The titles of this chapter and the next one are a 2-part reference to Green Lantern: The Animated Series. Fans of that show (particularly its Official Couple) will recognize the reference.
Chapter 34: Loss:
Radiant Garden – Kairi's Bedroom:
The silence of Kairi's room was broken only by the soft rustle of a balled up wad of tissues sailing through the air as Kairi tossed it towards the trash can on the other side of the room. Tears rolled down her cheeks like waterfalls and damped the sheets beneath her as the princess of Radiant Garden laid back sobbing on her bed. It had been two days since the Battle of Knowhere, and there had been no sign of Sora anywhere in Coalition space. If she didn't have confirmation from Vanitas that the cube he'd grabbed only teleported him instead of killing him, she'd have believed her fiancé was dead.
As it was, she had no idea where he was, everyone's focus was directed at the war against the Hellfire Club and the investigation into the stupid Legion, and nobody had the slightest clue how she was supposed to find the love of her life and bring him home. The first day after the battle, she'd gone on the warpath in a panicked frenzy. When she realized that there was absolutely nothing she could do to track Sora down, she became inconsolable with grief. How was she supposed to find him if she had no idea where to start looking? It wasn't like she could get energy readings from Knowhere to search for similar energy signatures from the cube elsewhere in the universe. Malekith had seen to that.
After Sora disappeared, the scales began tipping in the Coalition's favor. Vanitas was able to contain the Cube and spirit it away back to Radiant Garden, where it now rested in the Chamber of Repose deep beneath her uncle's old laboratory. Vanitas' informant warned that it was suicidally dangerous to keep the two Infinity Stones too close together, so Vanitas hid the Mind Stone in a locked box in the castle of the Land of Departure. When Maleficent realized that the battle was clearly lost, Maleficent executed the Collector to keep him from providing Coalition Intelligence with any useful information. And then Malekith used one of those Black Hole grenades to make the mining colony implode in on itself, killing all who lived upon it. Coalition Forces barely made it out in time before the entire decaying alien skull was condensed into a tiny wormhole.
A knock at the door distracted her from her moping, and the door opened to reveal a face nearly identical to her own, only framed by blonde hair instead of red. Without any prompting or greeting, Namine slid onto the bed and gave Kairi a comforting hug.
"We'll find him, Kairi," her Nobody greeted reassuringly. "Don't worry."
"Hard not to when nobody really knows where to start looking," the princess of Radiant Garden retorted sarcastically. "And between everything going on with the Hellfire Club and the Legion nobody even has the time to really look for any clues."
"I know, I know," Namine replied. "But what would Sora do if he was in your place?"
"He'd spend a few hours beating himself up over not being able to protect me," Kairi answered with a chuckle. "Then he'd pick himself up and track me down to the ends of the universe and damn anyone who got in his way."
"Exactly," her Nobody answered. "It's been two days, Kairi. It's time for you to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start hunting." This managed to cheer the princess of Heart up considerably. She wiped the tears from her face as she stood up from the bed. The sorrow in her eyes was gone now, replaced by ironclad resolve.
"Thanks Namine," she said as she gave her "twin" a hug. "I needed that. And you did just give me an idea for starting my search."
"How?" The blonde artist asked. "What are you going to do?" Kairi answered with a grin that promised intense pain on anyone who tried to stop her in her quest to find her fiancé and bring him home.
"I'm going to get Vanitas to arrange a meeting with his informant."
Arendelle – Spaceport:
"I wish you didn't have to go," Elsa said as she gave her fiancé one last hug. The date for their wedding was only a month away, and now he had been called out to face a situation that he might not come back from. They stood together at the security checkpoint of Arendelle's Spaceport, saying their goodbyes before the former Flurry of Dancing Flames went off to war. Elsa would have gone with him were it not for the fact that her duties as queen meant that she needed to stay and protect her people in the event the Hellfire Club or the Legion attacked Arendelle.
"I do too," Lea replied forlornly. "But I have to. With Sora M.I.A., Team Keyblade needs all hands on deck." With one of their most powerful Keyblade Masters out of commission, every Keyblade Wielder in the order (all ten of them, excluding Sora) was called out of retirement and into active duty to help defend the known worlds against the threat of the Hellfire Club, and help solve the mystery of the Legion, as well as how exactly Marluxia, of all people, had come to be a leader of this group. It was going to be dangerous, but it was obvious to everybody that it needed to be done.
"Just promise me you'll stay safe," she demanded as she stood on her toes to give him a kiss. "Just promise me you'll come home." Lea was acutely aware that the room was growing colder with his fiancé's every word. He thought he even spotted chunks of frost forming on the windows. Elsa' control over her powers had improved dramatically over the past six years, but her control tended to slip when she was stressed or emotional. Like right now, when he was about to head off to war, for crying out loud! He sight.
"I can't make any guarantees," he admitted sadly. "But I promise I'll do everything I can to stay alive and make it back in time for the wedding." With that, he gave his fiancé one last hug and kiss before he got in line to go through security and into the concourse. He hadn't mastered turning his Keyblade into a Glider form yet, so he was taking a passenger Gummi Liner to the Land of Departure. The Gummi Ship that would drop him off at Terra, Aqua, and Ven's castle was coming in from Twilight Town, so Roxas and Xion had arranged to meet him at the docking bay while the ship was cleaned and refueled in between flights. Sure enough, he arrived at Docking Bay 13 to find the duo sitting on a bench near the boarding ramp with a pizza balanced between them.
Lea smiled as he walked up his surrogate siblings/kids and plopped himself down on the seat next to them, helping himself to a slice of pizza. Roxas and Xion laughed as they teased him about need to ask before he started mooching their food from them. It felt like old times sitting here. As they sat in the spaceport waiting to board their flight, Lea couldn't help but think about how much he missed hanging out with them. After they'd graduated from high school in Twilight Town, he'd gotten a job in Arendelle so he could be closer to his girlfriend. But at the same time, he felt nostalgia as he thought back to all those nights cooking dinner for the three of them, helping Roxas and Xion with their homework, giving them advice on everything from school to dating.
Lea was old enough to be their older brothers, but that didn't mean he was blind to the fact that he was the closest thing they'd ever had to parents. And over time, he'd come think of them like they were his kids as well. They were all still best friends first and foremost, but after everything they'd been through in the Organization, they'd become more than that. They'd become a family. A bizarre and dysfunctional one, but a family nonetheless. What Lea felt was Roxas' and Xion's best quality was that after everything that had happened to them, they still had a degree of childlike innocence in them. He just hoped that they would be able to come out of the coming battles with that innocence intact. Lea may not have been a very superstitious man, but it was obvious to anybody that dark clouds were on the horizon. A storm was coming.
Earth – New Avengers Compound; Roof:
Tony Stark was awake in the early hours of the morning for one reason or another. Whether it was staying up obscenely late for a project or simply having too much caffeine during one of his creative bursts earlier in the week, there was always something to give the billionaire to wander the hallways of Avengers HQ at 2 o' clock in the morning. But tonight was one of those rare nights where it wasn't his creative juices keeping him up. He'd simply woken up in his and Pepper's room in the middle of the night and just didn't feel like going back to bed just yet. So with nothing better to do for fear of having the angry yells of his irately awoken teammates directed at him, he went up to the roof to look at the stars.
He was surprised to find that he wasn't alone up on the roof. The new kid, Sora, the dude who was supposedly this great mystical "Keyblade-wielding" warrior from a chain of masters and apprentices going back to the dawn of human civilization. He was still having trouble wrapping his head around that whole story, and the brunette's answers to his questions last night only added to the genius' confusion. So when he noticed the guy leaning against the railing running around the perimeter of the building, his first instinct was to stay silent and observe. He was still cautious about how genuine this guy really was. So hopefully a rare chance to see how he acted when he thought nobody was looking might help ease those concerns.
As he watched and listened, Tony noticed that the younger man was holding what looked like a pendant made of seashells in his hand. Then he noticed that the railing and concrete beneath Sora's chin looked wet. Tony's suspicion of the kid (despite the fact that he was in his early twenties, Tony still referred to him as kid since he was the youngest one in the building besides Stitch) evaporated almost instantly as he realized what was going on. Poor guy, Tony thought to himself. Here we are worried about security when the kid's just had his whole world turned upside down.
"You miss her, don't you?" Tony commented as he walked over and put a hand on the younger man's shoulder. Sora glanced at Tony with a look that clearly indicated that he was questioning how the billionaire industrialist figured it out. Stark simply responded with a meaningful look of his own that said that it was obvious. "I know how that feels. There was this one time eight years ago where I was fighting this terrorist, called himself the Mandarin. Technically he wasn't who he said he was but that's not important. Anyway, his goons blew up my house and I managed to get Pepper out of the house before it collapsed on top of me. Thankfully, my armor saved my life, but at that point it was pretty much on autopilot. The suit flew me halfway across the country until it ran out of power, and at that point, I had no way of contacting her."
"What I'm trying to say," the "Genius Billionaire Philanthropist" went on. "Is that even if half a country doesn't compare to half the galaxy, I understand how you're feeling right now." That managed to cheer the Avengers' young guest up, and the young man thanked Tony for his surprisingly kind and insightful words.
"Don't mention it, kid," Tony replied. "You'll learn pretty quickly that meaningful and insightful comments from me are about as rare as a four-leaf clover." That managed to get a laugh out of the Keyblade Master, breaking the ice and lightening the mood. After a few minutes of stargazing in which Sora commented on how different the constellations were from his home, Tony started pointing out Earth's constellations, and Sora ended up explaining how most stars represented a world's heart, the conversation turned to the Key Bearer's love life. To his credit, Tony refrained from his usual brand of sarcastic humor as Sora showed him the thalasa shell good luck charm his fiancé had given him years ago, and talked about how it had always symbolized the promise to always find each other no matter what happened.
Tony honestly thought it was a bit cheesy, but he honestly felt that the team could use a little cheese form time to time. Besides, he could tell that Sora really cared about his future wife, and out of respect for the kid's situation, he withheld from joking about the guy's past. They continued to talk about relationships and other similar topics well into the early morning hours, and by the time the sun rose, the rest of the Avengers walked into the living room that morning to find Iron Man and the Keyblade Master passed out on the couches.
Kairi's on the warpath, and she's got something to focus on now: demanding a meeting with Loki. He should be afraid. Very afraid. Anyway, since this chapter was mainly about the heroes reacting to the Battle of Knowhere, next chapter will be the villains' perspectives on the aftermath. I also wanted to throw in a small scene with Lea and Elsa, because similar to last chapter Yuffie/Ventus scene, I wanted to have a few fluff scenes between all the action sequences. And before anyone comments on it being out of character for Kairi to swear, this was just a one time thing to show her frustration with Sora's Tesseract-induced disappearance.
I had the bit at the end with Sora breaking down over everything that happened as a reminder that even if he puts on a brave face, all the crazy stuff that happens around him still gets to him from time to time. Rest assured though, the rest of the fic isn't going to be Sora goofing off with the Avengers while everyone else fights the bad guys. Things are going to get action packed soon enough. Some of you are probably wondering why I picked Iron Man as the one to have a late night chat with Sora, and it's mainly because I felt that despite their contrasting personalities, one of the things they have in common is that they're both devoted to the people they care about, and will do everything they can to protect them.
Chapter 34: Loss:
Radiant Garden – Kairi's Bedroom:
The silence of Kairi's room was broken only by the soft rustle of a balled up wad of tissues sailing through the air as Kairi tossed it towards the trash can on the other side of the room. Tears rolled down her cheeks like waterfalls and damped the sheets beneath her as the princess of Radiant Garden laid back sobbing on her bed. It had been two days since the Battle of Knowhere, and there had been no sign of Sora anywhere in Coalition space. If she didn't have confirmation from Vanitas that the cube he'd grabbed only teleported him instead of killing him, she'd have believed her fiancé was dead.
As it was, she had no idea where he was, everyone's focus was directed at the war against the Hellfire Club and the investigation into the stupid Legion, and nobody had the slightest clue how she was supposed to find the love of her life and bring him home. The first day after the battle, she'd gone on the warpath in a panicked frenzy. When she realized that there was absolutely nothing she could do to track Sora down, she became inconsolable with grief. How was she supposed to find him if she had no idea where to start looking? It wasn't like she could get energy readings from Knowhere to search for similar energy signatures from the cube elsewhere in the universe. Malekith had seen to that.
After Sora disappeared, the scales began tipping in the Coalition's favor. Vanitas was able to contain the Cube and spirit it away back to Radiant Garden, where it now rested in the Chamber of Repose deep beneath her uncle's old laboratory. Vanitas' informant warned that it was suicidally dangerous to keep the two Infinity Stones too close together, so Vanitas hid the Mind Stone in a locked box in the castle of the Land of Departure. When Maleficent realized that the battle was clearly lost, Maleficent executed the Collector to keep him from providing Coalition Intelligence with any useful information. And then Malekith used one of those Black Hole grenades to make the mining colony implode in on itself, killing all who lived upon it. Coalition Forces barely made it out in time before the entire decaying alien skull was condensed into a tiny wormhole.
A knock at the door distracted her from her moping, and the door opened to reveal a face nearly identical to her own, only framed by blonde hair instead of red. Without any prompting or greeting, Namine slid onto the bed and gave Kairi a comforting hug.
"We'll find him, Kairi," her Nobody greeted reassuringly. "Don't worry."
"Hard not to when nobody really knows where to start looking," the princess of Radiant Garden retorted sarcastically. "And between everything going on with the Hellfire Club and the Legion nobody even has the time to really look for any clues."
"I know, I know," Namine replied. "But what would Sora do if he was in your place?"
"He'd spend a few hours beating himself up over not being able to protect me," Kairi answered with a chuckle. "Then he'd pick himself up and track me down to the ends of the universe and damn anyone who got in his way."
"Exactly," her Nobody answered. "It's been two days, Kairi. It's time for you to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start hunting." This managed to cheer the princess of Heart up considerably. She wiped the tears from her face as she stood up from the bed. The sorrow in her eyes was gone now, replaced by ironclad resolve.
"Thanks Namine," she said as she gave her "twin" a hug. "I needed that. And you did just give me an idea for starting my search."
"How?" The blonde artist asked. "What are you going to do?" Kairi answered with a grin that promised intense pain on anyone who tried to stop her in her quest to find her fiancé and bring him home.
"I'm going to get Vanitas to arrange a meeting with his informant."
Arendelle – Spaceport:
"I wish you didn't have to go," Elsa said as she gave her fiancé one last hug. The date for their wedding was only a month away, and now he had been called out to face a situation that he might not come back from. They stood together at the security checkpoint of Arendelle's Spaceport, saying their goodbyes before the former Flurry of Dancing Flames went off to war. Elsa would have gone with him were it not for the fact that her duties as queen meant that she needed to stay and protect her people in the event the Hellfire Club or the Legion attacked Arendelle.
"I do too," Lea replied forlornly. "But I have to. With Sora M.I.A., Team Keyblade needs all hands on deck." With one of their most powerful Keyblade Masters out of commission, every Keyblade Wielder in the order (all ten of them, excluding Sora) was called out of retirement and into active duty to help defend the known worlds against the threat of the Hellfire Club, and help solve the mystery of the Legion, as well as how exactly Marluxia, of all people, had come to be a leader of this group. It was going to be dangerous, but it was obvious to everybody that it needed to be done.
"Just promise me you'll stay safe," she demanded as she stood on her toes to give him a kiss. "Just promise me you'll come home." Lea was acutely aware that the room was growing colder with his fiancé's every word. He thought he even spotted chunks of frost forming on the windows. Elsa' control over her powers had improved dramatically over the past six years, but her control tended to slip when she was stressed or emotional. Like right now, when he was about to head off to war, for crying out loud! He sight.
"I can't make any guarantees," he admitted sadly. "But I promise I'll do everything I can to stay alive and make it back in time for the wedding." With that, he gave his fiancé one last hug and kiss before he got in line to go through security and into the concourse. He hadn't mastered turning his Keyblade into a Glider form yet, so he was taking a passenger Gummi Liner to the Land of Departure. The Gummi Ship that would drop him off at Terra, Aqua, and Ven's castle was coming in from Twilight Town, so Roxas and Xion had arranged to meet him at the docking bay while the ship was cleaned and refueled in between flights. Sure enough, he arrived at Docking Bay 13 to find the duo sitting on a bench near the boarding ramp with a pizza balanced between them.
Lea smiled as he walked up his surrogate siblings/kids and plopped himself down on the seat next to them, helping himself to a slice of pizza. Roxas and Xion laughed as they teased him about need to ask before he started mooching their food from them. It felt like old times sitting here. As they sat in the spaceport waiting to board their flight, Lea couldn't help but think about how much he missed hanging out with them. After they'd graduated from high school in Twilight Town, he'd gotten a job in Arendelle so he could be closer to his girlfriend. But at the same time, he felt nostalgia as he thought back to all those nights cooking dinner for the three of them, helping Roxas and Xion with their homework, giving them advice on everything from school to dating.
Lea was old enough to be their older brothers, but that didn't mean he was blind to the fact that he was the closest thing they'd ever had to parents. And over time, he'd come think of them like they were his kids as well. They were all still best friends first and foremost, but after everything they'd been through in the Organization, they'd become more than that. They'd become a family. A bizarre and dysfunctional one, but a family nonetheless. What Lea felt was Roxas' and Xion's best quality was that after everything that had happened to them, they still had a degree of childlike innocence in them. He just hoped that they would be able to come out of the coming battles with that innocence intact. Lea may not have been a very superstitious man, but it was obvious to anybody that dark clouds were on the horizon. A storm was coming.
Earth – New Avengers Compound; Roof:
Tony Stark was awake in the early hours of the morning for one reason or another. Whether it was staying up obscenely late for a project or simply having too much caffeine during one of his creative bursts earlier in the week, there was always something to give the billionaire to wander the hallways of Avengers HQ at 2 o' clock in the morning. But tonight was one of those rare nights where it wasn't his creative juices keeping him up. He'd simply woken up in his and Pepper's room in the middle of the night and just didn't feel like going back to bed just yet. So with nothing better to do for fear of having the angry yells of his irately awoken teammates directed at him, he went up to the roof to look at the stars.
He was surprised to find that he wasn't alone up on the roof. The new kid, Sora, the dude who was supposedly this great mystical "Keyblade-wielding" warrior from a chain of masters and apprentices going back to the dawn of human civilization. He was still having trouble wrapping his head around that whole story, and the brunette's answers to his questions last night only added to the genius' confusion. So when he noticed the guy leaning against the railing running around the perimeter of the building, his first instinct was to stay silent and observe. He was still cautious about how genuine this guy really was. So hopefully a rare chance to see how he acted when he thought nobody was looking might help ease those concerns.
As he watched and listened, Tony noticed that the younger man was holding what looked like a pendant made of seashells in his hand. Then he noticed that the railing and concrete beneath Sora's chin looked wet. Tony's suspicion of the kid (despite the fact that he was in his early twenties, Tony still referred to him as kid since he was the youngest one in the building besides Stitch) evaporated almost instantly as he realized what was going on. Poor guy, Tony thought to himself. Here we are worried about security when the kid's just had his whole world turned upside down.
"You miss her, don't you?" Tony commented as he walked over and put a hand on the younger man's shoulder. Sora glanced at Tony with a look that clearly indicated that he was questioning how the billionaire industrialist figured it out. Stark simply responded with a meaningful look of his own that said that it was obvious. "I know how that feels. There was this one time eight years ago where I was fighting this terrorist, called himself the Mandarin. Technically he wasn't who he said he was but that's not important. Anyway, his goons blew up my house and I managed to get Pepper out of the house before it collapsed on top of me. Thankfully, my armor saved my life, but at that point it was pretty much on autopilot. The suit flew me halfway across the country until it ran out of power, and at that point, I had no way of contacting her."
"What I'm trying to say," the "Genius Billionaire Philanthropist" went on. "Is that even if half a country doesn't compare to half the galaxy, I understand how you're feeling right now." That managed to cheer the Avengers' young guest up, and the young man thanked Tony for his surprisingly kind and insightful words.
"Don't mention it, kid," Tony replied. "You'll learn pretty quickly that meaningful and insightful comments from me are about as rare as a four-leaf clover." That managed to get a laugh out of the Keyblade Master, breaking the ice and lightening the mood. After a few minutes of stargazing in which Sora commented on how different the constellations were from his home, Tony started pointing out Earth's constellations, and Sora ended up explaining how most stars represented a world's heart, the conversation turned to the Key Bearer's love life. To his credit, Tony refrained from his usual brand of sarcastic humor as Sora showed him the thalasa shell good luck charm his fiancé had given him years ago, and talked about how it had always symbolized the promise to always find each other no matter what happened.
Tony honestly thought it was a bit cheesy, but he honestly felt that the team could use a little cheese form time to time. Besides, he could tell that Sora really cared about his future wife, and out of respect for the kid's situation, he withheld from joking about the guy's past. They continued to talk about relationships and other similar topics well into the early morning hours, and by the time the sun rose, the rest of the Avengers walked into the living room that morning to find Iron Man and the Keyblade Master passed out on the couches.
Kairi's on the warpath, and she's got something to focus on now: demanding a meeting with Loki. He should be afraid. Very afraid. Anyway, since this chapter was mainly about the heroes reacting to the Battle of Knowhere, next chapter will be the villains' perspectives on the aftermath. I also wanted to throw in a small scene with Lea and Elsa, because similar to last chapter Yuffie/Ventus scene, I wanted to have a few fluff scenes between all the action sequences. And before anyone comments on it being out of character for Kairi to swear, this was just a one time thing to show her frustration with Sora's Tesseract-induced disappearance.
I had the bit at the end with Sora breaking down over everything that happened as a reminder that even if he puts on a brave face, all the crazy stuff that happens around him still gets to him from time to time. Rest assured though, the rest of the fic isn't going to be Sora goofing off with the Avengers while everyone else fights the bad guys. Things are going to get action packed soon enough. Some of you are probably wondering why I picked Iron Man as the one to have a late night chat with Sora, and it's mainly because I felt that despite their contrasting personalities, one of the things they have in common is that they're both devoted to the people they care about, and will do everything they can to protect them.