Kingdom Hearts fic: Of Flower Girls and Falling Stars - Part 4
Not technically Christmas fic, but there’s enough of a homecoming theme to this that this felt like an appropriate time of year to share it. Again, thanks go to thano for betaing this for me.
Title: The Long Way Home
Summary: Behind the scenes, the Traverse Town crew had their own story to tell during the events of Kingdom Hearts.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Everything up to the ending of the first game
Notes:
The fourth and final part of the ‘Of Flower Girls and Falling Stars’ series. Contains a few scattered references to previous parts, though not so many that it doesn’t stand on its own reasonably well. The timeline jumps back and forth a bit, but I don’t think it gets too confusing.
Previous parts:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Semi-related crack-tastic interlude
Cloud sat on the coliseum steps, and stared out at what lay beyond. There was nothing there to see that he hadn’t seen a hundred times before in the time he’d spent on this world, but there was nothing else to look at either, and he was beyond caring much. He supposed he hadn’t failed as long as he was still alive, but there wasn’t much satisfaction in surviving without a victory either.
“Hey down there,” called a familiar voice.
Cloud squinted into the light pouring through the coliseum gateway until he could make out the figure standing there. “…Cid, isn’t it?”
“You betcha,” Cid replied, grinning around the straw he was chewing on. “Her ladyship Miss Aerith seemed to think you’d be in need of another lift.”
“How did she know?”
“Search me, I never understood it. Gal just comes out with this stuff sometimes - talks to the stars or somethin’. Way beyond the likes of me, I’m just the messenger. Good news too - our world’s restored. And if there’s nowhere you’d rather go, I’m supposed to offer you an invite and hightail it back there again before all the connections start failing.”
Even coming out of the blue like that, it sounded like a surprisingly good idea. There was nothing left here for him now, anyway. Cloud nodded and started up the steps, falling into step beside the pilot as they both make their way towards the ship.
“So, you ever find that person you were looking for?”
“…Yeah.”
“So what are you up to now?”
“I’m still looking.”
Cid gave him exactly the look that answer deserved. “Argh… I don’t know why I bother with the likes of you. If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so, don’t go confusing me.”
“Sorry. I found him. I just couldn’t finish him.”
“Him? Wasn’t it that brunette girl with the fists you were looking for?”
Cloud looked at him with a mixture of surprise and suspicion. Cid waved his hands.
“Awright, I get it, none of my business. You still want that lift or not?”
They managed to go most of the gummi flight without talking again, which was probably just as well.
***
Nine years ended impressively fast.
The beginning of the end didn’t come without warning - there were definite signs something big was on its way well before it came. Traverse Town had seen more activity in the last two months than ever before in its history. Stars were dying every few nights and the population swelled with the sudden influx of new people. As self-appointed caretakers of the place, the four from the world once known as Radiant Garden were finding themselves with more work to do than ever before.
“…and two Dalmatians, just this morning,” Aerith was saying. She and Leon had gathered in Cid’s shop for their unofficial evening debriefing. “They’re horribly distraught. It doesn’t sound like any of their puppies made it.”
“I see. We’ll ask people to keep an eye out for them,” Leon replied. “But beyond that there’s probably nothing else we can do. We’re already stretched too far at the moment.”
“Odds are the poor things never got here at all. Could be anywhere now,” Cid put in. Everyone lapsed into silence.
As if she’d been waiting for her cue, Yuffie dropped neatly down from the trapdoor in the ceiling, amid the protests of several moogles. “Donald and Goofy are in town,” she reported to Leon, “and they’re looking for you. They’re wandering all over second district, yelling your name off every street corner.”
Leon stared at her. “Wait, you mean you didn’t even ask what they wanted?”
“Why should I? It’s you they’re looking for. Besides, I had better things to do. You can hardly move for Heartless out there right now. It’s crazy.”
“It is very strange,” Aerith agreed. “There’s never been so many of them here at once before. It’s almost as though there’s something attracting them here.”
Cid’s eyes widened. “It’s getting that bad? Shit, hope that new kid’s alright, he only wandered in here this morning.”
Cid suddenly found himself the recipient of three very intense stares.
“Cid,” said Leon, speaking very slowly, “What new kid?”
“Just your typical refugee,” said Cid, still largely oblivious. “Scruffy little brat, still all disoriented when he walked in. Poor sod musta lost his world just today. Looked like he could take care of himself though - was waving around this big metal thing - looked like a giant key, of all crazy weapons, but I bet he could do some damage with it.”
“A giant. Metal. Key.” Leon repeated, like he couldn’t believe his ears.
“Yeah, so? I told you it was a weird looking weapon…”
“Cid, listen to what you’re saying,” Yuffie complained. “A key shaped like a blade, a blade shaped like a key? A keyblade? The legendary thing King Mickey’s only had us looking for for the last five years?”
Cid looked momentarily flummoxed. “Goddamn - you think that was it? Well, how was I to know - I’ve hardly spoken to their lot since I got set up here. You’re the ones always hanging out at the castle, hearing all your crazy legends.”
Leon put his face in his hands. “We’ve got to find that kid. We’ll split up - Yuffie, you head back through the second and third districts - I’ll ask around here, find out if anyone saw where he went.”
“I’ll look for Donald and Goofy,” Aerith volunteered.
Leon nodded. “Good idea. Cid, exactly what did he look like?”
Nine years were about to come to a very abrupt ending.
***
The final approach to the Hollow Bastion castle was one of those moments they’d never forget.
For only the second time in her life, something trumped even Yuffie’s usual motion sickness. “Where is everything? There’s only the castle and a whole lot of fluffy clouds and space. What happened to the town?”
“The Heartless happened. The Heartless, Malificent and Ansem,” Leon was gradually coming to terms with this fact. “We’re lucky even the castle survived, on most worlds there’s nothing left after the Heartless get through with them.”
“Lucky? Sure, I bet that poor castle feels really lucky to be taken over by a hoard of nasty monsters and some crazy witch and a king who makes Heartless in his basement,” Yuffie declared with feeling.
“Did it always look so… broken down?” Aerith wondered. The answer was probably ‘no’, but no-one could rightly remember for certain. Nine years was a long time.
There was quiet for a little while as everyone just stared out the front.
Yuffie decided she’d had enough of quiet. “Oh, just land this thing already! Sora’s way ahead of us, and it’s our world not his, and I wanna seeeee!”
***
Together, on the first district steps, the three of them watched as the shape of the gummi ship and the roar of its engines faded into the distance. At least now that Sora and his companions had gotten the take off sorted out, they were managing to fly it reasonably straight.
“So, Leeeon, how screwed are you thinking we are right now?” said Yuffie, in that tone that promised trouble to come.
“He was a lot younger than we were expecting.” Aerith agreed lightly.
Leon decided they were just going to have to make the best of the situation. “Sure he’s young, but we’ll just have to give the kid a chance.”
“Really? When he first showed up you sounded about ready to give up all hope right there,” Yuffie reminded him.
“He doesn’t look like much, but he did handle that armoured Heartless…”
“…with a little help from Donald and Goofy.”
“…while they weren’t both running into each other and falling over their own feet, anyways.”
“…and it’s the keyblade we’re talking about here,” Leon continued, with only the slightest eyebrow twitch. “If we’d had any real idea how it chose its masters, we’d have found him ages ago. We can only assume it sees something in him that we don’t.”
“That what you really think?” said Yuffie, who clearly didn’t believe it for a second.
“Or is that what the king told you when you wanted to know why it couldn’t just chose you, hm?” added Aerith.
Leon decided punctuated silence was the only safe conversational option remaining to him.
“I do hope they’ll be alright though,” said Aerith, more sincerely.
Yuffie waved a hand. “He’ll be fiiine. Wave keyblade, kill Heartless, and they’re all going to be after him wherever he goes so he won’t even have to look for them. How hard could it be?”
***
Yuffie took two steps into the library and collapsed flat on her back panting. The Heartless in this castle were vicious. “You guys think Sora deals with this every day? I don’t know how he does it,” she called dramatically.
“Worse, probably,” Leon’s voice called back from somewhere above. “I think I’ve found a way further up. There’s another door, and some kind of lift mechanism.”
Yuffie rebounded like a human spring. “Hey, hey! No leaving me behind!”
Aerith looked longingly at all those books. Surely Ansem would have kept a copy of every report he’d ever written in here somewhere, but there would be time for that later. She followed the other two up the stairs.
Yuffie peered into the central well which appeared to run the whole height of the castle and whistled. “Wow, that’s a lot of up.”
“There’s bound to be Heartless the whole way,” Leon pointed out.
“Hey, did I say I couldn’t take them? I’m fresh as anything. Lead the way!”
***
It was a little after Sora’s second visit that Aerith found Leon in front of the pond in second district, looking contemplative.
“Was it really that surprising that this world should have a keyhole?” she asked him.
“You know what kind of world this place is,” said Leon, not taking his eyes away from the place where the keyhole had appeared. “What’s most likely to happen to it if Sora succeeds.”
“I know,” said Aerith gently. “But here and now, isn’t it a living thing like any other world?”
Leon turned to face her properly. “I suppose you knew there’d be one all along.”
Aerith smiled. “Maybe. But I never would have found it as quickly as Sora did.”
“Kid has the keyblade. That must give him a bit of an advantage. Still. He seems to be doing okay.”
“Okay?” Aerith’s eyes sparkled. Leon slumped his shoulders. “In the little time he’s had, he’s already locked the keyholes of four worlds. That’s ‘okay’, hm?”
“Either way, it’s out of our hands.”
“Does it bother you?” she asked, curiously. “That Sora’s going to be the one who decides everything?”
“It’s been out of our hands from the beginning. Taking care of one world is enough.”
They seemed to be about done with this topic of conversation, so Aerith asked, “Have you seen Cid today?”
“He’s in his workshop,” Leon told her. “He’s been complaining he can’t get anything done anymore without Sora showing up with some new gummi piece he wants installed right away.”
Aerith smiled. “He hasn’t had this much fun in years, has he?”
“Nothing even close.”
***
Years ago, Yuffie had once declared with absolute childish certainty that the castle of Radiant Garden would have been a proper ninja castle, with secret passages and trapdoors and everything. She was now starting to regret this.
“Let us get to the top already!” she complained to the moving platform that was currently refusing to move in anything like a useful direction. “If I’d known Ansem built his castle like this, I would’ve realised he was evil years ago!
“Oh, go bother someone else!” she added to a Shadow that had just popped up out of the wherever-it-was they came from. The little Heartless just stared at her with the uncomprehending gaze of its zombie-like kind until a shuriken finished it off.
“He didn’t build it though,” Aerith corrected her. “It existed long before his time. Although I think perhaps it might have been remodeled since the Heartless took over it.”
“What’s his deal anyway?” said Yuffie. “He’s a Heartless now, right? But Heartless don’t talk about their evil plans for universal whatsit like Sora said he did. They don’t possess people. They don’t even remember who they are.”
“Ansem must be some kind of exception. He is the one responsible for creating the Heartless in the first place,” Leon pointed out.
“The source,” Aerith agreed.
Leon nodded. “He might just be.”
“Hey! You guys are doing that thing where you talk about something like everyone knows everything about it without explaining anything to me again!”
“The source,” Leon explained patiently. “It’s something King Mickey came up with years ago. We can’t ever hope to defeat every Heartless individually, but it takes a lot of power to hold the pathways to darkness open. Defeating the source might just be all we need to do to beat them.”
“Okay, great,” said Yuffie, less patiently. “But what does that mean? So we beat him up, what happens then?”
Aerith took over. “The worlds the Heartless take - the darkness may consume them, but even it can never truly destroy them. Take out the source, and just maybe all those worlds can be restored.”
“Wow! It’s really that easy?”
“You think that’s easy?” said Leon, sounding disbelieving. “You take Ansem on.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t wanna steal Sora’s spotlight. I bet he’s getting all ramped up for that battle already.”
Somewhere far above them, someone knocked one of those giant, armoured Heartless into the well that ran down the centre of the castle. A deafening series of clunks marked its passage down. Yuffie stuck her fingers in her ears, grinned and mouthed ‘see?’
“Wait a sec though,” she said, after a little more thought, “what’s going to happen to Traverse Town? It’s stuck together from bits of all those other worlds, isn’t it?”
“It’ll come apart again,” Aerith told her. “Probably everyone will go home.”
“What about Kairi? She came from here originally, right?”
Leon and Aerith glanced at each other. “She’ll probably go back to the last world she came from,” Leon hazarded.
“That’s the same world Sora’s from, right? He’ll be going back there too, won’t he?”
“I suppose so.”
Yuffie didn’t find that particularly satisfying. “What do you mean suppose?”
“Sora’s going to be a long way from Traverse Town when he defeats Ansem. It isn’t going to be quite as simple for him to get back,” said Leon.
“Oh. Well he’s bound to find some other way. No trouble.” The others looked at her. “Hey, it took us nine years to make it back. We still made it. And no way is Sora going to take that long.”
Aerith smiled softly. “No. I can’t imagine he will.”
***
The sound of the door closing behind Sora echoed around the little house for half a minute before anyone spoke.
“Ansem,” said Leon at last. “How could we never have thought of it? We knew he was researching the Heartless. They never even existed before he started spending all his time out of sight.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” Aerith said softly. “It isn’t something anyone could have expected us to guess.”
“Yeah, and everyone always said he was such a great ruler,” Yuffie agreed. “Even my Dad hardly had anything bad to say about him. And to hear King Mickey talk about him, you’d think he was god’s gift to science.”
“The King’s not going to like this at all,” Leon sighed.
“Wherever he’s gone,” Aerith put in. “For all we know, maybe he already knows.”
Leon shook his head. “We knew Malificent had taken over the castle. We probably should have realised it would all end back there. It just never occurred to me that she might have been invited to stay.”
“Yeah,” said Yuffie. “Weird to think Sora gets to go back to our own world even before we do.”
“So, when are we going?” said Aerith, a little more brightly. The other two looked at her. “We aren’t going to let Sora save our world for us all by himself, are we?”
***
“Leon! Get out here already! You’re missing the light show!” Yuffie yelled from the balcony. “Don’t you even try to pretend you can’t hear me! I can hear you punctuating back there. Full sentence answers are appreciated, you know!”
“We have got more important things to do,” came Leon’s muffled voice from inside.
“This is important. We beat the big bad, saved the world, saved the universe…”
“Technically Sora did all of that.”
“…and now we get to watch the shiny. We have earned our share of shiny. Now siddown before I have to trip you up and tie you there.”
There was a rustle and a thump as Leon settled down beside her, but nothing was taking Yuffie’s attention away from the night sky right now. More stars than she’d remembered there ever being were whizzing back to their old homes in the cosmos.
“Ahh…” she sighed, “I haven’t seen a show like this since…”
“…the meteor shower. I remember.”
“Won’t be any gummi blocks to collect after this one though.” Yuffie said wistfully.
“No model aeroplane from Cid to the winner.”
Yuffie snuck a look away from the sky and realised Leon was smiling - not quite a full on grin, but a definite smile all the same. Her first impulse was to tease him about it, but he’d probably stop if she did that. And hey, even Leon deserved the odd smile now and then. With luck they’d all have a lot more to smile about from now on.
“It isn’t all over,” he said after a while. “I can’t go back to being Squall yet.”
Yuffie sighed dramatically. “You’re a big dummy and you’ve been Squall all along. You just - found some way of being Leon too. I don’t even know what the difference is supposed to be. They’re both names and they’re both you.
“Where are the others anyway?” she added, before he could come up with a response to this. “They’re missing this too.”
“Aerith had some kind of errand for Cid. I heard the ship take off a while back.”
“That’s not so bad then. Out the front of that ship is how he’d want to watch this anyway.”
On the balcony of the Hollow Bastion castle, for a long while after that there was little sound except that made by two people watching intently, as a thousand long-lost stars flew back to their rightful places in the sky overhead, and a thousand lighted windows of the town that disappeared that one night nine years ago spread out beneath their feet.
***
When it was all over, Cloud and Aerith met for the second time in the castle library.
“It isn’t over for you yet, is it?” she said, after one long look at him.
“How did you know?”
“A lot of things would be different otherwise, wouldn’t they?” said Aerith cryptically as usual. “But everything is changing. The worlds are restored again. Traverse Town is probably gone by now - it isn’t somewhere you can come back to anymore, but maybe this world will do instead. Sora really did a good job.”
“Sora.” All these things, everything that was happening seemed a million miles away from him… “He must have done.”
“Hah! He wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without our help,” Yuffie called from the window, with her usual lack of respect for the mood.
“I wonder where he is now?” Leon wondered.
Cid just grinned at them all. “That kid’ll find his way home. Count on it.”
“Don’t we all, eventually? So everyone’s here already, no-one else we’re waiting on, right?” Yuffie jumped clean out of the window. “Race you all back to my house!”
It had been a long time since they’d been the children who used to live in this world - that had once been called Radiant Garden and, some day, still might be again - but that much was true. Everyone would eventually find their way home.
Title: The Long Way Home
Summary: Behind the scenes, the Traverse Town crew had their own story to tell during the events of Kingdom Hearts.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Everything up to the ending of the first game
Notes:
The fourth and final part of the ‘Of Flower Girls and Falling Stars’ series. Contains a few scattered references to previous parts, though not so many that it doesn’t stand on its own reasonably well. The timeline jumps back and forth a bit, but I don’t think it gets too confusing.
Previous parts:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Semi-related crack-tastic interlude
Cloud sat on the coliseum steps, and stared out at what lay beyond. There was nothing there to see that he hadn’t seen a hundred times before in the time he’d spent on this world, but there was nothing else to look at either, and he was beyond caring much. He supposed he hadn’t failed as long as he was still alive, but there wasn’t much satisfaction in surviving without a victory either.
“Hey down there,” called a familiar voice.
Cloud squinted into the light pouring through the coliseum gateway until he could make out the figure standing there. “…Cid, isn’t it?”
“You betcha,” Cid replied, grinning around the straw he was chewing on. “Her ladyship Miss Aerith seemed to think you’d be in need of another lift.”
“How did she know?”
“Search me, I never understood it. Gal just comes out with this stuff sometimes - talks to the stars or somethin’. Way beyond the likes of me, I’m just the messenger. Good news too - our world’s restored. And if there’s nowhere you’d rather go, I’m supposed to offer you an invite and hightail it back there again before all the connections start failing.”
Even coming out of the blue like that, it sounded like a surprisingly good idea. There was nothing left here for him now, anyway. Cloud nodded and started up the steps, falling into step beside the pilot as they both make their way towards the ship.
“So, you ever find that person you were looking for?”
“…Yeah.”
“So what are you up to now?”
“I’m still looking.”
Cid gave him exactly the look that answer deserved. “Argh… I don’t know why I bother with the likes of you. If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so, don’t go confusing me.”
“Sorry. I found him. I just couldn’t finish him.”
“Him? Wasn’t it that brunette girl with the fists you were looking for?”
Cloud looked at him with a mixture of surprise and suspicion. Cid waved his hands.
“Awright, I get it, none of my business. You still want that lift or not?”
They managed to go most of the gummi flight without talking again, which was probably just as well.
***
Nine years ended impressively fast.
The beginning of the end didn’t come without warning - there were definite signs something big was on its way well before it came. Traverse Town had seen more activity in the last two months than ever before in its history. Stars were dying every few nights and the population swelled with the sudden influx of new people. As self-appointed caretakers of the place, the four from the world once known as Radiant Garden were finding themselves with more work to do than ever before.
“…and two Dalmatians, just this morning,” Aerith was saying. She and Leon had gathered in Cid’s shop for their unofficial evening debriefing. “They’re horribly distraught. It doesn’t sound like any of their puppies made it.”
“I see. We’ll ask people to keep an eye out for them,” Leon replied. “But beyond that there’s probably nothing else we can do. We’re already stretched too far at the moment.”
“Odds are the poor things never got here at all. Could be anywhere now,” Cid put in. Everyone lapsed into silence.
As if she’d been waiting for her cue, Yuffie dropped neatly down from the trapdoor in the ceiling, amid the protests of several moogles. “Donald and Goofy are in town,” she reported to Leon, “and they’re looking for you. They’re wandering all over second district, yelling your name off every street corner.”
Leon stared at her. “Wait, you mean you didn’t even ask what they wanted?”
“Why should I? It’s you they’re looking for. Besides, I had better things to do. You can hardly move for Heartless out there right now. It’s crazy.”
“It is very strange,” Aerith agreed. “There’s never been so many of them here at once before. It’s almost as though there’s something attracting them here.”
Cid’s eyes widened. “It’s getting that bad? Shit, hope that new kid’s alright, he only wandered in here this morning.”
Cid suddenly found himself the recipient of three very intense stares.
“Cid,” said Leon, speaking very slowly, “What new kid?”
“Just your typical refugee,” said Cid, still largely oblivious. “Scruffy little brat, still all disoriented when he walked in. Poor sod musta lost his world just today. Looked like he could take care of himself though - was waving around this big metal thing - looked like a giant key, of all crazy weapons, but I bet he could do some damage with it.”
“A giant. Metal. Key.” Leon repeated, like he couldn’t believe his ears.
“Yeah, so? I told you it was a weird looking weapon…”
“Cid, listen to what you’re saying,” Yuffie complained. “A key shaped like a blade, a blade shaped like a key? A keyblade? The legendary thing King Mickey’s only had us looking for for the last five years?”
Cid looked momentarily flummoxed. “Goddamn - you think that was it? Well, how was I to know - I’ve hardly spoken to their lot since I got set up here. You’re the ones always hanging out at the castle, hearing all your crazy legends.”
Leon put his face in his hands. “We’ve got to find that kid. We’ll split up - Yuffie, you head back through the second and third districts - I’ll ask around here, find out if anyone saw where he went.”
“I’ll look for Donald and Goofy,” Aerith volunteered.
Leon nodded. “Good idea. Cid, exactly what did he look like?”
Nine years were about to come to a very abrupt ending.
***
The final approach to the Hollow Bastion castle was one of those moments they’d never forget.
For only the second time in her life, something trumped even Yuffie’s usual motion sickness. “Where is everything? There’s only the castle and a whole lot of fluffy clouds and space. What happened to the town?”
“The Heartless happened. The Heartless, Malificent and Ansem,” Leon was gradually coming to terms with this fact. “We’re lucky even the castle survived, on most worlds there’s nothing left after the Heartless get through with them.”
“Lucky? Sure, I bet that poor castle feels really lucky to be taken over by a hoard of nasty monsters and some crazy witch and a king who makes Heartless in his basement,” Yuffie declared with feeling.
“Did it always look so… broken down?” Aerith wondered. The answer was probably ‘no’, but no-one could rightly remember for certain. Nine years was a long time.
There was quiet for a little while as everyone just stared out the front.
Yuffie decided she’d had enough of quiet. “Oh, just land this thing already! Sora’s way ahead of us, and it’s our world not his, and I wanna seeeee!”
***
Together, on the first district steps, the three of them watched as the shape of the gummi ship and the roar of its engines faded into the distance. At least now that Sora and his companions had gotten the take off sorted out, they were managing to fly it reasonably straight.
“So, Leeeon, how screwed are you thinking we are right now?” said Yuffie, in that tone that promised trouble to come.
“He was a lot younger than we were expecting.” Aerith agreed lightly.
Leon decided they were just going to have to make the best of the situation. “Sure he’s young, but we’ll just have to give the kid a chance.”
“Really? When he first showed up you sounded about ready to give up all hope right there,” Yuffie reminded him.
“He doesn’t look like much, but he did handle that armoured Heartless…”
“…with a little help from Donald and Goofy.”
“…while they weren’t both running into each other and falling over their own feet, anyways.”
“…and it’s the keyblade we’re talking about here,” Leon continued, with only the slightest eyebrow twitch. “If we’d had any real idea how it chose its masters, we’d have found him ages ago. We can only assume it sees something in him that we don’t.”
“That what you really think?” said Yuffie, who clearly didn’t believe it for a second.
“Or is that what the king told you when you wanted to know why it couldn’t just chose you, hm?” added Aerith.
Leon decided punctuated silence was the only safe conversational option remaining to him.
“I do hope they’ll be alright though,” said Aerith, more sincerely.
Yuffie waved a hand. “He’ll be fiiine. Wave keyblade, kill Heartless, and they’re all going to be after him wherever he goes so he won’t even have to look for them. How hard could it be?”
***
Yuffie took two steps into the library and collapsed flat on her back panting. The Heartless in this castle were vicious. “You guys think Sora deals with this every day? I don’t know how he does it,” she called dramatically.
“Worse, probably,” Leon’s voice called back from somewhere above. “I think I’ve found a way further up. There’s another door, and some kind of lift mechanism.”
Yuffie rebounded like a human spring. “Hey, hey! No leaving me behind!”
Aerith looked longingly at all those books. Surely Ansem would have kept a copy of every report he’d ever written in here somewhere, but there would be time for that later. She followed the other two up the stairs.
Yuffie peered into the central well which appeared to run the whole height of the castle and whistled. “Wow, that’s a lot of up.”
“There’s bound to be Heartless the whole way,” Leon pointed out.
“Hey, did I say I couldn’t take them? I’m fresh as anything. Lead the way!”
***
It was a little after Sora’s second visit that Aerith found Leon in front of the pond in second district, looking contemplative.
“Was it really that surprising that this world should have a keyhole?” she asked him.
“You know what kind of world this place is,” said Leon, not taking his eyes away from the place where the keyhole had appeared. “What’s most likely to happen to it if Sora succeeds.”
“I know,” said Aerith gently. “But here and now, isn’t it a living thing like any other world?”
Leon turned to face her properly. “I suppose you knew there’d be one all along.”
Aerith smiled. “Maybe. But I never would have found it as quickly as Sora did.”
“Kid has the keyblade. That must give him a bit of an advantage. Still. He seems to be doing okay.”
“Okay?” Aerith’s eyes sparkled. Leon slumped his shoulders. “In the little time he’s had, he’s already locked the keyholes of four worlds. That’s ‘okay’, hm?”
“Either way, it’s out of our hands.”
“Does it bother you?” she asked, curiously. “That Sora’s going to be the one who decides everything?”
“It’s been out of our hands from the beginning. Taking care of one world is enough.”
They seemed to be about done with this topic of conversation, so Aerith asked, “Have you seen Cid today?”
“He’s in his workshop,” Leon told her. “He’s been complaining he can’t get anything done anymore without Sora showing up with some new gummi piece he wants installed right away.”
Aerith smiled. “He hasn’t had this much fun in years, has he?”
“Nothing even close.”
***
Years ago, Yuffie had once declared with absolute childish certainty that the castle of Radiant Garden would have been a proper ninja castle, with secret passages and trapdoors and everything. She was now starting to regret this.
“Let us get to the top already!” she complained to the moving platform that was currently refusing to move in anything like a useful direction. “If I’d known Ansem built his castle like this, I would’ve realised he was evil years ago!
“Oh, go bother someone else!” she added to a Shadow that had just popped up out of the wherever-it-was they came from. The little Heartless just stared at her with the uncomprehending gaze of its zombie-like kind until a shuriken finished it off.
“He didn’t build it though,” Aerith corrected her. “It existed long before his time. Although I think perhaps it might have been remodeled since the Heartless took over it.”
“What’s his deal anyway?” said Yuffie. “He’s a Heartless now, right? But Heartless don’t talk about their evil plans for universal whatsit like Sora said he did. They don’t possess people. They don’t even remember who they are.”
“Ansem must be some kind of exception. He is the one responsible for creating the Heartless in the first place,” Leon pointed out.
“The source,” Aerith agreed.
Leon nodded. “He might just be.”
“Hey! You guys are doing that thing where you talk about something like everyone knows everything about it without explaining anything to me again!”
“The source,” Leon explained patiently. “It’s something King Mickey came up with years ago. We can’t ever hope to defeat every Heartless individually, but it takes a lot of power to hold the pathways to darkness open. Defeating the source might just be all we need to do to beat them.”
“Okay, great,” said Yuffie, less patiently. “But what does that mean? So we beat him up, what happens then?”
Aerith took over. “The worlds the Heartless take - the darkness may consume them, but even it can never truly destroy them. Take out the source, and just maybe all those worlds can be restored.”
“Wow! It’s really that easy?”
“You think that’s easy?” said Leon, sounding disbelieving. “You take Ansem on.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t wanna steal Sora’s spotlight. I bet he’s getting all ramped up for that battle already.”
Somewhere far above them, someone knocked one of those giant, armoured Heartless into the well that ran down the centre of the castle. A deafening series of clunks marked its passage down. Yuffie stuck her fingers in her ears, grinned and mouthed ‘see?’
“Wait a sec though,” she said, after a little more thought, “what’s going to happen to Traverse Town? It’s stuck together from bits of all those other worlds, isn’t it?”
“It’ll come apart again,” Aerith told her. “Probably everyone will go home.”
“What about Kairi? She came from here originally, right?”
Leon and Aerith glanced at each other. “She’ll probably go back to the last world she came from,” Leon hazarded.
“That’s the same world Sora’s from, right? He’ll be going back there too, won’t he?”
“I suppose so.”
Yuffie didn’t find that particularly satisfying. “What do you mean suppose?”
“Sora’s going to be a long way from Traverse Town when he defeats Ansem. It isn’t going to be quite as simple for him to get back,” said Leon.
“Oh. Well he’s bound to find some other way. No trouble.” The others looked at her. “Hey, it took us nine years to make it back. We still made it. And no way is Sora going to take that long.”
Aerith smiled softly. “No. I can’t imagine he will.”
***
The sound of the door closing behind Sora echoed around the little house for half a minute before anyone spoke.
“Ansem,” said Leon at last. “How could we never have thought of it? We knew he was researching the Heartless. They never even existed before he started spending all his time out of sight.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” Aerith said softly. “It isn’t something anyone could have expected us to guess.”
“Yeah, and everyone always said he was such a great ruler,” Yuffie agreed. “Even my Dad hardly had anything bad to say about him. And to hear King Mickey talk about him, you’d think he was god’s gift to science.”
“The King’s not going to like this at all,” Leon sighed.
“Wherever he’s gone,” Aerith put in. “For all we know, maybe he already knows.”
Leon shook his head. “We knew Malificent had taken over the castle. We probably should have realised it would all end back there. It just never occurred to me that she might have been invited to stay.”
“Yeah,” said Yuffie. “Weird to think Sora gets to go back to our own world even before we do.”
“So, when are we going?” said Aerith, a little more brightly. The other two looked at her. “We aren’t going to let Sora save our world for us all by himself, are we?”
***
“Leon! Get out here already! You’re missing the light show!” Yuffie yelled from the balcony. “Don’t you even try to pretend you can’t hear me! I can hear you punctuating back there. Full sentence answers are appreciated, you know!”
“We have got more important things to do,” came Leon’s muffled voice from inside.
“This is important. We beat the big bad, saved the world, saved the universe…”
“Technically Sora did all of that.”
“…and now we get to watch the shiny. We have earned our share of shiny. Now siddown before I have to trip you up and tie you there.”
There was a rustle and a thump as Leon settled down beside her, but nothing was taking Yuffie’s attention away from the night sky right now. More stars than she’d remembered there ever being were whizzing back to their old homes in the cosmos.
“Ahh…” she sighed, “I haven’t seen a show like this since…”
“…the meteor shower. I remember.”
“Won’t be any gummi blocks to collect after this one though.” Yuffie said wistfully.
“No model aeroplane from Cid to the winner.”
Yuffie snuck a look away from the sky and realised Leon was smiling - not quite a full on grin, but a definite smile all the same. Her first impulse was to tease him about it, but he’d probably stop if she did that. And hey, even Leon deserved the odd smile now and then. With luck they’d all have a lot more to smile about from now on.
“It isn’t all over,” he said after a while. “I can’t go back to being Squall yet.”
Yuffie sighed dramatically. “You’re a big dummy and you’ve been Squall all along. You just - found some way of being Leon too. I don’t even know what the difference is supposed to be. They’re both names and they’re both you.
“Where are the others anyway?” she added, before he could come up with a response to this. “They’re missing this too.”
“Aerith had some kind of errand for Cid. I heard the ship take off a while back.”
“That’s not so bad then. Out the front of that ship is how he’d want to watch this anyway.”
On the balcony of the Hollow Bastion castle, for a long while after that there was little sound except that made by two people watching intently, as a thousand long-lost stars flew back to their rightful places in the sky overhead, and a thousand lighted windows of the town that disappeared that one night nine years ago spread out beneath their feet.
***
When it was all over, Cloud and Aerith met for the second time in the castle library.
“It isn’t over for you yet, is it?” she said, after one long look at him.
“How did you know?”
“A lot of things would be different otherwise, wouldn’t they?” said Aerith cryptically as usual. “But everything is changing. The worlds are restored again. Traverse Town is probably gone by now - it isn’t somewhere you can come back to anymore, but maybe this world will do instead. Sora really did a good job.”
“Sora.” All these things, everything that was happening seemed a million miles away from him… “He must have done.”
“Hah! He wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without our help,” Yuffie called from the window, with her usual lack of respect for the mood.
“I wonder where he is now?” Leon wondered.
Cid just grinned at them all. “That kid’ll find his way home. Count on it.”
“Don’t we all, eventually? So everyone’s here already, no-one else we’re waiting on, right?” Yuffie jumped clean out of the window. “Race you all back to my house!”
It had been a long time since they’d been the children who used to live in this world - that had once been called Radiant Garden and, some day, still might be again - but that much was true. Everyone would eventually find their way home.