igrab
in
grabi_hands
☄ When the Galaxies Crossed • Quorra/Aqua
When the Galaxies Crossed
Quorra/Aqua
• 2,600 words
• Kingdom Hearts and Tron, not really a crossover of course
• Sam/Sora/Rinzler, Junior/Riku, Axel/Ven, and Terra/Saix implied
• I have a feeling I'm going to be writing a lot in this verse.
Dear god, I was terribly lost
When the galaxies crossed
And the sun went dark.
But dear god, you're the only North Star
I would follow this far.
I would follow this far.
Oh, so this was Radiant Garden.
Quorra's eyes were round and owlish and she held tight to Sam's hand, who was holding onto Rinzler's hand who was holding onto Sora's. Up ahead, Junior and Riku were talking in low tones - he'd been here before, with Sam, with Riku and Sora. Nothing had been the same since Sam had been chosen as a Keyblade bearer.
It was a really beautiful place. He said he'd been training somewhere else, sometimes even on the Grid, with a program Junior and Riku had developed. He was still getting used to it, the Keyblade thing. He wasn't much of a weapons guy, but he was getting there, and he'd gotten good enough to be able to take Quorra with him, so that was something.
And this was exciting! She hadn't been back on the Grid since she'd gotten out - no no no, too much to do, too much so see and feel and taste and touch and smell! She thought it would be like going back, the way Sora talked about it. It wasn't, not at all. The in-between place, the nothingness - that was a little like the Grid. She didn't like it. But Sam's motorbike-shaped spacecraft had gotten them here no problem, and she could breathe again now.
Her hand loosened its death grip on Sam's. She wanted to run, to go stick her nose in the flowers and wet her hair in the fountains. It all looked so beautiful, and she did, because no one had told her she couldn't, right? I mean. She should probably wait, but no one was paying her any attention.
It didn't make her sad, exactly. Not really. Flynn had gone home to Alan and that made her happy. Sam and Sora had separated Tron from Rinzler and Sam had taken Rinzler on as his pet project, and that made her happy, too. Sam loved on remorselessly, Rinzler loved back, and the both of them loved Sora so much it was like her skin was full of something gold and light and wonderful. That made her very happy. And Junior, Sam's best friend, and Riku, Sora's best friend - they'd found each other, too, and she didn't even need to know them to know that it made her happy.
So she couldn't, logically, be sad. But she wondered sometimes, if being an ISO meant that she would always be that kind of alone.
Up the path, she heard a door slam, then the sound of hurried footsteps. She quickly yanked her hands out of the flowerbeds - dirty already, whoops, and tucked them behind her back quickly as the feet came closer.
She was shocked to realize that she recognized them.
The tall one, that blond man with the green eyes, he'd been there. One of them. Her memories of the Grid were beginning to fade a little, which Sam had ruefully told her was a side effect of being human. But she could remember him. The way he'd appeared suddenly one day, looking so lost, and this was well before the Purge, while they were still wandering aimlessly and timelessly through the rolling expanse of raw data. They'd all appeared - the huge one with the craggy face, the little slim dark one, the man with the pink hair who talked about roses and the others - they were all there. Here. They'd drifted together when they'd appeared in the datastream, but milled, like all of them, lost and confused. They were here. What. This was.
"Axel!" Sora cried out, his voice loud and blissful. He ran towards the group, all but leaping on one of them, a skinny guy with a bright shock of red hair and little purple diamonds under his eyes. Quorra could remember those - they'd glowed, back in the Grid.
The man's face lit up so bright that it almost looked painful. "Hey, short stuff," he purred, catching him and swinging him around in a circle as the other men shifted and moved about, introducing themselves and giving Sora some strange looks - wary, relieved, grateful. She wanted to know what had happened. She wanted to know everything.
"Not so short anymore," Sora was saying, and Axel just ruffled his stupid-spikey hair.
"Naw, you're gonna be short forever."
"Sora?"
Quorra had been inching towards them without even realizing it, so she jumped when she heard another voice. This one wasn't familiar, not a bit, but oh. Oh, he looked just like Sora. The eyes, anyway. The eyes were exactly the same.
There was that smile again, on Axel's and Sora's faces both. "Roxas!" he squeaked, and the young man just laughed.
"C'mon, it's Ven now. You know where Roxas is."
Sora stuck his tongue out at the boy who could be his twin. "Nuh uh. I gave him back."
"Yeah, sure. Who's that?"
And finally, they noticed that Sora wasn't the only one here.
"Oh! These are my friends." His eyes fell on Sam and Rinzler and he blushed, stuttering, realizing that wasn't quite enough this time. "Er- basically. Sam. Rinzler. You know Junior and Riku. And this is Quorra."
Axel was looking right at her, looking right through her. He licked his lips. "Yeah. We've met."
She wanted to turn away, to press her hands together and look up at the sky and say nope, nope, that wasn't me, I wasn't an ISO, I didn't watch you die at the hands of Clu's minions while I was able to survive. Didn't happen.
"Really? How? Was it in the darkness? After - y'know, everything? What happened? Is she a Nobody, too?"
Sometimes - sometimes, the things Sora said were a little, well. Weird. He only called it the Grid if they were in the city; the outer lands was always 'the darkness', and she'd heard him ask, once, if programs had hearts.
Axel shrugged one shoulder. "Fuck if I know."
The group was thinning; Junior and Riku had disappeared into town with the bulk of the castlefolk, leaving Axel and Ven and a boy with sea-blue eyes and a fauxhawk and an older guy, blond and beardy and pierced. They looked pretty wrapped up in each other, though, leaving Axel to stare Quorra down.
She shifted foot to foot. "I'm human." She was, damnit. She'd been humanized. De-programmed. She was human.
Axel smirked. "I know, sweetie, but that's got nothing to do with the state of your heart."
"Leave it, lamebrain." Ven jogged the few steps down so he could punch the redhead lightly in the arm. "Anyway, you know Terra hates that word. It's not accurate."
"Accurate, smraccurate," Axel growled. "Whatever you want to call it, I don't have it."
Ven smirked. "What, a brain?"
Just as he was about to respond, the castle doors opened once again, and three more people came out. They were also all familiar, albeit in different ways.
The first one, with the blue hair to his waist and clutching an armful of books, was the last of the ISOs to arrive before the purging had started. He'd been beautiful when attacked; he was one of the few reasons they'd held out so long. Quorra had only ever seen him from a distance. She'd never gotten his name. The other man - no, he wasn't familiar per se, but there was something about him that was telling her she'd seen him before. The dark skin and white hair was striking; memorable. But she couldn't quite pin it down, and he was smiling warmly, looking down at Axel and Ven and Sora with a very pretty smile that light up a pair of deep blue eyes.
There was a girl, though. On the white-haired man's other side. Quorra had only seen her once - walking in the street, passing so close she could almost smell her, if smells existed in the Grid. But she almost had, hadn't she? She'd known she wasn't a program, wasn't even an ISO. User, Quorra thought suddenly, now understanding why the experience had tugged at her so. Like Flynn. Like Sam. User.
"Of course Axel has a brain," the man in the middle drawled, "he thinks with his - "
"Manners," the girl said, though it was fond. Warm. Low. Oh, she was pretty. Blue hair, just like the man on the other side. So, so pretty.
Said blue-haired man chuckled. "Like you're one to talk, sir."
"Mmm." He seemed to be contemplating something, off in the distance. Maybe the other group of... Nobodies, were they? Or maybe he was just pondering the clouds.
Ven snapped his fingers twice, grinning. "Hey. Ter-bear. You missed Riku."
"Did I?" He looked so put out by this that Quorra laughed, she just had to, and the newcomers turned to her, surprised.
"Oh! This is Quorra," Sora said, stepping into the tension with his usual quick smiles. "She's Sam's friend, from the Grid. Or, she was. We got her out," he said, looking immensely proud of himself, and the girl with the blue hair chuckled.
"You got all of us out," she said with a quiet grace, and Quorra only liked her all the more. Especially since her eyes were still on her, never wavering, steady and blue even though it was Sora she was talking to. "Hey, Terra - you want to go find Riku, right? I can take Quorra around town."
Terra looked immensely relieved, and, if she were honest, so did Sam and Sora. "Yeah, I should really be checking in with Leon..." Sora mumbled, and Sam said something about a cloud and sparring. Rinzler would go where Sam went, and the blue-haired man, it seemed, was following Terra.
"I'm Aqua," she said, and when Quorra held her hand out for a shake, she turned it over and pressed a gentle kiss to the back of her hand.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh, that felt. Very nice indeed.
Aqua chuckled all low and pretty. "You're darling, you know that? Come. Let me show you the castle, the restoration, and the town."
And so she did. It was beautiful, spending time with her - a sort of settled feeling came over her, unlike anything she'd ever felt before. No - not quite. She'd felt it whenever she'd been alone with Flynn, whenever he wasn't talking about Alan or Sam or Clu or Tron. When he was talking about the outside world, and all the things he wished she could see. When he smiled like she was the center of the universe, and she'd believed him.
The thing was, outside the Grid? She wasn't all that special. ISO was a programming standard, that was all. And they still couldn't figure out how her super-healing worked.
"...I remember you," Aqua said suddenly, as they leaned on a balcony overlooking a craggy mess of pipes and stone that still had yet to be restored. "In the city. Um, I never did get what it was called."
Quorra shrugged one shoulder. "We just called it the Grid. It was all we knew." She was surprised, though - that Aqua remembered her, of all the people in that busy place. But then - if she'd sensed something different, something better, even then - who's to say Aqua didn't feel the same?
The blue-haired girl was tucking a lock of that hair behind her ear, smiling off into the distance. "Terra thinks programs are basically Heartless, though he wants to rename them. He likes Unversed; that's not quite right, though. Unversed are bits of imagination - they're more like Nobodies. Sometimes I think they might be the same things."
Quorra just watched her as she talked. Listened. It was very much like listening to Flynn, really, the way she would let herself drift and get carried away on his voice - only Aqua was younger and prettier and... not Flynn, and she had a feeling the other girl wasn't prone to depressions the way her mentor had been.
"...And I think they're the same thing as you. As the ISOs." Ah, so she knew. Quorra flushed to the tips of her toes; tilted her head forward and tried without luck to hide behind her hair.
"I'm not - I was. I'm human now." Why was she so nervous? So... embarrassed? Sam told her regularly that she didn't seem to have a sense of shame; he usually meant it as a compliment. What was wrong with her?
"Not quite." Aqua reached up a hand and - oh, she was touching her. Fingertips gliding gently along her face. "Sora doesn't have my training. He's no Keyblade Master, not yet. I can see hearts. Or, whatever we're calling it these days - I like soul. It's a better word. But the thing about Nobodies is, they're not soulless. The very opposite. They're made of soul; they're the embodiment of an idea. Like the ISOs. Like you."
Quorra found that she wasn't, actually, listening to this at all. Aqua's eyes were on her and she was still touching her, that gentle, soft stroking that felt like a kiss of sunlight. "Hmm?"
"And that's why you've got those powers. Healing, right? You can regenerate, rebuild, restore. That tells me you've got an amazing heart and you just want to help everyone. I think that's adorable."
"Yeah," she murmured, still not entirely hearing sentences altogether. "I do. Want to help. That's what I am. Was. I was supposed to change the world."
Aqua cupped her face, then, and gave her a delicate little kiss on the lips that felt like oxygen. "You can. You already have. You change every world you come to."
•
When they returned to the castle, it was near dark. Everyone had ended up piling into the library, which had only just gotten rebuilt, according to the shaggy-haired man named Leon. He was leaning up against a wall with a quiet blond in black, talking to Sora and Sam and Rinzler, and the castle's other occupants and guests were strewn out over the room. It was a little overwhelming, but Quorra loved feeling overwhelmed.
And Aqua was still holding her hand, which made her feel better than the center of the universe. It made her feel beautiful.
"I'd really like to see you again," Aqua said, quiet and hopeful. Quorra smiled, ear to ear. She'd taught her so much, after all the kissing in the bailey - that she could make her own portals, walk through the Darkness without armor or a Keyblade. Because she was... nobody? No, Aqua was right, the words were all wrong. An ISO, then, still. And the Grid was a fixed point in the rolling Darkness, the North Star that would lead her home.
But she was thinking now, that maybe home was what you made of it, and maybe home was wherever Sam was, and Rinzler; Junior and Riku, Sora; and Aqua, of course.
"You won't be able to get rid of me," Quorra said with her irrepressible spirit, and Aqua bell-like laugh rang loud and clear through the room, through her head, and into the heart she knew she had.
Quorra/Aqua
• 2,600 words
• Kingdom Hearts and Tron, not really a crossover of course
• Sam/Sora/Rinzler, Junior/Riku, Axel/Ven, and Terra/Saix implied
• I have a feeling I'm going to be writing a lot in this verse.
Dear god, I was terribly lost
When the galaxies crossed
And the sun went dark.
But dear god, you're the only North Star
I would follow this far.
I would follow this far.
Oh, so this was Radiant Garden.
Quorra's eyes were round and owlish and she held tight to Sam's hand, who was holding onto Rinzler's hand who was holding onto Sora's. Up ahead, Junior and Riku were talking in low tones - he'd been here before, with Sam, with Riku and Sora. Nothing had been the same since Sam had been chosen as a Keyblade bearer.
It was a really beautiful place. He said he'd been training somewhere else, sometimes even on the Grid, with a program Junior and Riku had developed. He was still getting used to it, the Keyblade thing. He wasn't much of a weapons guy, but he was getting there, and he'd gotten good enough to be able to take Quorra with him, so that was something.
And this was exciting! She hadn't been back on the Grid since she'd gotten out - no no no, too much to do, too much so see and feel and taste and touch and smell! She thought it would be like going back, the way Sora talked about it. It wasn't, not at all. The in-between place, the nothingness - that was a little like the Grid. She didn't like it. But Sam's motorbike-shaped spacecraft had gotten them here no problem, and she could breathe again now.
Her hand loosened its death grip on Sam's. She wanted to run, to go stick her nose in the flowers and wet her hair in the fountains. It all looked so beautiful, and she did, because no one had told her she couldn't, right? I mean. She should probably wait, but no one was paying her any attention.
It didn't make her sad, exactly. Not really. Flynn had gone home to Alan and that made her happy. Sam and Sora had separated Tron from Rinzler and Sam had taken Rinzler on as his pet project, and that made her happy, too. Sam loved on remorselessly, Rinzler loved back, and the both of them loved Sora so much it was like her skin was full of something gold and light and wonderful. That made her very happy. And Junior, Sam's best friend, and Riku, Sora's best friend - they'd found each other, too, and she didn't even need to know them to know that it made her happy.
So she couldn't, logically, be sad. But she wondered sometimes, if being an ISO meant that she would always be that kind of alone.
Up the path, she heard a door slam, then the sound of hurried footsteps. She quickly yanked her hands out of the flowerbeds - dirty already, whoops, and tucked them behind her back quickly as the feet came closer.
She was shocked to realize that she recognized them.
The tall one, that blond man with the green eyes, he'd been there. One of them. Her memories of the Grid were beginning to fade a little, which Sam had ruefully told her was a side effect of being human. But she could remember him. The way he'd appeared suddenly one day, looking so lost, and this was well before the Purge, while they were still wandering aimlessly and timelessly through the rolling expanse of raw data. They'd all appeared - the huge one with the craggy face, the little slim dark one, the man with the pink hair who talked about roses and the others - they were all there. Here. They'd drifted together when they'd appeared in the datastream, but milled, like all of them, lost and confused. They were here. What. This was.
"Axel!" Sora cried out, his voice loud and blissful. He ran towards the group, all but leaping on one of them, a skinny guy with a bright shock of red hair and little purple diamonds under his eyes. Quorra could remember those - they'd glowed, back in the Grid.
The man's face lit up so bright that it almost looked painful. "Hey, short stuff," he purred, catching him and swinging him around in a circle as the other men shifted and moved about, introducing themselves and giving Sora some strange looks - wary, relieved, grateful. She wanted to know what had happened. She wanted to know everything.
"Not so short anymore," Sora was saying, and Axel just ruffled his stupid-spikey hair.
"Naw, you're gonna be short forever."
"Sora?"
Quorra had been inching towards them without even realizing it, so she jumped when she heard another voice. This one wasn't familiar, not a bit, but oh. Oh, he looked just like Sora. The eyes, anyway. The eyes were exactly the same.
There was that smile again, on Axel's and Sora's faces both. "Roxas!" he squeaked, and the young man just laughed.
"C'mon, it's Ven now. You know where Roxas is."
Sora stuck his tongue out at the boy who could be his twin. "Nuh uh. I gave him back."
"Yeah, sure. Who's that?"
And finally, they noticed that Sora wasn't the only one here.
"Oh! These are my friends." His eyes fell on Sam and Rinzler and he blushed, stuttering, realizing that wasn't quite enough this time. "Er- basically. Sam. Rinzler. You know Junior and Riku. And this is Quorra."
Axel was looking right at her, looking right through her. He licked his lips. "Yeah. We've met."
She wanted to turn away, to press her hands together and look up at the sky and say nope, nope, that wasn't me, I wasn't an ISO, I didn't watch you die at the hands of Clu's minions while I was able to survive. Didn't happen.
"Really? How? Was it in the darkness? After - y'know, everything? What happened? Is she a Nobody, too?"
Sometimes - sometimes, the things Sora said were a little, well. Weird. He only called it the Grid if they were in the city; the outer lands was always 'the darkness', and she'd heard him ask, once, if programs had hearts.
Axel shrugged one shoulder. "Fuck if I know."
The group was thinning; Junior and Riku had disappeared into town with the bulk of the castlefolk, leaving Axel and Ven and a boy with sea-blue eyes and a fauxhawk and an older guy, blond and beardy and pierced. They looked pretty wrapped up in each other, though, leaving Axel to stare Quorra down.
She shifted foot to foot. "I'm human." She was, damnit. She'd been humanized. De-programmed. She was human.
Axel smirked. "I know, sweetie, but that's got nothing to do with the state of your heart."
"Leave it, lamebrain." Ven jogged the few steps down so he could punch the redhead lightly in the arm. "Anyway, you know Terra hates that word. It's not accurate."
"Accurate, smraccurate," Axel growled. "Whatever you want to call it, I don't have it."
Ven smirked. "What, a brain?"
Just as he was about to respond, the castle doors opened once again, and three more people came out. They were also all familiar, albeit in different ways.
The first one, with the blue hair to his waist and clutching an armful of books, was the last of the ISOs to arrive before the purging had started. He'd been beautiful when attacked; he was one of the few reasons they'd held out so long. Quorra had only ever seen him from a distance. She'd never gotten his name. The other man - no, he wasn't familiar per se, but there was something about him that was telling her she'd seen him before. The dark skin and white hair was striking; memorable. But she couldn't quite pin it down, and he was smiling warmly, looking down at Axel and Ven and Sora with a very pretty smile that light up a pair of deep blue eyes.
There was a girl, though. On the white-haired man's other side. Quorra had only seen her once - walking in the street, passing so close she could almost smell her, if smells existed in the Grid. But she almost had, hadn't she? She'd known she wasn't a program, wasn't even an ISO. User, Quorra thought suddenly, now understanding why the experience had tugged at her so. Like Flynn. Like Sam. User.
"Of course Axel has a brain," the man in the middle drawled, "he thinks with his - "
"Manners," the girl said, though it was fond. Warm. Low. Oh, she was pretty. Blue hair, just like the man on the other side. So, so pretty.
Said blue-haired man chuckled. "Like you're one to talk, sir."
"Mmm." He seemed to be contemplating something, off in the distance. Maybe the other group of... Nobodies, were they? Or maybe he was just pondering the clouds.
Ven snapped his fingers twice, grinning. "Hey. Ter-bear. You missed Riku."
"Did I?" He looked so put out by this that Quorra laughed, she just had to, and the newcomers turned to her, surprised.
"Oh! This is Quorra," Sora said, stepping into the tension with his usual quick smiles. "She's Sam's friend, from the Grid. Or, she was. We got her out," he said, looking immensely proud of himself, and the girl with the blue hair chuckled.
"You got all of us out," she said with a quiet grace, and Quorra only liked her all the more. Especially since her eyes were still on her, never wavering, steady and blue even though it was Sora she was talking to. "Hey, Terra - you want to go find Riku, right? I can take Quorra around town."
Terra looked immensely relieved, and, if she were honest, so did Sam and Sora. "Yeah, I should really be checking in with Leon..." Sora mumbled, and Sam said something about a cloud and sparring. Rinzler would go where Sam went, and the blue-haired man, it seemed, was following Terra.
"I'm Aqua," she said, and when Quorra held her hand out for a shake, she turned it over and pressed a gentle kiss to the back of her hand.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh, that felt. Very nice indeed.
Aqua chuckled all low and pretty. "You're darling, you know that? Come. Let me show you the castle, the restoration, and the town."
And so she did. It was beautiful, spending time with her - a sort of settled feeling came over her, unlike anything she'd ever felt before. No - not quite. She'd felt it whenever she'd been alone with Flynn, whenever he wasn't talking about Alan or Sam or Clu or Tron. When he was talking about the outside world, and all the things he wished she could see. When he smiled like she was the center of the universe, and she'd believed him.
The thing was, outside the Grid? She wasn't all that special. ISO was a programming standard, that was all. And they still couldn't figure out how her super-healing worked.
"...I remember you," Aqua said suddenly, as they leaned on a balcony overlooking a craggy mess of pipes and stone that still had yet to be restored. "In the city. Um, I never did get what it was called."
Quorra shrugged one shoulder. "We just called it the Grid. It was all we knew." She was surprised, though - that Aqua remembered her, of all the people in that busy place. But then - if she'd sensed something different, something better, even then - who's to say Aqua didn't feel the same?
The blue-haired girl was tucking a lock of that hair behind her ear, smiling off into the distance. "Terra thinks programs are basically Heartless, though he wants to rename them. He likes Unversed; that's not quite right, though. Unversed are bits of imagination - they're more like Nobodies. Sometimes I think they might be the same things."
Quorra just watched her as she talked. Listened. It was very much like listening to Flynn, really, the way she would let herself drift and get carried away on his voice - only Aqua was younger and prettier and... not Flynn, and she had a feeling the other girl wasn't prone to depressions the way her mentor had been.
"...And I think they're the same thing as you. As the ISOs." Ah, so she knew. Quorra flushed to the tips of her toes; tilted her head forward and tried without luck to hide behind her hair.
"I'm not - I was. I'm human now." Why was she so nervous? So... embarrassed? Sam told her regularly that she didn't seem to have a sense of shame; he usually meant it as a compliment. What was wrong with her?
"Not quite." Aqua reached up a hand and - oh, she was touching her. Fingertips gliding gently along her face. "Sora doesn't have my training. He's no Keyblade Master, not yet. I can see hearts. Or, whatever we're calling it these days - I like soul. It's a better word. But the thing about Nobodies is, they're not soulless. The very opposite. They're made of soul; they're the embodiment of an idea. Like the ISOs. Like you."
Quorra found that she wasn't, actually, listening to this at all. Aqua's eyes were on her and she was still touching her, that gentle, soft stroking that felt like a kiss of sunlight. "Hmm?"
"And that's why you've got those powers. Healing, right? You can regenerate, rebuild, restore. That tells me you've got an amazing heart and you just want to help everyone. I think that's adorable."
"Yeah," she murmured, still not entirely hearing sentences altogether. "I do. Want to help. That's what I am. Was. I was supposed to change the world."
Aqua cupped her face, then, and gave her a delicate little kiss on the lips that felt like oxygen. "You can. You already have. You change every world you come to."
•
When they returned to the castle, it was near dark. Everyone had ended up piling into the library, which had only just gotten rebuilt, according to the shaggy-haired man named Leon. He was leaning up against a wall with a quiet blond in black, talking to Sora and Sam and Rinzler, and the castle's other occupants and guests were strewn out over the room. It was a little overwhelming, but Quorra loved feeling overwhelmed.
And Aqua was still holding her hand, which made her feel better than the center of the universe. It made her feel beautiful.
"I'd really like to see you again," Aqua said, quiet and hopeful. Quorra smiled, ear to ear. She'd taught her so much, after all the kissing in the bailey - that she could make her own portals, walk through the Darkness without armor or a Keyblade. Because she was... nobody? No, Aqua was right, the words were all wrong. An ISO, then, still. And the Grid was a fixed point in the rolling Darkness, the North Star that would lead her home.
But she was thinking now, that maybe home was what you made of it, and maybe home was wherever Sam was, and Rinzler; Junior and Riku, Sora; and Aqua, of course.
"You won't be able to get rid of me," Quorra said with her irrepressible spirit, and Aqua bell-like laugh rang loud and clear through the room, through her head, and into the heart she knew she had.