sora responded. "I haven't brought this up yet, but I've seen what the kind of desperation that you have to cherish Elsa and Kristoff and I, and your other friends, can do to people. It can tug them in very self-defeating directions that just make things a lot worse for themselves and a small or large amount of others."

Anna masked her expression.

"Can you please stop that?" Sora asked. "Hiding what you're feeling. It's horrible to see you do that to yourself. One of the reasons that I've wanted to see you again, and spend time with you again, was to see how incandescently and vibrantly your feelings show on your face and in how you hold yourself, and move."

Then she wouldn't hold back the heat from her cheeks.

Sora's eyes widened as he at last saw how embarrassed she was to be around him and receive his love of friendship, but he kept the guilt that she knew he must be feeling out of his own facial expressions and body language.

"But at least you're haven't been hiding your feelings and thoughts that much when you talk.

"To return to the former problem, before I say anything else, I won't think less of you if you admit that you're considering giving into the darkness, or even if I can't convince you to stop considering it. That in mind, what you also need to know is that it's a bad idea.

"Riku, and another one of my friends, Terra, tried that. Even when you believe that it's okay to hurt someone to help someone else, you're still losing faith in connections, and you're still taking your eyes off of how to help people in one or more fashions. So you'll lose your full awareness of how to consider their feelings and your own, and keep hurting them and yourself because you don't understand how to avoid doing so, or increasingly isolate yourself from them and have no recourse left but to focus more and more on your own feelings. You won't help Elsa that much, if at all. Or Kristoff or I. You'll make things worse for all of us. To apply Riku as an example, say that you use the darkness to cut down people, friends or allies, or enemies or opponents, to learn a skill that will enable you to keep someone; not Elsa; safe. You'll have kept that person safe, but the person you protected will feel terrible that one or more other people were put through pain to keep her or him or it from being hurt.

Anna agreed with that much, but there must be ways to wield the darkness without hurting others to sustain someone.

"Dark impulses and thoughts themselves aren't bad. Riku and Kairi both know how to wield it by just accepting that it's there and looking past it to the light, thus harnessing those inclinations to help, not to hurt.

"But if you wield those impulses and thoughts to hurt someone, for any reason, it doesn't help people, or hearts, or connections, or even your ability to care about yourself.

"I've run into a lot of forms of darkness that look like they can at least teach you how to take care of yourself better by enabling you to become special and thus deserve people's regard or praise, but even those forms of darkness lead nowhere. People don't need darkness to be unique. They already are. Forms of darkness that you wield because they believe that they can improve your capacity to take care of yourself, and that appear to enable you to become special, just cause you to push others away and become alone, and that's all.

"Forms of darkness that appear to improve your capacity to take care of others mean doing so by choosing one or more people over one or more other people, whether in the ways that I just brought up, or others. It's also selfish; it's saying that the people you yourself value are more important than the people others value.

"There's always a way to a better answer. You don't need to hurt people to help people, no matter what's going on.

"So, can you please promise me that, no matter how terrible the danger of the Foretellers or Maleficent's Successor Organization Thirteen become, and whether or not you harness darkness in the future; you'll just accept it and look through it to the light and not hurt anyone with it, and you won't give into it and let it rule you?"

Anna refused to even consider lying to Sora.

Nor would she hide how she felt from her face and body.

At those thoughts, she became aware that she was still being oblivious, of herself this time.

The sole true justification that she had for not giving into darkness was because she didn't want Elsa and Sora and Kristoff to be hurt at all if she did, and her other friends and other people, to not be hurt too much, so whenever she was able to cherish one or more of them, it reassured her enough that there was a decent enough chance that she didn't need to that it was okay for her to consider continuing to walk in the light.

The rest of her justifications weren't even gossamer threads of hope.

They were just strings that she was clutching as though they were lifelines.

She hadn't pushed back her doubts in any way.

She'd just wrapped herself up in a web of those strings to keep the terror and misgivings away.

But if she denied this, she'd deny it to Sora.

Anna forced herself to smile bitterly, and even with what she'd just done for Sora and learned that she'd done for Kristoff, smiling bitterly was effortless.

"I'm not sure that I can believe that there's a better way," she spoke back, and now complete and absolute horror and terror appeared on Sora's face. Anna cringed, but she knew this was the truth, and she knew that she needed to say this. "I'm determined not to resort to amoral or immoral solutions, but I can't trust that that determination isn't a flight of whimsy itself. Even if it isn't, with Elsa, and you, and Kristoff, and my other friends and the people of Arendelle and elsewhere, in this much peril, can they afford for me to look for one? If there's always a better way to protect people and help them with the light, the same must be true for the darkness. And even if that's a fanciful whimsy, if the worst comes to worst, at that point, what do we have to lose by me trying?"

Each word was another stabbing and lancing coiling serrated anguish in her heart, and the tears were back in Sora's face, and as soon as she asked the latter question they spilled back down his face.

"I won't take the risk of causing more harm than help if things don't get too much worse, but otherwise I won't make any guarantees. You're not going to be able to convince me to have a change of heart or change my mind."

Anna tensed, though she refused to brace herself, and she didn't even bother trying to figure out whether Sora would respond to this in one of the ways that she could anticipate, or whether he'd surprise her once more.

"I'm sorry," Anna finished, "but all I'll promise is to tell Elsa and you and Kristoff if I choose to give into the darkness before I do so, so you don't worry about what I might do to others or myself if you aren't continually wary of me; and so, if I do give into the darkness, I don't do it behind your backs."

"From now on, for the indefinite future, unless I say so, I don't mean anything romantic with anything I say or do," Sora said.

Anna wanted to throw up at how she was disappointed that all that Sora did was turn her chair, pull her into his arms and her head onto his shoulder, and start rubbing her own back with soothing, reassuring circles of his own.

She had no reason to be disappointed.

As Sora was Sora, there was a chance that he'd have surprised her even now, but it was totally understandable that he had no idea what else to say or do.

She was indescribably measurelessly more revolted that she was partially relieved and thankful that Sora hadn't called a Keyblade and knocked her out.

"I suppose I'll need to be satisfied with that promise for now," Sora spoke, voice cracked and broken and agonized and asphyxiated with tears. "So here's mine in return.

"I promise you that I'm not going to stop arguing about this with you until I've convinced you to change your mind. And if you do tell me that you've made a self-destructive choice, I won't strike at you, but you will need to strike me down, or otherwise go through me, in order to hurt yourself, or anyone else."

The terror and doubt did vanish then.

"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."

"I can't!"

They were back, so blindingly obvious in everything that they meant that Anna couldn't believe that she could have still been clueless enough to truly push them away even for less than a second.

What was wrong with her?

She didn't bother closing her eyes as her own tears returned as strong as before.

And Sora would probably feel a minute amount better that she wasn't holding them back even that way.

Perhaps she could at least lessen the blows of what she'd just said to Sora, and refused to say, if she tried even harder than usual to tell Sora how she felt.

"I can't even have faith in the darkness," she spoke with anguished bitterness. "What you just said actually caused me to reconsider for a very short time." Sora sagged a small amount beneath her. "You believed in me, but I can't even believe in the light or the darkness. There's little to nothing inside me but the knowledge of what will happen to Elsa, and you, and Kristoff, and the others, and a lot of people, if I mess up this time."

They say 'have courage,' and I'm trying to

This was it.

She needed to talk about this now.

She didn't want to tell anyone about this, now immeasurably fathomlessly more than at any time before in her life, but Anna couldn't think of anything else that Sora needed her to talk about, so the time had arrived.

Don't think twice

Feel don't conceal

"And the terror that I'll hurt Elsa once again, and that I'll abandon her and betray her once again, and that I'm incapable of loving her and keeping her safe, and that she'll lose her memories of me and the love and warmth and safety and security that I was able to give her or die, and that no matter what I say or do I can't stop her from suffering through either horror. And that I'll do, or fail to prevent, something similar from happening to you, and to Kristoff, and to Olaf and Sven and Marshmallow and everyone and everything else who and that I'm supposed to love and cherish and keep safe and protect and call home sweet home and give a sanctuary to."

As though a dam had been wrenched loose, for the first time since Elsa had refused to open the door and let Anna into her room, or leave it and walk into the hall to meet Anna, all the agony, all the despair, all the self hatred, all the horror and terror, all the blackest hours of the night empty of even emptiness when she'd left Elsa entirely alone in the darkness, abandoned and betrayed and past the tightly closed and locked and sealed and barred door and walls of no return, came cascading and flooding out in a typhoon surging tidal wave tsunami that washed away and scoured clean everything and anything and nothing and no thing, all existence and non existence, all reality and unreality, all space and absence of space and time and lack of time, all the World and the void and the lack of the World and the gap of the void, all pitch ivory ebony and black night starfire, all creation and uncreation, all comprehension and incomprehension, all emptiness and the lacuna of emptiness, all expression and communication and inexpression and uncommunication, all never beginning and never ending, all that she remembered and didn't remember, all that she dreamed and didn't dream, all that she was aware of and wasn't aware of, all that she felt and didn't feel, all that she thought and didn't think, all that she knew and didn't know, all that had been and was and could be and hadn't been and wasn't and couldn't be her life, all that was and wasn't her body, all that was and wasn't her mind, all that was and wasn't her soul, all that was and wasn't her being, all that she was and wasn't, all that did and didn't comprise her, all that did and didn't define her, all that did and didn't make her up, all that did and didn't constitute her, all that was and wasn't her essence, all that was and wasn't her existence, all that was and wasn't what she was, all that was and wasn't her self, all that was and wasn't and had been and hadn't been and could potentially be and couldn't potentially be her heart, all that was and wasn't and had been and hadn't been and could be and couldn't potentially be her

---

"Elsa was never the one who gave people frozen cold," Anna barely registered that the bawling voice and tears were hers.

"All the pain she went through the whole time was all my fault, because I didn't know that she'd nearly killed me and knocked me into a coma with her ice magic. Her heart froze into ice itself because I froze it. She suspended Arendelle because I pushed her away. I spent years and years hurt and upset and dejected and mad because she wouldn't talk to me," Sora stopped rubbing her back so he could hold her with both arms as close and warm and tightly and protectively as he could without hurting her, and he pressed his cheek against her hair, "When I should have said or done something such as pestering Mom and Dad about whether or not Elsa was okay from the start.

"I destroyed her.

"For years.

"Because I was a whimsical flighty toddling infant who refused to care about or understand why her big sister didn't want to play with her and prance and cavort through rainbows and posies.

"And then, even after Mom and Dad, unknown to me because they actually did care about Elsa, I still refused to grow up, and I childishly trusted a silver tongued politician and believed that he loved me, and I loved him back, so let him use me as a puppet weapon of his own to set Elsa up and convince her to give up her will to stop him from trying to usurp the throne, by allowing him to trick her into firing an ice curse into my heart.

"Elsa had options. I had options. I could have reached Elsa years ago, before things got as bad as they did. But I just didn't want to make the effort to understand her or her pain. I just wanted to jump and run around in my comfortable little dream reality where nothing could go wrong, and turn blind eyes to my own sister's torment.

"Mom's and Dad's, too.

"Elsa didn't murder Mom and Dad.

"I did.

"Because I refused to reach Elsa.

"Do you want to know why I refuse to be responsible for myself any longer?

"Because I didn't genuinely care about being responsible for anyone else, even myself, for most of Elsa's life.

"I wanted to live in a carefree flighty reality so much that anyone and anything else could just rot and get lost, or even be tortured and just die.

"Yes, I cared that Elsa was suffering, and I worried a lot about it, but I chose my own pain about her shutting me out over hers.

"I let Elsa live abandoned and betrayed and despairing and hating herself for years for no reason than that I didn't want to inconvenience my coddled carefree empty-headed flights of fancy.

"Maleficent doesn't have a clue.

"She believes that she should condemn herself for causing her unborn daughter to die by causing everything to have been darkness from the instant reality started, so she can be alone in pain forever?

"Even my improvement on that, to cause all existence to not have been darkness but wholly unrestrained wild and haphazard chaotic energy so I don't just drift alone in the unending and endless emptiness absent of emptiness forever, but so I suffer as much as possible in every ethereal and emotional and mental and physical way someone can for eternity; wouldn't even begin to be a dot of a line of an outline of a flicker of a ghost of a phantom of a silhouette of a shade of a shadow of the most infinitesimal, most miniature, most minuscule, most microscopic, feather light brush of the barest surface of the thickest substance close to enough to start to atone for what I did to her, or to justify me continuing to be alive."

She could feel Sora's tears wetting her hair between his cheek and her hair, and how violently his crying was now wracking his body and breathing against her torso, but none of that reassured her at all, or in any shape.

But she'd hurt Sora even more if she didn't do what he wanted her to and kept hiding herself.

No matter what she said or did, she'd hurt the people she loved, especially the ones who she loved the most.

Could she actually do what she was imagining to herself if she got ahold of the Kye-Blade or Note Blade?

Not by casting the realm of light into darkness, but removing herself from the current dimensions of space and time and creating a new one somewhere else that would do to her what she needed and wanted done to her forever?

Sora must have realized what she was feeling and thinking in how she'd shifted, because he stopped breathing for several seconds.

"Always remember," he said, voice even more cracked and broken now, and completely, absolutely desperate with horror and terror and a desperate, begging plea. "You did love and cherish and keep safe and protect Elsa, and light her way home. No one else could have. And you'll need to go through me to lay a finger on the Kye-Blade or the Note Blade."

Anna wanted to retch as the pain and terror briefly flickered away once more.

Anna laughed sickly and bitterly. "Yeah, right," she replied. "Mom and Dad could have done it if I'd found out what Elsa was going through and given them a piece of my mind about it."

"Then they would have done it because you convinced them to," Sora disagreed. "And consider this. If you preferred chasing rainbows to caring for Elsa, why did you search for Elsa without Hans? If you truly adored kid's storybooks more than Elsa, why didn't you just let Elsa wander off to who knows where and play into Hans' hands even more effectively by arguing that the throne should revert to you and your assumed boyfriend because Elsa was now missing in action and unable to oversee her Kingdom?

"You could have done that, and Hans was almost certainly hoping that you would. He probably didn't believe that you'd actually look for Elsa, and trying to turn you against her was just a contingency plan if he couldn't trick you into seeking the crown, and thus enabling him to marry into power and then get you out of the way so he could rule without you being in his hair.

"Which also didn't work because you chose to love Elsa rather than let Hans pretend to love you, when you could have saved yourself over her."

Anna barked a single, harsh laugh.

"After I let things reach the point that I needed to choose.

"And you don't know what really happened. You arrived too late to see. I knew who and what Hans was then, and that Elsa wasn't fighting back, and that she almost certainly wouldn't, and that Hans was going to murder her. But I still wanted someone to protect me more than I wanted to protect Elsa at first, and I didn't turn to protect Elsa until I was barely even in time to shield her from Hans."

Anna at last screwed her eyes shut, but even with them closed, the vision of Hans standing before and above Elsa with his sword unsheathed, Elsa lying unmoving and uncaring and ruined and forsaken on the ice, remained gouged into the uttermost foundations of what constituted her.

"Even then," she wailed in broken agony and despair and self hatred and revulsion, unsure why she even cared enough about how horrific she felt about what she'd done to wail and not just tell Sora what she'd done, "Even when Elsa was wholly broken and had no hope left, I still turned my back on her and my eyes from her torment, until there was almost no time remaining to give her my love and cherish her.

"Nor was it Hans whose act of true love I wanted to thaw my heart at that time. Even after Hans taught me that you can't connect with people with that kind of love that easily, even though I'd just met you recently, too, and I knew that you really did care about me and, though I refused to admit it to myself, that you were already in love with someone; I wanted you to be my storybook knight in shining armor, and give me a Sunbeams and candy canes kiss, and thus chase all my fears and pains and Elsa's curse away and make everything all right again.

"I'm so sorry."

"I wouldn't have kissed you, but I would have given you my love as a friend," Sora responded, and while his words weren't surprising, he had reacted so quickly he must have once again done so almost without being aware that he'd decided to do it.

Anna didn't know why she couldn't throw up that she felt a good deal lighter because Sora had just told her that he loved her, even though it wasn't romantically.

What depths were left that she could sink to?

Beyond doubt ones that would horrify and terrify and revolt and disgust even Yozora.

"A hug would have been enough. Your sisterly love for Elsa thawed you. A hug from a friend who cared about you a lot would have had the same result.

"And before you tell me that I'm missing the point, that you shouldn't have sought your own salvation, so what if you were uncertain? You knew your capabilities, even freezing solid. You knew how much time you had to reach Elsa, and how long you could spend making your decision before you'd lose your chance to keep Elsa safe. If you were genuinely as selfish as you believe, you wouldn't have even been conflicted."

Anna remembered what breathing was, because Elsa needed her to hear this so she might be able to improve how she could be there for Elsa when she saw her once more, but she couldn't breathe.

"You'd have put most or all of your effort into looking for me or reaching Kristoff," Sora continued, "And by the time you realized that you needed to worry about Elsa as well as yourself, it might, or would, have been too late.

"For that matter, if you were as selfish as you believe, why was it Elsa who you wanted to spend time with you? Why didn't you compete with her as a rival sister to turn your parents' attention from her to you, when she was spending most of her time pushing people away and you had a good chance of doing so, and gain the familial company that you claim you wanted that way?

"What you were naïve about wasn't what Elsa was living through.

"What you were naïve about was why you kept trying to reconnect with her.

"You see your reasons for doing so because you just wanted to be happy playing fun and games, but I cannot believe that with as much as you do love Elsa. Like I said, if you just wanted to run through daydreams you'd have been glad Elsa was out of your life and sought the throne as Hans almost certainly wanted you to, content with him as a little child's knight in shining armor who would give you a happy life as a King by your side as Queen. But when Hans offered you everything that you believe you wanted, you turned him down and set out to light Elsa's way out of the darkness.

"Elsa's pain just hurt you so much that you lost confidence in why you continually endeavored to open the door to her heart, as she lost confidence in her ability to cast spells. You wanted her company because, though you lost the ability to believe in yourself so you didn't see this, you did understand how much pain she was in, so you wanted her to spend time with you so you could pull her out of her room and into your arms."

Anna wanted to believe Sora, but this time he was overlooking something.

"Then why didn't I badger Mom and Dad to spend more time with Elsa?" Anna countered. "They ruled Arendelle, and its castle. They had plenty of ways to open the door to her room whether she wanted them to or not."

"Because you were sharp like I was, though you didn't recognize it," Sora said back. "You knew that, if Elsa was pushing you away yet her parents were talking to her and it wasn't reaching her, that it wouldn't have made a difference if they spent even more time talking to her, and it might have made things worse if they pushed her too hard. And, though you lost your memory of Elsa knocking you out, you could tell that your parents, and maybe Elsa, were keeping something from you. You knew that blundering into what they were keeping secret the wrong way could make things worse in other manners, so you were aware, deep down, that you needed to attempt to reconnect with Elsa without involving them."

For a second, Anna did need to ensure that she remembered what breathing was, but then it stopped being a problem.

"I could have ordered a guard to break down the door, or used another method, if I'd been genuinely determined to reach her.

"And even if I didn't turn away from her intentionally, I still couldn't do anything but turn away from her."

"You wholly knew better than that," Sora responded. "If the sister who loved her ordered a guard to break down the door to her room, it would have terrified her and she'd have stopped trusting you.

"There's no way that you didn't apply every method that you could think of to try to get through to her. You didn't tell me what the argument at the coronation was about, but I'm sure even when you lost your temper then it was because you were mad that she'd hurt herself, not you.

"I know what you're going through.

"I spent a lot of time learning to stop putting Riku on a pedestal and attempting to live like he did, but because I'd found out by the time I did that Kairi was a Princess of Heart and a biased research paper by one of my friends said that Princesses of Heart supposedly possessed no darkness, I still put Kairi on a pedestal and I still kept trying to imitate her. Because of this, I didn't see how much dark pain Kairi was capable of being burdened with, and you know what that brought about yesterday.

"I didn't care for how Roxas had woken me up by merging with my heart, but because he was an unnatural Nobody and I wanted reality to be a happy go lucky place, I bought into Xemnas' lies and my biased friend's beliefs that unnatural entities presumably didn't have any hearts and they couldn't feel, and I didn't realize how much pain Roxas, or his Nobody friend Lea, or another mutual Nobody friend of ours named Namine, were in until months later. I didn't even know Xion was around.

"As soon as I discovered how much they were suffering I set about trying to take their pain away, but I let them go through months of needless torture before I clued in.

"That's a very large part of the reason that I almost didn't arrive at your side when you brought Elsa home."

Anna wanted to retch once again at the memory of how indefinably measurelessly it had twisted and distorted and bent and contorted and warped and inverted her heart, and agonized her, to see that Kristoff was the one who had arrived at her side to love her and cherish her and protect her and warm her freezing heart when she was nearly fully ice; and not Sora to reassure her that she could bring Elsa home when Elsa needed her far more than at almost any, if any time before, and to kiss her himself. And that though she'd looked hopefully and trustingly and faithfully and desperately for him to appear after Kristoff had, he hadn't, and she'd needed to call on his belief that she could help and love and cherish and protect Elsa on her own.

That did not matter.

Whether Sora returned her developing feelings of romantic love did not matter.

Whether Sora loved her as a friend did not matter.

What mattered was whether or not she could love him.

She pushed the memory, of how light and warm and buoyed and certain and confident and strong she'd felt when she had heard Sora run onto the lake and say her name, and he'd even said Elsa's before he'd said hers because he'd known she cared more about Elsa's safety than her safety, as distant as she knew how to.

And then, as distant as possible, the memory of how much warmer and lighter and more buoyed and protected and safe and cherished she'd felt when the cold had vanished from her heart and insides and limbs and skin and the first thing she'd become aware of was the warmth that she'd never stopped believing that Elsa had, and then, though she hadn't been willing to pay attention to anything else, she'd still seen Sora looking right at her.

"When I found out how much pain they," Sora was going on, "And Ven and Aqua and Terra, were in, and that Xemnas had lied to the Nobodies about not having hearts and put them, and a lot of other people, through around a decade of a living nightmare with those lies, I was horrified, and it really discouraged me. Then I got into an ugly duel with Xemnas that took a lot out of me to win, so by the time I disabled him, the combination of my emotional and physical exhaustion left me at Xehanort's and his cohorts' mercy, and Riku and Lea needed to bail me out because I'd partially given up, and I didn't have the will to get back up when I was tired and keep defending myself when I most likely could have. I'd been in worse scrapes before, but I'd gotten back up and defended Donald and Goofy and myself and sent our adversaries packing, but after what I'd just learned I felt too lousy to get up that time.

"So Xehanort tried to do something to me that drained me of a lot of my abilities, and that enabled the Real Organization Thirteen and Marshmallow to keep throwing me off of the mountain. If I hadn't given up I could have been right there with you when you called Elsa home, though you don't need to worry that I'd have blocked Hans myself. I'd have freed you from the curse, but I'd have let you intercept Hans while you still had the ability to do so with your icy arm and hand first; you and Elsa both needed it to be you who did that. Then, before Elsa believed that the curse was irreversible and before you'd spent more than a minority of seconds fully frozen, I'd have given you a hug and sped up you thawing yourself with your act of true love for Elsa.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there then."

That was not important.

"But a large part of the reason that I wasn't there then, and my abilities were drained, was because I was furious with myself for not having realized what Roxas and Lea and Namine, and Xion, who I'd just met though I didn't know her name, had been enduring, and that I'd just let it happen and I'd even been partially okay with it.

"I understand your pain.

"So please, let me cry for you, so you don't need to."

At least this time Anna was too upset for heat to reach her face.

"You hate yourself for letting Elsa suffer like that for so long, so you've convinced yourself that what you did was worse than it actually was.

"I can never believe that you'd have cared more about yourself than Elsa. What I can, and am willing to, believe in, and choose to believe in, is how blindingly ivory your love for her is.

"And you did love her, and keep her safe, because you never gave up on trying to reach her heart and bring her home, no matter how often and how long she pushed you away for all those years.

"She didn't give up all hope after she blasted you in the heart with the ice fragment.

"If she had, she wouldn't have waited for Hans to kill her.

"She'd have put an end to herself on her own, or used what little control over her magic she did have to die at your hands.

"But she didn't, and do you know why?

"Because, since you kept coming back and endeavoring to reach her with all your heart and bring her into the warmth and home of your love and light and heart and arms no matter how many times she pushed you away from her, or how many years she did it for; she knew, no matter how bad things became, no matter how hopeless things looked, you were still right out there for her, feeling for her and thinking of her and not forgetting her and keeping her close in your dreams; and that no matter how deeply she fell into the darkness, you would always be there to light her way out of it to love and warmth and kindness and home."

---

Anna

was that her name?

what was a name?

what was it to not know what a name was?

what was not knowing?

what was it to not know what not knowing was?

what was not knowing what anything was?

what was anything?

what was not knowing what was anything?

attempted to figure out what was going on.

Someone who loved her and didn't believe that she was an abomination who needed to suffer as much as it was possible to imagine known or new ways to suffer forever was holding her.

That person had just told her something important.

But what?

Why couldn't she remember what it was?

And why couldn't she remember who was holding her?

And why couldn't she figure out what was going on, or even what figuring out was?

Something flickered through the edges of her perception, and she recoiled from it with more horror and terror than she could recall knowing or feeling at almost any time before in her life, even as she reached for it with the desperation of a drowning person endeavoring to grasp a life raft that she was all but convinced it wasn't possible to take hold of.

Whatever the person had just said, whoever he or she or it was, if she figured out what was going on and remembered what was happening, she knew that it would obliterate her completely and absolutely and wash her away forever.

Because it offered hope, and she'd let someone she loved live without it for years beyond counting, and that person should have passed the point of no return where no hope could reach her, and she should have followed the person who she loved.

But that was why she needed to figure out what was taking place, and what figuring out was, and remember was happening.

Because if someone had just offered the person who she loved hope, she needed to take hold of it for that person.

And for herself as well, because if someone was still willing to love her after everything she'd done and hadn't done for all those years, she couldn't hurt that person by spurning that gift, and there must still be something left inside her that was worthy of having had that gift offered to her, so it must be okay to want to receive it.

Awareness and reality returned, and she knew, but she still could barely believe it, even though there was no doubt at all that what Sora had just said was all true.

"You're so good at kidding," Anna said, but, even though tears of fathomlessly indefinably exhausted relief were flooding her eyes behind her eyelids, there was a wider and easier smile on her face than she could recall having since before she'd even known what smiling was, and she had no idea if it was possible to stop smiling like that until she died. "If that works for me, it works for you yourself, you know.

"I've wanted to tell you that for a long time. I brought Elsa home myself without you there, so I've known since then I had the capacity to do so all along, but you gave me the courage to believe that I could, so I didn't even truly need to choose between Elsa and myself. Everyone, even Elsa to an extent, just thought I was a silly little girl who didn't understand reality or life, and you're the only person I've met in my life who didn't believe that once, and believed in me wholeheartedly as soon as you met me.

"I haven't met anyone else who feels and thinks the way that you do about people.

"I can tell that you're right, and that I wasn't once genuinely trying to look out for myself, just for Elsa.

"But I can also tell now that I've lived without hope for just as long as her, and when I met you, you gave that back to me.

"You did for me what I did for Elsa.

"You melted my frozen heart with the warmth of your love.

"You most likely did counter Elsa's ice fragment, by running onto the lake and saying Elsa's name and mine, but because you didn't actually reach me, my own love for Elsa defrosted me first.

"Thank you, for all of it.

"Reality isn't rainbows and fairy tales, I know that now. The belief that life and the World are nothing but laughter and kindness where dreams can always be attained if you strive hard enough to grasp them, people will never fail to support each other and one another no matter how hard things become, love and friendship will overcome all adversity, and all problems have a solution and all questions to the dilemmas of connections and life have an answer, is just a self-deceptive prayer longed for by people whose legs and feet and hearts and minds haven't yet been crippled by hardship. Once you discover that other people, and you yourself, can feel pain, you learn that connections and hearts and life and the World are anything but dreams that can always come true, and that hearts and reality are mostly just sources of pointless harm that you need to struggle through without accomplishing anything to cause doing so to be worthwhile, because if you don't, the people around you and elsewhere, and you yourself, will be worse off. And because the pain of being here in existence is so harmful, there's no end to the people who reject and dismiss each other and give into the darkness in order to cling to what scraps of happiness they can keep or acquire, for others or for themselves, and refuse to support each other and one another, or understand each other and one another and other people's feelings and thoughts, or even their own. They thus perpetuate the pain, and spread it further, and the hearts around them and elsewhere and in future generations react the same way to the pain and perpetuate it and spread it themselves, and the cycle continues.

"No matter how sweet, all dreams must eventually fade into the remorseless, relentless light of day.

"But you're different.

"Because your loved ones and friends and other people need you, you refuse to let anything keep you from trying to cherish and support others, or trying to understand them; you won't reject anyone, no matter how determined the other person is to reject others and how deeply he or she or it has given into the darkness to do so; you refuse to allow any pain or ruthless lesson about how painful existence is to cripple you and prevent you from trying to care for people; and you never fail to find a light in the night, even when it's so faint and distant it can barely be discerned.

"If anyone can break the never ending spiral of death and hatred and pain and rejection that Lauriam and Elrena talked about, and light the World's way to a realm where connections and hearts are simple and clean sanctuaries where facing your fears without thinking twice will enable people to realize their dreams of a better tomorrow together with each other and one another more often than not; and where people can learn not to reject each other and one another, and understand and support each other and one another and their feelings and thoughts and hearts and minds and overcome hardship and attain love and hope and warmth and laughter that aren't fairy fantasies and that will last; it's you.

"Just by being yourself, you enable people, and their hearts, to receive or fulfill their dreams.

"Can you please believe that yourself?"

"Okay," Sora responded, and he didn't sound uncertain about whether he should do so.

"Then if you don't need me to help out on," she could justify saying the name now, but she was now too exhausted to enjoy doing so, or being on the Gummi ship, "Radical Dreamers, Unstolen Jewel, I'd like to sleep now and dream of you."

Sora brought her away from him and pulled back, and she pushed herself the rest of the way back into her chair, but she was so exhausted that she didn't even want to open her eyes.

"That's fine by me," he reassured her. "But don't forget that I'm out here for you the whole time, as you were for Elsa."

"That's one thing that I'll never dream of," Anna said back, and then she leaned her head back against the headrest.

Anna finally had enough reason to be assured that Sora would be relatively all right for the time being, so she let her attention drift so she could fall asleep easier.

But she still grinned widely as she heard him cry, "Keyblade Heroine Number Four, welcome home sweet home to the team of half-pints!"

.

"Take her back to a world with kindness, a world with warmth!"-Shinn Asuka

GUNDAM SEED DESTINY:

Phase 30: A FLEETING DREAM