Kingdom Hearts 1. Prologue

**Prologue**

Roxas, more so than anyone else, remembered everything.

First, he remembered the turquoise glint of the sea and the sway of his father's red and white fishing boat bobbing along atop it. The words 'Our Lady White' flaked away black paint along either side of the stern, and his father said he'd named it for his mother. She had died, he said, in some accident when Roxas was a baby; she was in heaven now, resting until it was time for rebirth. He said that Roxas might meet her again someday, though neither of them would remember--but, he said, when two hearts have known love, they never fully forget.

Nocturne sat upon a peninsula that curved out into the waves, and the little boat would carry them out into the bay in the early mornings. His father would cast out his nets and tell stories until the fog dissipated under the sunrise, and Roxas would listen while lowering the crawley traps hand over hand, careful not to lose hold of the ropes.

When the sun rose and the fog burned away, he could look across the bay to the green of the far shore and see the speckled shadows of the ruins of Alta. The angled sunlight drew the crumbling towers in color, sand and silver and charred black, walls a quarry of rocks that trailed down into the sea.

His father would tell him that once Alta was the grandest city in the West, a gem upon the seaside, the kind of city that young boys would dream of leaving their plain hometowns to visit. The sort of place that spawned romance and adventure. It was beautiful and flourishing, tended dutifully by the House of Twilight and their lavish court. Some of the stories he told, Roxas thought he must have made up, or maybe someone else had told him once, when he was a boy on a fishing boat, too, because the city had always been in ruins.

Sometimes at night, when the floodlights were lit outside the walls of Nocturne and on the perimeter around the little village where the fishermen lived, bright and reflecting white on the waves, there were flickers of flames among the ruins, visible only in the dark. His father called it a bad omen; he would bar the door on those nights, lock all the shutters, douse the lights and build a blanket fort in the living room. They would stay up late with storybooks and a torchlight. His father would get a cup of water and make the fluid dance up into the air, forming into words and shapes, and Roxas would laugh and clap and demand he make the ocean with the fish jumping out. He always did, but not until Roxas asked.

They would sleep through the morning instead of fishing.

He asked his father one day, when he kept drawing his nets back empty, why he didn't command the water to spit all the fish into their boat. His father smiled, and laughed a little, and said that it would be cheating. Said that working hard and doing the right thing was more important than fancy magic.

Roxas was five years old when he last saw his father.

There were loud noises outside, in the village, and they disturbed his dreams but he didn't fully wake until his father was gathering him up and carrying him downstairs, blanket and teddy bear still clutched in his arms.

"We're going to play a game, Roxas," his father said, soothing one hand over his hair because the noises outside were getting louder. "It's like hide and seek."

The mana rifle that his father usually kept locked away in a metal box in his bedroom closet was propped against the wall in the living room. When he set Roxas down on the floor, tucking the blanket around him and smiling to assure him that everything was okay, Roxas saw that there was a knife on his belt, the one with the crest of the House of Twilight on the hilt.

"To win the game," his father explained, "you have to hide in the closet and be as quiet as you can, for as long as you can. Okay?"

Roxas nodded, though he thought it was a dull game and it was a strange time to be playing, in the middle of the night with all that noise outside, but his father looked happy when he agreed. Told him he was a good boy.

The closet his father opened was strange--Roxas had thought it was full of coats or something, though he'd never looked inside it before--but now he saw that the inside walls were all metal and the door had strange tech devices on it. His father urged him inside, with his blanket and bear, and knelt to take his face in his hands.

"You understand the game?" Roxas nodded vigorously, stared up at his father's smile and wondered why his eyes looked sad and watery. "Remember to stay quiet, okay? Try to sleep if you can. It'll be morning before you know it."

He nodded some more and wanted to ask where his father was going. If he was going to hide somewhere and be quiet, too. He was tired, though, and those noises were really loud now. His father kissed the top of his head, and told him not to be afraid.

The door closed with a hiss and for a moment afterward it was so dark he wanted to cry out. He remembered the game, though, and hugged his bear tighter instead, and then a small green light turned on somewhere overhead. It was dim, but it was better than the dark.

His father said it would be morning soon, but the night seemed to stretch on forever. He couldn't sleep, because he could still hear the noises from the village, and sometimes the ground would shake so hard the light would flicker and Roxas felt like he was bouncing on the floor.

Worse than that was when the noises stopped. There was so much silence, and it was so long and heavy Roxas thought it might crush him if it continued. He wanted to yell, then, ask when the game was supposed to be over, but he thought his father would have told him. He thought his father must be coming to get him when it was over, and if he'd been good and quiet maybe he would get a sweet from the bakery.

So he didn't make a sound, even when the black, searching fingers squeezed underneath the door.

His father had told him about the Shadows. They slithered into the world through the crack in the sky and the people had to make rings of light around their towns to keep them away. His father showed him pictures in some of the storybooks, where a hero with a weapon of light would carve through them and rescue the townspeople from their searching claws and glowing yellow eyes.

The black fingers wiggled, and pawed at the metal, and Roxas thought that his father had always said the Shadows couldn't get him, in their house. That the lights kept them all safely away from the village.

He didn't like this game anymore.

There was a torchlight in the corner, and he turned it on and aimed it at the crack under the door and the fingers disappeared. He slept like that, feverishly, propped against the wall with the blanket wrapped around him, bear in one arm and the other hand holding the light steady. Light to drive the darkness away.

* * *

When he woke up, the torchlight had run out of power, but there was a strip of light shining under the door. It was morning. That had to mean that the game was over.

He called for his father to let him out. He said he'd been good and stayed quiet. Said he was hungry and his legs hurt from sitting on the metal floor and he didn't want to play anymore. He called and he called, but the door never opened. He beat his hands on the metal surface, kicked at it with the balls of his bare feet, struck it with the dead torchlight, but the door never opened.

Roxas sat back down, finally, and hugged his bear, and cried.

"Hey," a voice said. "Hey, is there someone in there? Can you hear me?"

The voice wasn't his father. It was too young, and danced around brightly like music or a leaping fire. Roxas tried to scrub the tears away from his face and stood up, banging on the metal with one fist. "Lemme out!"

"Okay, listen." The voice was very close, and he could see a shadow passing in front of the light under the door. "You have to get as far back from the door as you can and cover your face. Got it?"

Roxas was tired of doing what he was told, and this wasn't a fun game, either. But the voice was going to let him out, so he said, "Okay," and shuffled back into the corner and pulled the blanket over his head.

"Ready?"

"Yeah."

There was a strange, grating sound and sparks shot through the door on one side. Metal creaked and Roxas sank down further in the corner, curled around his bear and wrapped both arms over his head. The noise stopped after a few minutes, and then there was a jerk and a creak and the sunlight spread over his toes.

The voice belonged to a boy. An older boy, maybe six or seven, in clothes that were a size or two too big for him, and he had a brilliant smile and messy, spiky hair the color of ripe red pinellos, and a smoking firewedge clutched in one fist. "Hi," he said, still shoving the door open and Roxas didn't remember all that debris being in the living room, or the sun shining that brightly from overhead when they had a perfectly good roof to block out the elements. He stayed in his corner and hugged the bear tighter.

The boy stopped pushing the door when it wouldn't budge any further and dusted his hands off on his pants like he had intended it to only open that far, then crouched in the doorway and peered at him. "You hurt?"

Roxas shook his head.

"Good." He smiled again, like this all really was a fun game. "Wanna come with me?"

"Where's my dad?"

The boy pursed his mouth thoughtfully, shrugged. "I dunno. We came from the temple. You know, in the city."

Roxas knew about the temple in Nocturne; it was broken and ruined sort of like the city across the bay. The temple was where the orphans lived. Roxas wasn't an orphan.

"Hey, tell you something. If you come with me, your dad'll know for sure where to find you." The boy smiled eagerly, reached out a hand to take his, waiting. "All the kids go to the temple after there's a war."

"There was... a war?"

The boy nodded. "Yeah. There were mana bombs and everything, must've been scary, huh?" He edged a bit closer. "The floodlight perimeter broke down, too. It's not safe here anymore." His hand reached again, waving for him to come along. "Hey, it's okay. I'm Axel, what's your name?"

He was going to answer, but heard a noise somewhere past Axel that sounded like running feet, and then a shadow fell across them both. "Oh, you found one, huh?" Another boy, this one much older--maybe ten or eleven. He towered over them both and made a face at Roxas, cowering in the corner with a stuffed bear as he was. The boy made a snorting noise and rolled his eyes, reaching over Axel's head. "Jeez, what a wuss. Just grab him."

"NO!" Axel jumped up faster than Roxas had ever seen anyone move, shoving the older boy roughly in the stomach with both hands. "I found him, _I'll_ take care of him!"

The older boy stumbled backwards into the door, surprised for a moment before straightening and shrugging like he hadn't just been shoved around by a kid four years younger than him and four inches smaller, at least. "Whatever. Just gimme the firewedge, there's another shelter down by the beach."

Axel handed the device over, mumbling something halfhearted about it still being hot, and stared at the older boy with a scowl until he walked off with another scoff. Continued staring even after Roxas couldn't see him anymore and only turned back to the little metal room when he was satisfied the other boy was gone. Axel smiled again, then, and shrugged. "Forget that guy, he's a jerk. So, you want to come with me, right?"

Roxas wasn't sure. The boy said that the lights were broken, and that meant the Shadows could get into the village. He certainly couldn't stay! But his father would be looking for him now, right? Because the game had to be over, it was morning and the noises had stopped. What if his father was out here looking for him and nighttime came? What if he was supposed to stay here? But he couldn't stay until dark! Roxas chewed on his lower lip, hugging the bear and wishing his father had explained the rules a little better.

Axel was crouched in the doorway again, hands on his knees, watching Roxas intently and waiting.

"You're sure he'll come look for me at the temple?"

A nod, and a brilliant smile, white teeth like a crescent moon. "Positive."

This time, when Axel reached out his hand, Roxas took it and wrapped his fingers tight around it, and stood up.

Outside the little metal room and beyond the door the world was strange and broken. Roxas was almost certain that the room had transported him somewhere else, a place with smoking ruins of houses and piles of rubble and gray ash craters that spread across the ground. At the docks the boats were overturned or blackened or simply gone, a few planks and splinters the only sign left of their possible existence, the dock itself jagged spikes of wood pointing out of the ragged waves. Roxas tilted his head back as far as he could but the sky was clear and blue in every direction, the sun slowly climbing in the east and highlighting the crack like a white-streaked rainbow.

Roxas didn't think the day had any business being so nice.

Axel found a safe path through the debris for Roxas and his bare feet, wrapped in his blanket and clutching his bear, and when the safe paths ended Axel carried him piggyback over the splintering boards or scattered glass until they reached bare dirt or cobbles again.

Once, as they were turning past the charred corner of a building that still had one lonely wall standing, Roxas saw a pair of boots on the ground. Axel hissed and tugged him against his side, hand clapping down over Roxas's eyes. "Don't look. We're almost there."

And after a few more paces, when Axel dropped his hand again and Roxas almost looked over his shoulder but didn't, he heard someone humming a song. They were on the outskirts of the village now, in the grass where the floodlights stood on poles only the poles had fallen or were tilted against each other, wires dangling limp and the lamps they were holding shattered, just a bit of jagged glass showing where the bulbs had been. There was one space where the poles were still upright, though, just two of them, and in the grass there a woman was sitting with a basket of fruit and flowers, dressed in pink and green and her curling brown hair tied back in a tail. A little girl much younger than Roxas was in her arms as she rocked back and forth like the waves swaying a boat on the open sea, humming a soothing tune.

Axel bounced on his heels and hurried forward, one hand up and waving now, grin bright on his face. "Aerith! Look, I found someone!"

Roxas thought, in the moment that the woman looked up at them and smiled, one hand raising to wave them over like welcoming them into an embrace, that she was beautiful, and he wondered if his mother had looked that beautiful and kind, too.

He hoped she did.

Axel let go of his hand and tumbled into the grass, all limbs and red hair and too-big clothing. Roxas followed more demurely, settling down with the blanket on his shoulders, bare feet tucked under him. The woman pulled a small, round whitefruit out of her basket and offered it to him, still smiling. "What's your name?"

"Roxas," he said, still looking at her and not the fruit between his fingers at all.

She was like the ocean, he thought. All water and waves, slow moving, gentle rocking, the soothing stretch and pull of breakers rolling over the beach. "It's lovely to meet you, Roxas. My name is Aerith."

"She looks after us," Axel interjected, nodding in a way that assured Roxas he knew what he was talking about. He bounced on his knees in the grass and leaned forward to gain the woman's approval. "I found him in a shelter and got him out all by myself."

"That's very good, Axel," she assured him, and the way he grinned could have powered a floodlight perimeter all on its own. In her lap the little girl had turned to observe the newcomers, tear-streaked face just visible from amongst the folds of Aerith's dress, one small fist clutching the fabric tight. She stared at Roxas with wide, watery eyes for a long moment, then her attention dropped to the bear in his arms.

"Can I have a whitefruit?" Axel asked, still bouncing and hope made his face go round and open.

Aerith shook her head, and the purse of her lips was kind but firm. "You've already had three."

"But--"

"There will be other children, and they're going to be hungry. You're a big boy now and you can wait."

Axel slouched a bit, excitement deflating for the moment, and sprawled out on his stomach to pick at the grass. Roxas took a bite of his fruit and his stomach growled, and he took three more before he noticed the little girl staring again.

He thought about his father and the gun and the knife, and the noises and shaking and where he might be now, and wondered if something very important had happened last night. A war, like Axel had said. He thought, and he wondered if his father had known they would be separated, and remembered that the last thing he'd told him was not to be afraid.

Roxas picked up the bear from his lap, and held it out to the little girl. She blinked at him a few times, eyes huge, then cautiously reached out both hands to take it. When the bear was securely in her arms, Aerith hummed in approval. "That was very kind of him, wasn't it, Olette? Can you say thank you?"

The girl murmured something muffled into the bear's cottony head that sounded like it might have been 'thank you'. Roxas mumbled something that sounded like, "You're welcome," at his knees, because he figured that was what his mother would have wanted him to say, and Aerith probably did, too.

It felt so strange, sitting here on the outskirts of what used to be his home, shivering under his blanket in the dew-covered grass and learning to be polite from a woman he just met, who wasn't his mother but might have been a reflection of her, like the watery visage he used to see when he looked over the side of his father's boat into the ocean. It was strange, but turned like this with his back to the village, maybe he could pretend he was with a caretaker his father had hired to mind him for the day while he went out into rougher seas to fish. Such things happened from time to time, and whenever it did Roxas felt small and sad and sat somewhere by himself with a storybook instead of playing with the other children. His father always told him that he should try to make friends at times like these, but he didn't like to play their rough games and if he tried telling them stories, like the ones his father told, they thought he was strange or boring and left to do something else.

Now, though, he didn't know how long it would be until his father came back, and Roxas didn't want to sit alone in a corner until he did. So when he took another bite, he noticed Axel fidgeting again, shifting on his elbows and eying Aerith's basket, and Roxas watched him thoughtfully before holding out his half-eaten whitefruit.

"I'll share," he said softly, then made his voice stronger because his father had said not to be afraid. "If you'll be my friend."

"Roxas." Aerith's voice was soft but admonishing. "You mustn't bargain for friendship."

"That's okay," Axel said brightly, and that tone was back in his voice--leaping and dancing like fire. He pushed the fruit back towards Roxas, rejecting it but smiling just the same. "I'll be your friend, anyway."


	2. The Girl in the Desert, Part One

With this chapter, we're back on a weekend posting schedule. Barring any brain failures or acts of god, etc. I'll announce any planned hiatus as it comes.

* * *

**The Girl in the Desert, Part One**

Hot. It was _hot_.

Hot like a scathing bonfire against her back, hot like the rough surface of a cast-iron skillet against her front, and between the two she was fairly certain she was dying. She flexed her fingers and felt grit slide under her nails, turned her cheek and felt skin scrape against the burning surface she was lying on. Let her eyes flutter open and only one could see past the hand lying limp in front of her face, around the strands of red draped over her nose. It tickled, and she made a soft noise of protest that sounded louder than it was in her ears, but when she tried to move her muscles simply tensed once, then relaxed into a dull pain that ran deeper than the heat.

She blinked, exhaled and some of the hair fluttered to the side just enough to expose the landscape beyond. An expanse of pavement bleached gray under the sun, dust and sand skittering across it in a fitful breeze, distorting waves of heat rising up from it and throwing the world behind it into a watery haze. Endless faded brown, the baked and cracked earth, pavement splitting it down the middle like a strip of withering twine.

How...?

She wondered, and the word alone seemed to sum up everything. How.

What little she could see of the sky above her was just as stretched and washed-out as the road beneath her. She was facing north, she noted--she recognized the way that the sky cracked on that side of the world. More jagged than in the south, where it was a thin splintering, fine as a spiderweb and meandering in slow, lazy arcs until it touched the earth somewhere distant.

In the north, though, the crack was more apparent. It gaped like a wound, massive and black between the edges, and on either side of it the color of the sky was a shade different. Paler blue to the east and more violet to the west. In the desert, where the land was flat and barren and endless, it looked closer than she remembered.

She shivered, chill running down her spine that defied the heat--licked her lips, felt them splitting in the dry air and tasted blood, felt how dry and swollen her own tongue was and wondered again, how--

_How long will it take me to die like this?_

Memory fogged and swirled when she tried to dredge up information, but she thought she recalled something about heat stroke, and thought that she would probably pass out first. That was somewhat comforting, although before she died she would really, really like to know just how it was she'd ended up here, on the side of the refugee road in the middle of the desert, still in her temple silks, hair loose to the wind and dangling red over her face, slowly roasting under the sun.

She didn't think it was too much to ask. She closed her eyes again, silently apologizing for being unable to move and fold her hands over her heart properly, and prayed.

She wasn't sure how long that lasted--she sent out at least a dozen prayers to any of the Seven who might listen, extra to the Twin Goddess as Her servant, pleading for at least an explanation if not forgiveness. It may have been hours, as the sun never seemed to move anywhere that would result in being any less hot, and by the end she was sure it was nearly over, anyway. There was a roaring in her ears that she imagined was a prelude to unconsciousness.

She stopped praying and opened her eyes. If there was no response now, perhaps the Seven would explain this after she was dead. Perhaps.

What she saw, however, was not death (Dawn, the second, goddess of death and rebirth), but a whirl of movement in front of her eyes, across the baked gray and haze of the road, that resolved itself after a moment to an enormous set of tires screeching to a halt, kicking up sand in clouds that crawled pitifully across the pavement. Her gaze traveled up as far as it could, taking in scratched and dented gray metal, molded to itself and larger than she could see in any direction save where it stopped around the tires, black and heavy-treaded under the dust. She coughed, weakly, and thought she heard something slam, though all of this might have been her imagination.

Looked like a V-class, she thought, idly--strange thing to think while dying. She'd worked on one or two of those, volunteering in the camps around Luma. Strange to see one outside a caravan. It was probably her imagination.

But she didn't imagine hearing the footsteps skidding across the road, the sound gritty with sand--or the voice, or the cool hand that brushed her hair back and pressed against her cheek.

"Hey. Hey! Are you alive?"

Her eyelids fluttered for a moment and she realized she was on her back, a figure hovering over her and blocking the sun, and when it resolved she coughed again, blinking again, unable to hold the image. A boy. Blond hair, messy with spikes, and blue, blue eyes.

"It's you," she murmured, hoarse, and her tongue stuck inside her mouth. Then shook her head. "No--no, it's not. Who are you?"

But another sound filtered past the engine of the truck still running, a buzz at first, then more than one, then three--maybe more. The figure's head jerked to the side, looking past her and down along the road. "Shit. Can you walk?"

She tried lifting her arms, and was able to grasp the boy's shoulders. He resolved in her vision again just long enough for her to catch the look of panic on his face, too pale for this desert and so much like... something. Someone? "I'm sorry," she said, but wasn't entirely sure why.

His arms were strong, though. She could feel muscles through the silk when he lifted her up, steadying her when her feet stumbled over each other, lifting her when they reached the truck. It was huge, she could tell now even though the image of it jumped around in front of her eyes--definitely a V-class, armored, probably customized--and the shade it threw off was so welcome she nearly collapsed in it.

"Almost there," he said, holding her securely by the waist and throwing open the passenger door with his free hand, and his voice had that same panicked edge, and the buzzing was growing louder.

She found enough energy to climb up and into the seat and--goddesses, it was blessedly cool inside, cooler yet when the boy outside closed the door, and she leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes, feeling her muscles uncoiling one by one.

She had the presence of mind, in that moment, to fold her hands over her chest. Thank you, Seven, for affording me rescue--she prayed, and she meant every word, but when she opened her eyes and found the strength to reach up and smooth her hair back, tucking sweat-soaked locks behind her ears and gritting her teeth at the thought of a boy seeing her in such a state, silks stained and hair on her shoulders, she added--

Now, just what the _hell_ is going on?

There was a shuffle and a slam of the opposite door, muffled cursing and then the vehicle sprang to life, engine lurching and protesting as it rolled forwards, the seat beneath her jerking and rumbling along with the rest of the truck.

Other sounds followed, toggles switching and monitors sputtering with static and beeps and the low, displeased and rather frightened hisses of the truck's driver. She opened her eyes slightly, head lolling on the back of the seat but at least the world around her was holding steady otherwise. He was young, she thought, watching the boy with one hand on the wheel in front of him, other hand alternating between tapping at a monitor that was still reading static and operating a gear shift, or flipping a toggle, or pressing a series of buttons, still hissing and muttering to himself and watching the rearview mirror outside his window more than the road in front of him. Although the road, what she could see of it, was as empty and endless as the desert around them.

He was young. As young as her, at least, and thin and lithe in a way that was familiar, all long lean muscle and slender fingers--and pale like a Western refugee in a way that wasn't. Even with her vision cooperating she couldn't quite pin him down, her memory grasping and failing and grasping again. He was probably a stranger that just felt familiar, in the way that some strangers did--someone who just felt trustworthy. She was positive she didn't know anyone who had any business being in the middle of the desert.

Although she hadn't had any business being there, either, so she could be wrong.

"What's going on?" She asked, finally, shifting enough in her seat that her head stopped lolling. She thought she could see some movement in the rearview mirror on her own side of the truck, black specks resolving into something like insects, rolling along the ground at speeds that kicked billows of dust behind them.

"Angels," he muttered, jerking at the gear shift again before looking over at her, face drawing into something like concern, though he was frowning so it was hard to tell. "About five of them. Can you put your seatbelt on?"

She swallowed and coughed again, feeling dust and sweat against her skin when she rubbed her throat, light tug at the choker there and a brief moment of relief that it hadn't been lost. She pushed against the seat, reaching both hands down at her sides and feeling for the harness, fumbling with the straps and pulling them up, over her shoulders, breathing deeply to focus her movements and get the buckles to snap together. It was a little too loose, she thought, but had run out of energy, and when she opened her eyes the boy driving appeared satisfied. The figures in the rearview were larger now, less insect-like and more apparent--motorbikes, two and four-wheeled, the men astride them burnt brown by the desert sun. _The Tribes_, the fog in her mind supplied. Their exiles and outcasts, pirates of the refugee road.

"Are they dangerous?" She asked, watching him fiddle with another toggle and wait while a series of lights on the consoles began turning on.

"Only if they get close enough to shoot," he replied and shot her a curious look, but his lights were lit and he turned his attention back to the wheel, palm slamming on a button before he took the wheel with both hands. "Hold on."

She barely had time to wrap her hands around the armrests before the truck shot forward with a speed that threw them both back against their seats. She remembered this vaguely, remembered the sound of the boy chuckling softly and revving the engine, and then she remembered nothing.

* * *

"Hey. Wake up."

The voice was soft and tickled her senses to life, and when she opened her eyes she blinked in the light, and once her memory caught up everything looked pretty much as it had before. The truck was slowing gradually back to its normal speed, the lights on the consoles dimming and flickering out as it did, and the boy in the driver's seat was watching her intently. The rearview mirror showed only desert and road receding behind them. "What happened?"

"Outran them." The driver smirked a bit, pleased with himself and presumably the capabilities of his truck, and he looked so much like a normal, school-aged boy that it made her heart ache--because clearly, anyone in a V-class armored truck in the middle of the desert was nowhere approaching normal. "So--what's your name?"

She frowned, partially at herself and the sudden emotion and partially at the belated question. And all the important questions like _'Where did you come from and why the hell were you lying in the road in the middle of the desert?'_ that weren't being asked. Partially at herself for feeling nothing but a cool sort of calm at the very center of her being. "Kairi."

The boy shot her a look, one eyebrow cocked at the tone and the frown. "You okay?"

She shrugged against her skin and the crackle of dry sweat covering it, and pushed herself a little more upright, muscles sore as they stretched, shaking her head more for movement than in response. "I'm fine."

"Kairi." The way he repeated her name had a certain tension to it, like he hadn't decided what to think of her just yet and was about to put that to the test. "I need you to hold the wheel for a minute."

He made a soft humming noise when she turned to face him fully, mouth falling open--something approaching an abbreviated laugh. "I killed a fuel core with the drive accelerator. There's nothing else on the road, just hold the wheel steady while I go replace it. I'll be right behind you." He reached back without looking away from the road, between the seats with one hand to rap his knuckles against the pocket door leading to the rest of the truck, slid closed at the moment. It made a hollow, metallic sound. "Okay?"

She considered this for a moment, licking her lips before nodding just slightly. "Yeah, all right." Then leaned to the side and reached out to grab the wheel, and his hand landed on top of hers, assuring her fingers were securely wrapped around it. She noted again that his hands were cool, and then the contact was gone and he was standing up, slipping between the seats and sliding the door open, disappearing beyond.

The road spread before the windshield was indeed empty, dusted with sand and disappearing at the edges into brown dirt. If she squinted, at the very edge of the horizon she thought she could see the curves of hills. If she stared at it too long she started to feel dizzy, so she busied herself looking from one side of the road to the other, clicking her teeth together and counting the seconds.

"Almost done," the boy's voice called from the truck's interior, followed by the hiss of pressurized air and the slide of metal against metal. The sound set her teeth on edge, and she realized her head was beginning to ache.

The boy appeared at her side and slid back into his seat just as her eyes were starting to droop and her grip on the wheel was starting to slide. He pulled her hand away gently and held it for a moment until she looked up again, then shook it rather formally. "I'm Roxas." He said it with an level of patience that was as abbreviated as his laugh, and the two words were enough to express the sentiment that she had not been rescued to be coddled. He nearly discredited himself by pressing a water bottle into her hand before releasing it. "Drink slowly or you'll make yourself sick."

Kairi considered the tone and the ascertaining way his eyes widened when he looked at her before returning to the driver's seat--then curled back into her own seat with the water and decided to do as she was told. It was lukewarm and not cold, but heavenly against her parched mouth anyhow. She shifted a little more for comfort and was content to just sit there with her water, staring at the endlessness of the desert and half-dozing in between sips. She could see Roxas from the corners of her eyes, fiddling with some more controls and shutting monitors off, eventually leaning back in his own seat and resting both hands at the bottom of the wheel, barely needing to do more than hold it steady as the road careened straight ahead into the horizon.

If she closed her eyes for long enough, bits and pieces of memory started to float to the surface, bobbing along amidst the fog like toy ships in a wading pool. She remembered the temple like a brand in her mind's eye, polished wood and stone and crystal windows, candlelight reflected a thousandfold until the nave glowed as bright as day all the way to the buttresses high above. It was perfect and whole there but all the things in and around it wavered uncertainly. Hymns were sung but the women singing were invisible. Faces and events escaped her, bits of conversations floated around and contradicted each other. Arms cradled her in a gentle embrace, she was laughing with someone, and the last thing she could remember clearly, she was sure--a boy's voice, low and fearful, a hand securely wrapped in hers.

_Kairi, they're coming._

"You should get some sleep."

Roxas's voice jerked her out of the doze she'd fallen into, pulled her upright while she inhaled like coming up from underwater, blinking at the bright light of the desert. Kairi settled after a second, reorienting herself and let the breath back out; reached up to rub her forehead. "Yeah. I should."

He was looking over at her, bright blue eyes and no expression there to interpret, just a nervous flick back and forth between her and the road. "Look," he said, letting out a short breath and staring at the windshield with a kind of resolve. "There's a bunk back there, with drawers alongside it. In the second from the bottom there should be some clothes that'll fit you. The shower is kind of tricky to find, but if you look for--"

"There's a panel between the bunk frame and the control access closet." Kairi finished the sentence smoothly, set her water bottle aside and placed her hands on either armrest, testing her own weight. She felt heavy and awkward, her joints were watery and unreliable.

Roxas was staring at her again, eyebrows up under his messy bangs. "You've been in a V-class before?"

"I used to..." Kairi trailed off, took a deep breath and levered herself out of the seat, clutching the armrests until she was nearly upright, then the back when she felt her knees steady to hold her up. "Work on trucks in the refugee camps." She wavered a little, felt the blood rushing to her head, reached out to rest one hand against the pocket door and waited again for her body to settle. "There were so many, sometimes the city couldn't let the caravans in. There was nowhere for them to go, so we made sure they could survive outside the walls." Her eyes slid closed and she felt the world tilting, fog tumbling over itself and for a moment she thought she was falling.

"Kairi." Cool hand around her wrist and her eyes fluttered open, swaying a little where she stood. Roxas was frowning. "You need to rest."

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly along with a nod. "Yeah."

The space beyond the pocket door was just large enough to be functional, a double-bunk on one side, extra mattress stowed in a drawer beneath the lower one, flanked by storage for personal items and clothing. Appliances on the other side for everything from cooking to laundry and a cold pantry for fresh food. Everything was gray and metal, the bunks clothed in white, the appliances with rows of darkened lights. Most of these trucks, she could almost remember--they'd been cheerful places, if small. A place for a family to live for the months it took to travel from West to East, all the way to Luma, decked with their treasures, colorful beads and scarves to brighten the drab interior.

This truck wasn't someone's home. She wondered at that, opening the second drawer from the bottom and selecting a grayish pair of drawstring pants, a white cotton shirt--most likely to fit and just as uninteresting as the rest of the truck. The only part with any color was the boy driving it.

The bathroom was even smaller than she remembered and the shower minuscule; she bumped her head against the nozzle several times and wondered if she'd really grown that much without realizing it--hissed when the water hit her skin and stung the developing sunburn.

It was, needless to say, not as pleasant and refreshing as a shower should have been.

She'd found a length of leather cord in the drawer and stood in the bathroom, wrapped in a towel while a fan blew the steam away through a vent in the ceiling, and slowly plaited it into her damp hair. Priestesses shouldn't be seen by men with their hair on their shoulders, her memory murmured, soft and muted through the fog. It was too familiar, like a flirtation. An invitation. Kairi stared into the mirror, damp hair garnet-dark, sunburned cheeks and blinked at herself, fingers tangled and tugging awkwardly.

Had she... really grown older? She didn't think she remembered this, the mature angle to her face. The length of her hair. The way her body felt full and curved like a woman's rather than a girl's. It didn't seem quite right and like instinct she closed her eyes to the reflection, shifted the damp locks under her fingers and tried to twist them into the right shape.

It was almost familiar, right here like this. Like a swirl in the fog, she could almost feel a pair of hands stopping hers, a soft laugh and then other fingers taking over, expertly pulling the plaits into place and continuing on. Soft hum in the background, right behind her head. Her cheek resting against a silk-covered knee. Murmured conversation.

_You're such a tomboy, Kairi._ The voice chided but it was warm and fond, soft and female like her own. _You come back for evening hymns every day with dirt on your knees and your hair falling everywhere no matter how well I braid it. What am I going to do with you?_

When she opened her eyes, she was winding the braid into a knot at the back of her head with practiced ease, tying it carefully in place. And her heart ached, but she wasn't sure what for.

* * *

She woke once, briefly, just enough at first to rub at the soreness in her arms and roll to her other side, stretching and curling under the sheets. She was nearly asleep, slipping down irrevocably into the lull of slumber, but then Roxas's voice carried through the open doorway.

"That's not the point, though, Zex, if it was _really_ that important he would have come himself by now."

She couldn't see Roxas from the bed, and only a bare crack of the doorway that showed a strip of the consoles and the arm of her empty seat. Roxas's voice paused after the initial sentence, and continued on after a moment.

"Well--it's not like I'm looking _forward_ to it." Another pause, and that short laugh of his. "Well, orders are orders. Or they were, for me. I mean... if you were a traitor--okay, never mind, bad example. It doesn't matter now, anyway."

The words made her head throb, trying to think about them and put them in context. Who was he talking to? The truck was too small for someone else to have been lingering somewhere within it unseen, and communications in the desert were unreliable if not nonexistent. She rubbed her forehead and tugged the sheets up further.

"Don't worry about that," Roxas said after another short pause. "You could have left, you know. You still can, it's your contract."

She thought she heard a chuckle sometime after that. And she thought she might have heard another voice, just faintly, but the haze of sleep was dragging her down and she was never certain if the entire thing wasn't just a dream.

* * *

The next time she woke, it was because the rumble and vibration of the truck had stopped. She stretched, arms straight over her head and hissed when her sunburnt skin pulled over her muscles, shifting to a cooler part of the sheets to soothe it. When she opened her eyes and pushed herself upright, metallic footsteps tromped through the pocket door and Roxas appeared by the bunk, toolbox in one hand. "Hey. Feeling better?"

"Yeah." It was a murmur, breath mostly, and she yawned, rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and felt like a child. "Not great, but better. Why are we stopped?"

"It's almost sunset." Roxas set the toolbox on the floor and stepped up on the edge of the bunk without much preamble, shirt hiking up at his waist as he reached up to the ceiling--Kairi realized she was staring at a pale slit of skin and quickly averted her eyes, reached up to assure her hair was still mostly in its braided knot. A jerk at the handle of a hatch above them and Roxas dropped back down, pulling a utility ladder with him, a square of orange sunlight glowing down at them.

"I'll go up." Kairi made the offer almost automatically, sliding to the edge of the bunk and reaching for her shoes. She had them on and straightened before realizing that Roxas was staring at her, yet to say anything, blue eyes blinking like he wasn't quite sure what he was seeing. She felt the corner of her mouth quirk up--she'd never get tired of seeing that look on a boy's face. "You're checking on the lights, right? You can switch the fuse groups at the control panel, I'll go up and change the duds. It'll get done twice as fast."

A few more blinks, a moment of uncertainty, and then Roxas shrugged, handed her the toolbox. "Okay, then."

The air outside was still hot, but far more bearable in the fading light, the sky's red glow reflecting in spikes of red along the crack that split it. The sun melting in the western sky had lost the burning power that had attempted to cook her on the asphalt earlier that day. The desert would cool in the night, and the morning would be pleasant.

The night itself would be... less pleasant.

She avoided thinking about the amount of light left in the sky and methodically checked the lighting on the roof, humming the evening hymns to herself to assure she remembered them. She called back and forth through the hatch for Roxas to switch from the small yellow track lights to the bigger white dome lights, and then the emergency floodlights on each corner, brighter than the sun. Switching out dead bulbs for the new stock kept carefully in the toolbox.

When the roof was done, she crawled down the ladder on the back of the truck and did the same with the lights on the side, the back, the headlights and the blinders that would blast out the underside of the vehicle in the early morning when the shadows were still heavy and dark, just as a precaution. When she finished, screwing a clear dome back into place over the last replacement bulb, Roxas opened the driver's door and waited for her, sideways in his seat with a metal cylinder fidgeting in his hands.

"You weren't kidding about working on refugee trucks," he said, not really expecting a response; it was more of a quiet observation. An acknowledgment. She nodded a little, handed over the slightly depleted toolbox and he exchanged it for the cylinder. Gray metal with a strip of glass down the center, simple buttons on one end. "For your sunburn. It's pretty lousy as medpacks go, but it'll take the edge off."

Kairi felt the smile flutter on her face, and for a moment she thought maybe she was flattered by his concern. Maybe. "Thanks."

"Sure." He shrugged, throwing off the smile and any suggestion that he might feel something like worry from time to time, and the gesture itself was so familiar it made something jump in her gut. Something swirl in the fog of her memory but never surface. He jerked his head to the side, swung his legs back into the truck and that was a silent order to get in, now, and stop this nonsense. She grinned at his back and hurried around to climb inside.

Fifteen minutes later, the eastern sky outside the windshield was darkening to violet. Roxas had secured the truck, spinning the pressure wheels on the roof hatch and the back door, showing her how to secure the passenger door before finishing with his own and settling into his seat to restart the truck. It rumbled away steadily beneath them now, behind and beyond the stuttering buzz of the medpack in her hand. Kairi spent the minutes twisting herself into awkward angles, trying to reach the sunburn on the back of her arms and neck. Finally switching to her calves, pant legs rolled up, the little device coughed and blinked on and off, protesting its own function.

"Told you it was lousy."

Kairi glared at the driver's seat, catching the edge of a smirk on Roxas's lips before returning attention to the medpack, shaking it slightly. "Honestly."

"Try thumping it." Roxas gestured at her, mimicked whacking the cylinder against the heel of his hand.

She gave the thing a few good smacks, felt it sputter back to life and continued scanning it over her sunburn, little bar of energy through the glass panel stimulating her skin to repair itself. "If this is all you have, you'd better pray to Eden that nothing bad happens before you get to civilization."

"I didn't really have time to be picky." That smirk was still on his mouth, quiet amusement, and it stayed there for a few more minutes, the amount of time it took for the sky to darken from lavender to purple. He reached over his head, flipped the switches methodically--all the track lights, one set of domes for each side and a low-set flood for the rear where the mirrors couldn't see. The headlights came on last, washing out the road before them to bright gray.

Roxas breathed out in a whisper, fingers curling around the edge of the wheel. "Here we go."

It started simply enough. Sagebrush on the sides of the road, beyond the edges of the light the truck cast, spread long shadows pointing east, graying light dimming the edges as the last of the sun faded. Ink black darkness in patches, shivering. Wriggling, turning on itself, spiking out searching fingers and as Kairi turned her head to watch in horrified fascination, through the window of her door a flash of glowing yellow eyes peered at her from the shadow's depths.

In her seat, she pulled her legs back against her body, medpack forgotten in her hand, curled around herself and murmured the name of her goddess.

_Luma guard me, Luma keep me, Luma temper the quaking darkness and lift up thy servant to the light--_

"Don't panic," Roxas said in that same whisper, steering wheel creaking under white knuckles, and the night exploded around them.

Swarms of them, black shifting bodies, quivering antennae and long, spindly fingers, searching and clawing and writhing over each other and eyes, eyes everywhere, thousands of them glowing and blinking yellow, watching as the truck passed, squirming out of the road in wake of the headlights, crawling at hissing and unable to get close, to find the prey the lights were guarding.

Kairi thought of the city, vague images swirling around and the Holy Guard patrolling the city walls, minding the floodlight perimeter, and wondered how they could watch this horror unfurl night after night. Heard a child's voice in the back of her mind, deep with the intent of frightening its friends, _the Shadows come out of the crack in the sky and live in the dark, and if they catch you they'll eat you and then eat your heart, and then you can never come back for your next life, because your heart is gone forever_.

"It gets easier," Roxas said in a voice that was defiantly even and his hands were still wrapped around the bottom of the wheel in a death grip. "After a while."

Kairi swallowed, and had the presence of mind, finally, to switch the medpack off. The sunburn was still raw on the backs of her heels (and that was a strange place to be sunburnt, she thought) but she wasn't willing to unwrap herself enough to treat it any further. "How long until sunrise?"

"Eight hours."

The nights were going to be decidedly less pleasant.


	3. The Girl in the Desert, Part Two

**The Girl in the Desert, Part Two**

Kairi dozed fitfully in her chair throughout the night, half-dreaming in spikes of running, screaming nightmares. And when she returned to the waking world, there were nightmares outside the truck windows, in the dark.

She didn't think Roxas blinked once for the entire duration of the night. Or move, for that matter; he was like a statue, hands tight on the wheel, back straight, jaw set, staring directly at the road.

When the eastern sky began to fade to blue, Roxas exhaled like he'd been holding his breath since sunset. Kairi was finally able to sleep, then, fingers curled around the god-knot at her throat.

* * *

She woke up to a bar of sunlight disturbing her face, to a stiff pain in her neck and a leg that had fallen asleep and a tight, burning ache in both of her heels, still. She grumbled at the sun, uncurled from the seat to raise a hand to shade her eyes and hissed as her muscles stretched, sore and displeased at her chosen sleeping position. The truck was still and silent, the world outside washed in the cool light of morning and when she pushed out of the chair to stand and stretch away the stiffness, through the half-open pocket door she could see a blond lump occupying the fold-out upper bunk.

Roxas was sleeping, so Kairi pushed the pocket door closed and fished the medpack out from where it had rolled under her seat and finished scanning her sunburned heels. She poked around in the cab for a while, familiarizing herself with it and found the cold compartment near the floorboards between the seats. She selected a chilled whitefruit and a can of sweetened tea, found some protein bars in the pantry compartment above it, and sat in the passenger seat eating breakfast and poking at the control panels in front of her, figuring out what they did. There were a few communication devices and some emergency kill switches on the top, and then mostly the console stored emergency or maintenance items. There was a small tool kit in one, and as she drew it out she decided how to spend her morning.

She tiptoed back into the truck's living area and spent several minutes poking around as quietly as possible until she found a floppy white hat to shade her eyes from the sun. She grabbed the tool kit and slipped outside, spent a moment breathing the fresh air, just beginning to warm now, then started humming the morning hymns and pushed the truck's engine hood open.

She started with the basics, small maintenance tasks, checking things like fluids and belts and cables and filters, crawled through the gravel underneath to check for leaks and make sure the fuel converter was operating at peak efficiency. She replaced some fuses, a spark plug that was nearly worn out, and a leaky hose, then finally sat back in the gravel in the truck's shade, drawing an arm across the sweat on her forehead and wiping her hands off on an already blackened rag.

Roxas had the passenger door open and was sitting on the lower step, toes touching the ground, and when she finally saw him there the corners of his mouth turned up in something like a smile, kindly mocking. "Sorry, I'm still having trouble reconciling 'priestess' with 'mechanic'."

Kairi balled up the rag and threw it at him, playfully--it missed, but he flinched anyway so she counted that as a win. She stood up, feet crunching in the gravel, stretching one last time before the journey resumed. "It's a priestess's job to take care of her people. She can do that spiritually, but if she can't do it practically, too, then what's the point?"

Roxas was quiet and thoughtful for a moment, gaze turned inward like she had struck some part of his memory. Ultimately, he nodded, pulled one knee up to push himself to standing on the step and turned back inside. "Let's get going."

She picked up the rag from where it fell and followed him.

* * *

It was shortly after midday when something else finally appeared on the road. It started out as a glint somewhere in the distance ahead of them, then grew into a gray blotch with a star of light reflecting off of it, then finally resolved into the miniature image of a truck, wavering in the haze of heat that rose off the road and steadily growing as they approached, a much larger and bulkier model than Roxas's truck and clearly progressing at a slower speed.

"That's a T-2400," Kairi murmured over her water bottle, watching as the image became clearer. Tail lights and dusty black tires wavering in the heat.

"Strange to see something that big without a caravan," was Roxas's response, and he specifically avoided Kairi's pointed look at such a hypocritical comment, reached to flip on the sonex instead. The little device crackled with static, hissed in displeasure and finally snapped into silence when Roxas grabbed the hand mic, clicking it on with practiced ease. "T-2400, this is Oathkeeper, coming up behind you. Over."

The sonex was silent for a moment, humming electrically. Roxas reached up and was right on the edge of flipping to a different channel when the speaker crackled and a young male voice replied, "I see you Oathkeeper, pulling to the right. How goes the road?"

"Outran some Angels yesterday at noon, all clear since then. How's it gone for you?"

"No sign of the Tribes, but we blew a converter gasket two days ago and had to hunker down on the roadside. Our caravan was low on water rations and fuel and had to go on without us, there's a rumor that there's a waypoint with a mana oasis about five hundred miles further in. You know anything about that?"

Roxas exchanged a sideways glance with Kairi, almost-smile appearing on his face for just a moment. "No, I hadn't heard about it. That's great news. Can I pass a message to your caravan, if we find them?"

"That would be great!" The voice was interrupted by some low noises, murmuring of other passengers putting in their two cents, perhaps, before the connection cleared and he continued, "Ask for a man named Rai. Tell him Hayner and his crew are alive and well and on the road, and we'll catch up to them soon."

For a moment, it was like the clockwork of time had stopped. Roxas just sat there, with the mic in his hand and his gaze fixed on the truck outside the windshield, pulled to drive on the right side of the road so the smaller vehicle could pass. Mouth softly open as though to speak. And when the moment dissolved, and he thumbed the button to speak the words, "Will do. Drive well and stay safe," his voice only caught a little bit on the first word.

"Same to you, friend."

Kairi watched him while the truck steadily moved closer, and then they were beside it, and then they were past and it was receding away in her rearview mirror. She had thought to wave a bit out her window as they passed, but they were gone and away so quickly she wasn't sure if they'd seen it. And through all of this Roxas still had the mic in his hand, holding it there as though he wasn't sure if he was finished or not. It was only when the truck had reduced back to a gray blob and the sonex growled loudly with the lack of a signal that he finally replaced the mic in its cradle and switched the device off.

She thought about saying something, asking who they were and how he knew them, but the way his expression closed when he caught her staring at him made her decide against it.

* * *

Something else appeared in the road as evening approached, but it wasn't a truck.

It took a while for Kairi to realize just what the misshapen lumps on the surface of the road were. The sun was lowering, but the road still gave off waves of heat and it wasn't until they were a matter of yards away that it became clear to her. It felt like a small choke in her chest.

Roxas revved the engine, picking up speed. "Close your eyes."

"Stop the truck."

"There's nothing we can do for them now, Kairi, just close your eyes and we'll be past in a few seconds."

It felt like roiling anger in her gut, like hot water streaming down over her head. She surged up, reached over and grabbed Roxas by the fabric of his shirt, right on the shoulder, not quite on the collar. "STOP THE TRUCK."

He grabbed her around the waist before hitting the breaks to keep her from flying through the windshield and joining the bodies in the road, slowly baking and bloating in the desert sun. When the truck finally fell to a halt and the momentum threw them backwards she was all but in his lap, his arms tight around her, and she was looking directly at the jut of his collarbone just above the collar of his shirt. He smelled like salt and the sweet cooking spices her mother used in winter dishes.

For a second, they breathed, and then Roxas hissed, "Seven fucking bless us, don't _ever_ do that again," and pushed her away, ignoring how she stumbled upright, and pulled the parking brake taut.

Kairi grabbed the back of her own seat for balance and scowled, shoving her way back to the passenger door and throwing it open. She thought she might have tossed something back like, "I won't bother!" before slamming the door behind herself, but she couldn't pay any attention to the boy or how he reacted through the seething. He was going to just... _plow through them_ and go on as though they weren't there. It just--it wasn't _right_. It was blasphemous, ignoring the dead.

Outside the truck the desert spread around her in eerie silence, only broken by the whirring of a breeze pushing sand across the road in ripples, catching in bits of fabric and beads and broken pottery and other debris that was once these people's life, wedged as it was inside of a truck. There were wheel tracks on the north side of the road, a sweep of black rubber on the pavement becoming deep tread-marks in the baked earth, disappearing into sagebrush in the distance.

There were four of them, and it must have happened sometime early in the day because the sun had done its damage along with the tiny bit of insect and animal life that existed in this wasteland. She knew enough about death and disease not to approach too close. She clutched the god-knot at her throat instead, then knelt down on pavement still hot from midday, one at a time as near to them as she dared, and sang them each a hymn.

It was similar to the morning hymns, a song to encourage light to guide the way for hearts of the departed. It was growing late, and without a servant of Dawn to perform the death rites these hearts might still be hovering around the corpses, uncertain of what to do, and if they remained here after dark they would become food for the Shadows. So she knelt, and she sang, and she hoped and prayed to her goddess that the hearts would find their way home, and when she looked up she thought she might have seen flickers of light floating up into the sky.

When she finished with the last hymn, Roxas was standing outside the driver's door, leaned back against the gray metal surface, hands in his pockets, eyes closed. And for a bare instant, again, just as the last notes of her song were fading, time ground to a halt in a protest of clockwork and she saw--maybe she thought she saw it, just there in one eerie instant. The way that light collected around him, the way it threaded through his hair and ruffled over his clothing like a soft breeze, the way it hovered in the air around him and glowed.

But when the sound faded, and the pavement scraped against the soles of her shoes, the spell broke and his eyes opened, and he was just a boy again. She stared at him for a moment before moving, tongue against her lower teeth, and wondered.

He looked up when she approached, blue eyes wide for a moment before flicking to the side. "I'm sorry. I should have stopped."

"It's okay now."

He nodded a little, still not quite looking at her directly and made a gesture towards the south side of the road. "I can get around through the gravel."

Kairi looked back over her shoulder at the four bodies, horridly exposed on the gray pavement, and frowned. "We should do something."

"There's nowhere to bury them except the sand and if we step off the road the tribes will come for us, next." Roxas's voice was cool, pragmatic, but not uncaring. He shuffled forward so he could reach back and open his door, hiding more of himself from her view. "And if we try to burn them we'll set the whole desert on fire. There's nothing to do but let the Shadows eat the bodies."

She didn't move for a long moment, didn't say anything in response and finally he pushed the door just enough that he could look past it at her, finally meeting her eyes, and sighed. "You saved their hearts. That's more than enough."

It wasn't until later in the night--when the light had died and the desert had exploded into darkness and Roxas was stiff as a board in the seat beside her clutching the wheel and Kairi herself was curled in a ball in her own seat, trying not to look out the windows but unable to look away at the same time--that she wondered how Roxas knew what she was doing.

* * *

At night, in the dark, when she felt the most alone in her seat despite the boy a bare arm's reach away, was when she thought the most. Her memory was still mostly soupy gray fog, but reality was becoming sharper, clearer, she was able to associate the things she did with things she had done in the past, and although this didn't always bring the memory connected with it back in more than a brief flash, it made her comfortable just in knowing that it existed.

Now, though, in the dark when what she wanted most was comfort, the memory of a mother or father or a protective hand, she tried to find something in the fog. She stared out the window and tried to stare in the rearview mirror instead of at the roiling darkness beyond the truck's small, dim perimeter of light, watching the glint of the track lights running down the side. Little spots of gold in her vision, and that was when she remembered the city.

Cold stone under her bare toes, cool wind against her bare legs--she had snuck out of bed in just her nightclothes, climbed the spirals of staircases up, up, and up to the temple's highest point, the round balustrades of the belltower. That bell was just below the cold stones under her feet, now, dull and brassy and massive in the darkness, and she had run a finger along the rim just to hear the faint metallic ring echo within it.

And before her and below her the city spread out like strings of holiday lights set in a canopy for Candlemas, glowing bright and golden and dimming the sky above from black to indigo. _It really is the city of light_, she had breathed, clutching the edge of the parapet and looking everywhere, searching each patch and pool of light for places she recognized. She just thought she had found the square where she and her friends used to play in the fountain when the hand tangled with hers clutched tightly, and a girlish voice high with excitement and fear whispered, _I can see them_.

When she looked, out past the light strings and the hulks of refugee caravans and the brilliant white ring that marked the floodlights of the high golden walls where the Holy Guard kept watch, she could see the darkness. She could see it _moving_.

And when she opened her eyes, she could still see it.

Kairi broke the cycle finally by sitting up in her chair, curling her legs beneath her and settling against the arm nearest Roxas. "You're never going to ask, are you?"

His head jerked to the side, blue eyes regarding her with an expression she hadn't identified yet. Mildly alarmed curiosity, or something to that effect. His fingers were still deathly tight on the wheel. "Ask what?"

"Oh, I can think of lots of things." She smiled down at her hands, felt it like an echo when she twined her fingers together. "Who are you and what the hell is a priestess doing in the middle of the desert, anyway? How did you get here, where did you come from? Are you in some kind of trouble?"

Roxas tilted his eyebrows up and then he was staring out the windshield again, stiff and tense, but there was a slow curl of a smirk around his mouth. "Are you?"

Kairi hissed a sigh through her teeth, one hand up to push a wisp of hair back from where it had fallen over her nose, tucking it behind her ear. "It's strange." She murmured the words mostly to her lap, to the curl of her hands there. "It feels like I should be more worried, like I should be afraid, even. Panicking. I don't know what's happening but instead of being afraid all I can feel is this _calm_. Like some part of me knows that I'm safe, and this is what's supposed to be happening."

"Maybe you do." The smirk on his face was growing, just a bit mocking now. "Maybe your goddess sent you on a mission."

Kairi turned in the seat to face him fully again, and studied Roxas carefully. She felt herself frowning, deeply this time and with a measure of sadness, eyebrows drawing together. "The gods don't interact with mortals anymore. Not since the sky split open."

A blue gaze darted to the side to meet hers, just for a moment, and he didn't really look surprised. Just thoughtful, almost like he was prepared for everything she was saying. He resettled in the seat again, shrug of shoulders and stretch of neck before offering her one last glance. "No, I had no intention of asking you anything. I picked you up because you were alive and I'll drop you off wherever you want."

Kairi turned her attention back to stare at the blank gray of the console in front of her and wondered why that stung so much. It was such a little thing, such a short span of time, two days in a truck, but right now Roxas was really all she knew. Everyone else was a blur in her memory. "Well, if that's all."

"That's not what I meant." And even though she couldn't see him anymore she could still hear the small smirk in his voice. "See, if I asked you all that, inevitably the conversation would have turned on me. Say, who are you, Roxas? What are you doing out here in a truck all by yourself? Where'd you come from?" His abbreviated laugh was low and almost warm in the space between them. "It was preemptive."

She tapped at the leather arm of her seat with one finger, nail tracing the line of upholstery back and forth. It was a strange circumstance, she thought, that he didn't want to talk and she did but didn't have any answers. "I suppose we both get to guess, then." It was as good a reason to have a conversation as any, as neither of them could sleep but neither of them wanted to be awake to see this, either.

"Well." Roxas actually moved, shifted back in his seat as though to find a more comfortable position. His features were relaxed and his knuckles were just slightly less white. "I found you in white silk. That makes you a servant of the Twin Goddess. Judging by the god-knot around your neck, you're pretty high ranked to boot, and that means you're from the main temple in Luma." He paused to tap a finger against the steering wheel, soft thump of sound for a long moment while he plowed through whatever thoughts were in his head. "The rest is inexplicable. You would have had to travel west to get out here, and no one travels west through the desert. Ever."

The world outside was changing slightly--finally, the eastern sky was showing the faintest signs of sunrise, just a bit of fade to deep blue. Kairi closed her eyes and sent out a silent prayer to speed the morning along, leaned her head back and threaded through the fog in her memory to find the better, brighter part of that memory. The city square with the fountain. Children crouched on cobbled streets, bright pebbles in their hands and someone was telling a story. And she knew and the others knew that he was making it up as he went along, but his voice was so eager, so convincing, winding the tale around and around until it snapped into place and they all gasped in awe.

"You're a refugee," she murmured, fingers reaching up to trace the edges of the god-knot nestled in the hollow of her throat--two entwined circles in black and white held taut by leather, curled around each other even while pulling apart--and she tried to remember hours of grease and sweat and metal under her fingers and listening to every story, every tragedy, every poor, displaced bit of humanity who had finally taken to the road in hopes of a better future. Or any future at all. "You couldn't stand the turmoil in the West any longer, the street wars as the old Houses struggle to remain standing and the commoners falling to poverty and starvation, while the scholars hide in their universities and the priestesses in their temples. Your father was a fisherman--" She paused, frowned to herself and screwed up her face, calling Roxas's image up behind her closed eyes. No, he had too fine a look, and his hands were cool and smooth. "No, you were nobility. A son of the West's once great and powerful Houses. Your father was waging war against a rival House and you were his heir, but you wanted none of it. You were sick of battle and bloodshed--so one evening before the sun set and the city walls were closed and lit you stole this truck and ran away. To the East, to the seven cities of the Seven Goddesses, and you will never speak your family name again."

When she opened her eyes several minutes later, Roxas was watching her from the corners of his eyes. Hands low and spread on the wheel, relaxed and motionless.

"You're a good storyteller," he said after a moment, attention returning to the road, and his voice was light and amused again.

And that was more than enough to tell her that she was nowhere near being right. Kairi huffed, blowing a breath upward at the hair that had come loose around her forehead and slid down a bit in the seat. "I learned from the best," she muttered in defeat--two defeats, really, because on one hand she was wrong, and on the other she couldn't even remember who 'the best' was.

The bit of light in the east was growing. It would be morning soon, and the desert would be blank and hot and empty once again, and then they could sleep in peace. Just a little while longer, she thought, and prayed again.

Then, because she realized she hadn't yet, she said, "Thank you."

The sound of her voice seemed to jerk Roxas out of his own thoughts, head swinging to face her abruptly and blinking. "What?"

"For saving me."

He paused, and for a moment had that pure boyish look again, like he had no concept of doing anything but saving a girl he found on the side of the road in the desert. "Sure."

* * *

Sleeping in the bunk, although the mattress was rather hard, was infinitely better than sleeping in the passenger seat, and Kairi woke at midday with a comfortable stretch under the sheets, and when she took a deep breath she smelled something delicious. She blinked in the dim golden light that served the bank of appliances opposite the bunks, and at Roxas, half turned to look at her, the empty shell of an egg in one hand.

"I hope you like velango," he said, tossing the shell into a compost bin and returning to the small panel of cookware, hands busy at a pull-out counter while something sizzled inside the boxstove. "Because this is my last melon and if it doesn't get eaten it'll go bad."

Kairi pulled the sheets up to her nose and chuckled softly behind them. "You're making me breakfast?"

Roxas's shoulders stiffened and hunched defensively over the counter and the sound of a knife slicing through rind. He didn't say anything for several minutes and Kairi left him to sulk, rummaged around for her borrowed drawstring pants and pulled them on under the covers. She had found her shoes and made the bed somewhat before he finally spoke again, half turned towards her again, this time in the process of pulling a pan of eggs and rove sausage out of the boxstove with a towel over his hand, prodding at them with a spatula before returning the pan for a few more minutes.

"It just... occurred to me that I haven't been being very hospitable. I'm in too much of a hurry to get where I'm going, I suppose." He turned to her fully, then, holding out a cool bowl of sea-green melon, chopped into chunks. "It's also nice to have a real meal every once in a while, instead of protein bars and water."

Kairi accepted the bowl, and the fork that followed, and pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged on the mattress. The first chunk of fruit all but melted on her tongue, icy cold and sweet. "I think," she pondered with her mouth still halfway full, and someone used to chide her about that, she was sure, "what's really going on here is that you couldn't deal with me working on your truck, so you're taking it out on yourself by being domestic instead."

Roxas stared. And he stared, and he stared, and then his expression cracked and he laughed, almost doubled over, turned away from her and leaned against the appliance bank for a second while he got himself under control enough to pull the pan out of the boxstove before their breakfast burned. He was still chuckling softly when he turned back to hand her a plate of eggs and sausage, smirking a little when she grinned. "Okay, fine. What do you want?"

She considered this for a moment, chewing on another chunk of melon, before indicating the cab with her fork. "Show me how to drive."

* * *

"Okay, ease up on the brake. Now shift up and accelerate. Slow, don't punch it, that eats up the fuel core. Shift up again and bring it up to cruising speed. Okay, now right here," Roxas reached around her shoulder again, indicated a green toggle on the control panel just beyond the wheel. He smelled more like soap today.

"That's the variable speed toggle," Kairi finished effortlessly, grinning when he sighed.

"Yes, that's the variable speed toggle. When you reach cruising speed, flip that switch and you can take your foot off the accelerator. Then you just have to hold the wheel and watch."

"That's it?"

"That's it," he echoed, twisting out from behind the seat. "I can't believe you know how to fix these things but not how to drive them. It's not really very _practical_."

"Well, I've never found it necessary to drive across the desert before." She looked up at him at the sound of the pocket door sliding open, head tilted back so she could see his hand on the doorframe. "Where are you going?"

"Cleaning up breakfast, doing some laundry. You know, since I have such a _domestic_ streak."

Kairi straightened and laughed softly at the windshield, and felt more like herself than she had since she woke up on the side of the road under the broiling sunlight. "What exactly am I supposed to be watching for, anyway?"

Roxas's voice echoed in the truck's interior. "In case there's something in the road."

The likeliness of there being anything at all in the road, despite the fact that they had come across two things the day before, seemed impossible. The world was an empty, barren wasteland from the perspective behind the windshield, and staring at it made her mind wander. She belayed this for a while, examining the sonex, and then the videx that could be toggled between views of the sides and rear of the truck where the mirrors couldn't see. She ran one finger down the gauge bar for the drive accelerator Roxas had used to outrun the Angels, and then she finally sat back in the seat and stared at the road and let her mind wander.

She thought, for a few precious moments, about the smell of spices and soap.

Like a phantom, the feel of fingers carefully plaiting her hair returned, a slow memory, something still blurred by the fog. That same voice above and behind her chiding, _I know what you're thinking, Kai._

_About what?_

_That boy. I see how you look at him._ One of the tugs at her hair was sharp, by accident or design she couldn't tell. _You want to break your Oath with him._

_No._ Kairi tugged her head away from the plaiting fingers, reached back to grab them instead and twine them with her own. _I would never really do that. They're just daydreams, that's all._

The fingers squeezed back, the voice beside them uncertain. _Are you sure?_

_Yes. I just think sometimes,_ she sighed, leaning back against bony knees while the fingers moved to stroke her hair, _that it would have been nice, before we joined the temple, to have had one kiss. Just one, just to know what it's like._

Kairi blinked at the gray pavement, reaching back to brush away the feel of fingers in her hair. She thought she caught the edges of Roxas's voice through the doorway, but when she called back to him he claimed to not have said anything.

Passing through the desert, in the driver's seat now so she had no choice but to stare and watch it go by, threw off her sense of time, and she sat there thinking little half-formed thoughts that never carried her anywhere for some length of time she couldn't define, before she saw it.

It started as a black speck far in the distance, and as she continued it didn't resolve so much as become a larger black speck, and for the longest time she couldn't quite quantify just what it was supposed to be. Another truck, a caravan, a swarm of Angels? As they drew nearer, though, she could see where the road started to curve, where the land dipped down into a bowl and right at the edge of that dip, right in the corner where the pavement turned to the north to avoid it, a great hulk of black and metal junk was piled across the road from gravel edge to gravel edge.

"Roxas," Kairi called over her shoulder in warning.

"What?"

"There's something in the road."


	4. The Girl in the Desert, Part Three

Apologies for the unexpected hiatus last week; I had a week-long internet outage, and another fic that required my attention. ^^

* * *

**The Girl in the Desert, Part Three**

Roxas stood in the space between the driver's seat and passenger seat, one hand on the console bank above the windshield, staring out across the pavement from where the truck was parked a quarter mile distant yet to the barricade in the road, and muttered, "_Shit_," for probably the tenth time.

Kairi fidgeted with the wheel, fingers tracing the grooves in the cushioned leather. Her voice was slow and thoughtful, feeling out the words and stretching them like a suggestion. "You think this might be the waypoint the guy in the other truck was talking about?"

"They don't put barricades across the road for waypoints," Roxas explained very firmly, hand on the consoles tightening while the other cut through the air for emphasis. "They put barricades in the road because they want you to stop."

Kairi nodded and thought that was pretty obvious, examining the carefully constructed wall of scrap, piled up high and wide; long, threatening spiked poles stuck up at intervals along the top. There was certainly no getting around it, no getting through it, and she was pretty sure that the definition of a barricade indicated as much. "So..."

"If someone wants you to stop in the road in the middle of the desert, it's probably not for a friendly reason."

Kairi drummed her fingers against the wheel and stared up at him, noting the way his jaw was set and his shoulders were tense. Roxas and whatever went through his mind were mysteries comparable to the ones the High Priestess of Luma guarded, but there were moments when things broke through. She was pretty sure, now, that the thing coiling up his nerves was _fear_, and she would have thought that Roxas being afraid would be enough to unsettle her own protracted state of calm. It didn't, and she cleared her throat, tried to be altruistic. "So what do we do? Turn around and go back?"

Roxas muttered something low and harsh into the air.

"What?"

"I said I don't have enough supplies to go back. The last waypoint was four thousand miles in from Rhohadam and that's over three thousand miles back. I have enough for another thousand, maybe, if we don't eat for the last five hundred." He glanced sideways at her, blue eyes sharp. "I packed for one."

Kairi felt her smile go watery and looked back down, at the hulking black mass in the road. There was no driving around it, no plowing through it, and no going back. From this distance she could see that it was manned, figures moving around on top of it like the guard on the balustrades of a temple, head and shoulders visible over the edge. They looked like they were wearing blast armor, muted black and gray, dull metal woven with a leathery reptilian skin. Cheap but efficient, enough to dissuade the idea of fighting their way through.

She cleared her throat, finally, straightened in the seat, because with all that aside there was only one option remaining. "I can talk to them."

"No, I'll talk to them." Roxas reached down for her shoulder to pull her out of the seat, silent hiss through his teeth the only resignation that showed. "I need you with me, though. If it's a caravan and not the tribes they won't fire on you."

His statement begged the question, and she asked while curling into the passenger seat, tucking loose strands of hair back behind her ears. "What if it _is_ the tribes?"

His eyes flickered over to her for an instant, intense and blue for that one fraction of a second, a morbid sort of finality to the look. His voice was still tight and his shoulders were still tense and Kairi still wasn't the least bit frightened, even when he shifted the truck into drive and hissed, "Then it was a pleasure knowing you, Kairi."

Roxas drove the truck the rest of the way, slowing gradually until the yards became feet, ultimately inching along closer and closer. The top of the barricade was a sort of parapet, several feet higher than the truck was tall, and two of the figures she had seen from a distance were standing there now, watching the vehicle as it inched along. One was a head taller than the other, and all that could be seen of either were the lower half of their faces; the taller one was leaning on a long, rusted pike and watching the whole of the world around them, attention turning from the desert to the truck and occasionally back to whatever lay behind the barricade. The shorter one, though, hovered forward and watched their approach eagerly, fingers tapping against the parapet's edge.

Closer to the ground, a small rectangle was cut away from the piles of scrap--most of it appeared to be junked truck bodies and old tires, like a bigger, more serious version of a child's play fort. Through the opening and the heavy glass protecting it was a small, unlit room and two more figures, less distinct in the shadows, and emerging from one corner was the protruding horn of a sonophone.

Just as she noted the device, a dark male voice boomed through it, "PLEASE, EXIT YOUR VEHICLE."

Kairi let out a breath, exchanging a look with Roxas. Not the tribes, if they were speaking the common language. He didn't look as mollified as she hoped, though, and he continued inching the truck along, slightly faster, as though he really did intend to ram it.

On top of the parapet, the shorter person looked up at the taller, received a nod in response, then rubbed his hands together in some kind of anticipatory glee, rolled his shoulders and ducked down, disappearing behind the walls for a few seconds. When he reappeared, he had a massive black particle canon on his shoulder, and he rested the end of it on the parapet, pointed comfortably at the truck. As she watched, the interior of the barrel began to glow blue, and the guy offered them both a broad, toothy grin.

"Shit," Roxas muttered for the eleventh time.

"PLEASE," the sonophone voice repeated, ever so patient, "EXIT YOUR VEHICLE."

Roxas finally hit the brakes and cut the engine, one hand lingering on the parking brake as he stared across the console at her, licking his lips. If he'd ever truly looked as young as he really was, as well as she could guess, at least, it was now--his eyes were wide and the mind behind them was churning, searching desperately for a solution, lost in the middle of a world that was bigger and more dangerous than he had ever imagined. She felt sorry for him, just for a moment, wondering what the root of his fear really was, if it had anything to do with the barricade and the people manning it or if that was just the catalyst.

She wondered, while some unknown memory ached, what the real story was.

"Here we go," Roxas said in a low breath, staring out the windshield instead of at her, left hand settling on the latch.

"It'll be okay," Kairi assured him, smiling, and opened the door.

The air outside was heavy and hot and her feet touched the ground at the same time she heard Roxas yelling, "I have a woman with me!" Kairi pushed the door closed, then held her hands out in front of her in a display of harmlessness. Through the hole in the scrap she could see the two figures engaged in some kind of discussion--the bigger of the two was handling the sonophone and stood rather stiffly while the other, smaller and more femininely-built person waved her hands around in grand gestures and seemed to be doing a majority of the talking. On the parapet, the guy with the particle cannon was still grinning and offered her a thumbs-up. The taller one, next to him, tilted his head back in what looked suspiciously like an eyeroll.

Kairi frowned at the casual air they affected, and wondered just what was really going on, here.

Roxas made a gesture from the other side of the truck, waving her ahead, and they both moved forward until they were standing in front of it, side by side, hands in the air. She could feel the heat from the engine radiating against her back, and that coupled with the heat radiating from above made a trickle of sweat run down the side of her face, down the center of her back. Kairi pursed her lips once, turned just enough to see Roxas's profile--all stiff, jaw clenched. "I can talk to them," she offered again, but he shook his head firmly.

"No. I'll do the talking." Roxas's mouth barely moved when he spoke, almost like a statue there, eternally trapped in submission. "You can't exactly explain why you're here, anyway."

"ARE YOU A PRIESTESS OF LUMA?" the sonophone demanded with a high-pitched squeal, and they both jumped and winced. The armored figure fiddled with the device's controls for a moment, head bent in such a way that Kairi could practically hear him cursing under his breath. Then resumed with, "Sorry. Are you a priestess of Luma?"

Kairi exchanged a glance with Roxas before nodding a little in response. The two figures in the lower part of the barricade discussed something again, and the one Kairi figured was a girl nodded a lot and scurried out of sight, further into whatever little compound they had built. A moment later the taller guy on the parapet leaned away from his pike and backward, as though to listen to something, then exchanged a word with the canon guy. On the ground, Kairi frowned and waited while they passed around whatever information they felt was important, until finally the girl returned to the lower box, passing whatever conclusion had been reached to the guy with the sonophone.

"We will accept the priestess without testimony on the basis of the Oath of compassion and nonviolence." The sonophone squealed momentarily and the person operating it thumped the controls with a fist until it stopped. "The boy must answer our questions honestly. Our Truthsayer will tell us if you are lying."

"Shit," Roxas muttered for the twelfth time, and his eyes darted over to her, back and forth from her face to the barricade, licking his lips as he reconsidered this, their situation and what was being asked of him. He kept his voice low, limited to themselves. "Maybe you should talk to them, see if you can vouch for me."

Kairi offered him a sidelong glance, eyebrow raised, watching him backpedal. "You don't want to answer the questions, Mr. I'll Do the Talking?"

"I have a feeling I know what they're going to be." Roxas swallowed and set his jaw, looking at the barricade now with his head tilted towards her. "In which case, no, I really don't."

"Declare your weapons," sonophone guy demanded.

Roxas hissed through his teeth, rolled his eyes skywards for a moment like a prayer to whomever would listen, or possibly a curse to whomever wouldn't. "This is a V-class truck, it's equipped with a small arsenal of high-range mana blasters and a personal-use rifle. For obvious reasons."

Kairi clicked her tongue and muttered under her breath. "And you didn't use those on the Angels because...?"

He leaned slightly to the side to mutter back, "They draw mana from the fuel core. It was more efficient to just outrun them, Miss Compassion and Nonviolence."

She let out a breath through her nose, thought abound informing him that the Oath had a clause regarding a priestess's duty to defend her temple and her people when threatened; considered the way Roxas never discussed anything until it was unavoidable, and considered, in turn, what that meant for them right now.

The figures occupying the barricade were performing their information pass again, the girl going from the box to somewhere behind the parapet and returning. The sonophone was quiet for a few long, agonizing minutes while this happened, and then while the guy behind it contemplated whatever the cannon guy had passed along. Kairi spent those minutes wondering if she should be more worried than she was and how much of what Roxas said was the truth, and how much of the truth he never said at all; Roxas spent them shifting his weight from his left foot to his right, jaw clenching, eyes staring straight ahead.

Then, finally, the device crackled again. "Declare your Arts."

"Shit," Roxas hissed, and Kairi stopped keeping count.

She blinked, instead, head turned away from the barricade and watching as his tension began transforming into agitation. "Is that a bad thing?"

"It could be," Roxas said, and that didn't really answer anything. He grumbled to himself under his breath for a moment, shifted on his feet some more, then seemed to come to a decision and raised his voice enough to say, "I'm a Scholar of photology."

The two figures in the cutout box turned to look at each other, and despite the armor covering most of their faces Kairi got the impression of them blinking--whether in amazement or confusion was unknown. The sonophone asked, finally, "You're a Lightwielder?"

Roxas groaned and his hands were curling into fists in the air. "Yes."

The projected voice, although still flat, sounded vaguely impressed. "That's a rare Art."

"Yes, it is. Whatever." Roxas was looking towards heaven again, barely restraining the desire to wave his arms, gesture his frustration, and Kairi watched him with eyebrows gradually drawing together. "What the hell is the point of all this, anyway?"

But the barricade's guards were passing their information again, the girl in motion and the others considering, speaking, making the exchange. Kairi stopped watching them and shifted closer to Roxas instead, keeping her voice as low as possible, head tilted down, barely moving her lips. "Is it so bad?" She chanced a look at his face, watched how his teeth were showing, grit tight. "You're not telling the whole truth, are you?"

"I can't," he said, through the grimace, teeth still clenched.

Kairi processed this for a long minute, sonophone crackling in the background, before asking, "Can Truthsayers detect lies of omission?"

"I don't know." Roxas unclenched long enough to breathe, heat clogging the air around them, closing his eyes and inhaling deep, opening them and finding that nothing had changed. "We'll find out in a minute."

The sonophone squeaked, crackled, and the man behind it said, "State your name, House, and city of origin."

Roxas's agitation returned with a vengeance, feet shifting constantly on the pavement, entire body tense and coiled like a tightly wound spring and it was painfully obvious that he was either trying hard to lie believably or trying hard not to; nobody needed a Truthsayer to see that. Kairi looked up to the guy with the cannon again, noting the blue glow and the casual air he held it with. She frowned again, but he acknowledged her--lifted one hand, palm flat, like an unspoken, _Wait, just for a moment._

"My name is Roxas, and I am not aware of my family having any House affiliation, seems how they're all dead." He spat the last word like a curse and scowled, blue eyes burning. "I'm from the city of Nocturne."

"Never heard of it," the sonophone declared gruffly.

"That's what everyone says." Roxas shuffled again, tightened his fists again and took another deep breath, like he was attempting to relax and remain in control. "I've answered all your questions, now you answer mine. What the hell is all this about?"

Sonophone guy was sending the runner back up to talk to cannon guy's guard, but after the girl disappeared out the back and a moment of thought, he said simply, "We need your truck."

Roxas, after a protracted second of sheer disbelief, mouth open and eyes wide, exploded. "Well, you can't fucking have it, how about that? How about you and your buddies stop playing soldier boys and let me through before I run you all down?"

Kairi hissed in warning, shifting to the side enough that their arms bumped against each other, watching the parapet and the unheard conversation occurring there. "Shh. Just wait."

"You don't understand," sonophone guy said, perpetually calm. "This is a matter of life and death."

Roxas, though, was through with submission, hands dropping to his sides, fists clenched, shoulders trembling. He stared at the ground with a startling ferocity, grimacing at it and gathering all of his nerves together, taut and angry and--Kairi realized all at once--completely terrified. She didn't have time to contemplate this, to resolve it at all or even to process it through the haze of calm that only made her blink at him, the way his head jerked up, the way his eyes blazed and a ruffle of light stirred over his hands and the abrupt way he all but roared, "What makes you think that what I'm doing _isn't _a matter of life and death?"

In the box, the guy was about to retort, or make some other perfectly reasonable argument, but the runner reappeared at precisely that moment and immediately began to relate something to him with grand gestures, small body thrumming with excitement. Sonophone guy considered this for a long moment, while Roxas fumed silently, sweat trickling down from his temples, and Kairi looked up at cannon guy, who smiled in reassurance.

Sonophone guy cleared his throat, one fist in front of his mouth, before continuing. "Our Truthsayer tells us that you have not declared all of your weapons, or all of your Arts, and that you are lying about your House affiliation."

Sand skittered across the pavement in the breeze in the silence that followed. Then Roxas, under his breath and between his teeth, muttered, "Kairi, get back in the truck."

She looked from him, to the barricade, and back and the truck, and wondered just what the hell he planned on doing, anyway. "But--"

"Get back in the truck!"

Kairi hesitated, backed up a little and then caught sight of movement out of the corner of her eye. On the parapet, cannon guy was waving to get her attention, then pointing at something on the side of his massive gun. A little red light, solid and unblinking. He grinned at her again, and it was like encouragement.

Was it... the safety? Had it been on all this time?

Kairi wasn't sure what she was doing out here, in the middle of nowhere for no reason, impossibly, with no memory of how she'd gotten there and very little memory of anything else. She didn't know what was causing the fog in her mind, what was keeping the veil of calm over her senses, why either were there to begin with. She didn't know why she felt such an affinity to Roxas, why she wanted to help and support and protect him, other than the fact that he was the only person she knew, the only one with a physical form and a face, who wasn't a vague silhouette or a baseless voice hovering in the blur of her memory. The world was a big place, and she was lost within it, but she wasn't afraid. Her memory was mostly ideas, but because of that she knew what her place and purpose was. She knew what her abilities were, and where her duties lay.

And one of them was right here, on the edge of something dangerous. She licked her lips, squared her shoulders, and stepped forward. "I have a proposal, please!"

Roxas caught her by the elbow, not quite forceful enough to pull her back; more like a threat that he could. She couldn't see his face and what expression had settled there, just heard his voice, how it was tight and whispered. "What the hell are you doing?"

She turned her head back slightly, just to the side. "Just wait."

On the barricade, the four guards all seemed to find this interesting, and the sonophone crackled in approval. "We will hear out the priestess."

Kairi took a deep breath, steeled herself under the hand still on her elbow, and prepared for the tirade that would inevitably follow. When she spoke, she turned her attention up to the guy on the parapet, cannon on his shoulder. "We will temporarily relinquish control of the truck."

"WHAT." And this time, Roxas really did yank her backwards. "No. Fuck no and what's all this 'we' stuff about? It's MY truck, and I say hell no, I'm not giving up control of it to _anyone_, whether they have a particle cannon in my face or not!"

"Roxas," Kairi said softly, turning enough to look in his eyes, and gently pulled his hand off her elbow, "you're going to have to give a little bit if you want us to get through this without incident."

Roxas stared back, and his voice was low and stuttered, painfully uncertain and dark. "Don't fucking do this."

"It's okay," she murmured, smiled to reassure him and squeezed his hand before letting go. Roxas scowled and stared at the ground, and she figured that was the most approval she was going to get.

Kairi faced the barricade again, swallowed and thought she had probably never felt as much of an adult as she did right now, in this moment, hearing the words of a grown and trained priestess tumbling out of her mouth. "In exchange for our show of good faith, I propose that we be allowed to sit down with you peacefully and discuss this issue as civilized people. I will offer myself to act as mediator, as I am both bound by my Oath to assist you in your claim of need, and have a vested interest in this truck as it is," she paused, swallowed, tongue wetting her lips and continued, "at the moment, my home."

On the parapet, cannon guy smiled and offered her a thumbs up. His taller companion leaned over to murmur something, and he nodded, indicating where Kairi and Roxas were standing in the road. A nod in return, and the taller one lowered his pike, and climbed down behind the barricade walls.

A few minutes passed in silence with some discussion going on somewhere Kairi couldn't see, and she stood there, something in her knees shaking as she wondered what she'd just done, if she could really carry this through, if Roxas was standing behind her and wishing he'd never picked up that poor sunburnt girl off the side of the road. She stood her ground, though, waiting for the word, tongue pressing prayers against the roof of her mouth.

And then the sonophone crackled and the gruff voice behind it said, "We accept your proposal."

There was a shift in the junk piled up alongside where the cut-away rectangle sat, and after a moment of creaking and groaning it became a massive door, scraping backwards over the pavement just enough to allow a person through. The guy with the pike came out first, weapon lowered at his side, followed by the one who manned the sonophone, and the girl hurried past them at a light jog. She smiled in consolation as she passed Roxas, making a beeline for the driver's door.

"Don't worry," she sang, almost reaching out to pat him on the shoulder but drawing away upon sight of the dark glare Roxas was wearing. "We'll take good care of it, promise."

Roxas scowled at her as she passed him, opened the door and climbed inside, then turned just enough to scowl at Kairi when the engine grumbled to life. Then, finally, he scowled at the ground, as though the pavement and the sand scattered over it was at fault for this defeat.

Sonophone guy appeared at Kairi's side with a curt nod, helmet obscuring everything but the flat line of his mouth, one hand out toward her elbow without touching. "If you prefer not to be manhandled, I recommend coming along quietly."

Kairi took a breath and nodded in agreement, following at his side as he guided them back to the doorway. Somewhere behind her she was vaguely aware of Roxas glowering and stubbornly standing in place until the guy with the pike finally grabbed the shoulder of his shirt and hauled him along. She looked up to the parapet and noted that the guy still on it, the smaller one, had lowered and powered off his cannon, and as they passed under it to go through the open door he waved at her with a pleased smile.

The man at her side made a low grunt, hand not quite on her back to guide her through the small entry. "This was all his idea. Sora's sense of diplomacy is... strange."

Kairi heard Roxas protesting behind them and silently agreed, noting that the man's voice sounded vaguely apologetic, if gruff. His hand touched her back briefly as they had to move sideways to get around the door itself, and then pushed slightly when she paused to stare.

The barricade was blocking a small compound, a few shelters built of scrap metal on either side of the road, floodlights held on high poles overhead. A small crush of people, mostly youths and older children, scampered around at various tasks--some of which appeared to involve maintaining the barricade and the things beyond it, and some of which appeared to be tag, or sticks, or other games that children got underfoot playing. At the opposite end of the compound a low fence ran across the road, a handful of four-wheeled motorbikes and a rusting green rover sitting just inside and a small hopper parked outside. Just past that the road split, the main part of it winding around the dip in the land as it sharpened into a plateau, curving north and then back to its original trajectory to continue eastward further on.

The other fork disappeared below the plateau's edge, and at sight of all the people here, she wondered what was down there.

"Cid!" The man at her side called abruptly, pausing with a hand on her shoulder and indicating an older man in dusty clothing, dirty blond hair held back by an equally dirty rag, who appeared to be scolding a trio of boys who appeared to not be listening very well. "Yuffie needs to bring the truck in, open the main gate."

"You heard the man," he growled to the boys, and they scampered over to a large wheel, turning the crank in tandem and the door they'd just crossed through began to open wider, large enough to let a truck much bigger than Roxas's pass. She tilted her head back to watch it, and noted that the guy with the cannon was no longer on the parapet.

When she looked back down, Roxas and his captor were engaged in an advanced argument.

"Fucking let go of me! Where the hell do you think I'm going to run to, anyway? You have my truck!" Roxas twisted and raged against the hand still resiliently holding on to his shirt, until the guy with the pike finally let him go, staring down at him with what must have been a dubious, affronted expression judging by the way his lips pressed into a tight line. A moment later, once Roxas had shook himself out and tugged his shirt straight, the guy settled the pike in the crook of his elbow and reached up to pull his helmet off.

Kairi knew, immediately and from the bits of understanding that came out of the fog, by the fall of silver hair that tumbled out of the helmet and onto his shoulders that the guy was a Replican. Roxas noted the same thing at the same instant, and his expression twisted on itself.

The guy tucked his helmet under his free arm without much concern for what Roxas did, scowling back at him in pretty much equal measure. "You could stand to show a little dignity after your woman saved your ass."

Roxas was practically spitting, eyes blazing electric blue and if he really was a Lightwielder, the Replican was going to find himself blind or worse in another second. Kairi opened her mouth, but it was the man beside her who interjected.

"Riku." His voice was firm and flat, and the Replican's head jerked to the side. "I'll take them down, you bring Sora and Yuffie once the truck is inside. We'll be in the red room."

The Replican nodded sharply and retreated without another word or even a glance for Roxas, who continued to stand and fume and glare at the ground around his feet. After a moment of this, when it was clear he wasn't going to come along quietly with them, Kairi pulled away from her guard and approached him, pausing just close enough to have something like a private conversation. "Roxas," she murmured, considered reaching for his hand but didn't think they were quite connected enough for that to be appropriate. "I need you to trust me."

When he looked up at her he was still scowling, and he was still glowering, but there was something deep and honest behind the expression, something in the blue depths of his eyes, that was absolutely terrified, just the way he'd been before. The fear hovered there between them and wrapped around her throat, made her mouth drop open. "I understand what you're trying to do, Kairi. I do, and I appreciate it," he said, voice low and tight. "But you have to understand that _we can't stay here._" He emphasized the words in short, hard bursts of breath. "We can't."

Kairi considered the words and the implications, the idea that something bad would happen if they didn't keep moving, and wondered how much of what Roxas told her was the truth. What it was that he struggled so hard to hide. She swallowed, nevertheless, because Roxas was all she knew and if her fate was tied to his, then his fears were hers as well. "We'll get the truck back. Let's just hear them out, okay?"

Roxas deflated, slowly, rage draining out of his body and gaze dropping back to the ground, nodding in a kind of defeat. "Yeah, okay."

When she turned back, the man guarding her had pulled his helmet off, revealing tousled brown hair and a scar running down his nose, and he held an expression that was halfway between bored and irritated. He gestured for them to follow and turned towards the rover parked by the fence, waiting until his two charges were climbing into the back seat of the open-air vehicle before tossing his helmet onto the floorboards. He regarded Roxas for a long moment. "Feeling more cooperative?"

Roxas was still scowling, but it was mostly a sulk, now. "Yeah."

"Good." The man slid into the driver's seat and turned over the engine, waiting until the roar faded into a low buzz. "Don't patronize our Replican. He has a bad temper."

Roxas scoffed softly and hunkered down in the back seat, avoiding Kairi's eyes and holding tightly to the side of the vehicle as the driver threw it in reverse, then waited for one of the many kids running around to open the gate in the fence so they could proceed to the road beyond. "So he's yours?"

"If you wanted to say he belonged to someone, that would be Sora." The man's voice was short and curt. "If you have a problem, take it up with him and his particle cannon."

Roxas slid even lower in his seat, grumbled something about, "Since when do clones have tempers," but he didn't raise his voice any further and their guard didn't say anything about it, so Kairi just sighed and watched as the rover sped out of the barricade's little compound and took the left fork down into the hollow.

The ground cut off sharply just beyond the road and the compound, and the smaller path followed it down in a slow gradient, walls of orange tinted rock rising up all around them, throwing the upper world into a high mesa as they descended. And right there, nestled in the curve of the plateau walls, a haphazard village sat, built of rock and brick and scrap metal, aluminum roofs reflecting the sun. A huge caravan was parked at the south end where one of the small avenues widened into a square for just that purpose. All around the outskirts were high poles strung with wire, iron spikes driven in the side to allow one to climb up and inspect the floodlights above. A high, barbed-wire fence marked the perimeter where the lights and the waypoint village ended and the desert began, the only barrier between them and the tribes and the darkness that occupied the night.

It was a clever location, she realized, noting how the shadows were lengthening after midday--in the hottest part of the afternoon with the sun dipping to the west, the village would be completely in the shade of the plateau. The walls behind the village had little footpaths leading up and switching back along it, leading to a few open-mouthed caverns, the metal tiers of a refinery all but built into the rock alongside, the only building in the town that wasn't made of spare parts. The waypoint had probably started out with just that, a factory to stabilize the mana drawn from the pool within the caverns, inject it into fuel cores and channel it into the electric currents that powered the perimeter and the refinery itself. Over time a village sprang up, people one by one choosing to stay and work, or establish trade, or provide a service for the passing caravans.

That was a noble choice, in its own way, Kairi thought. It would take a lot of fortitude to _want_ to stay in the desert, to help operate a waypoint that would never really prosper.

When the road reached level ground once again, it turned sharply and carried them along the fence for a short while before turning toward the village, hot wind billowing past them and blowing strands of hair out of the carefully plaited knot on the back of her head and into her face. The drive through the village was swift, only a few people out and about in the heat of the day, younger kids than the ones helping at the barricade playing with wooden swords and brightly colored balls and refugees from the caravan bartering for food and fuel and water and parts to repair their trucks. They drove to where the shadows were deepest, right along the rock walls and their guard parked the rover in front of one of the larger buildings, three stories with wide overhangs and railed balconies, strung with Candlemas lights, front door draped with a patterned red scarf.

A woman stepped through the door as the engine cut, long black hair tied back from her face and a bar towel between her hands, mouth open to speak and then pausing as she observed the two unfamiliar faces in the back seat. Kairi stared back at her for that moment, noting how her eyes flickered to the god-knot at her throat and then over to the driver. "What's going on?"

"We might have a truck." The driver picked up his helmet off the floorboards and climbed out, not paying any attention or bothering to introduce his passengers in the same way he'd never bothered to introduce himself. "Get the conference room ready and find Cloud, the others will be down soon." And with that, he brushed past the woman and through the scarf-covered doorway, disappearing inside and leaving the three of them to stare at each other.

"Well," the woman said finally, eyeroll followed by a brilliant smile. "Welcome to the Bastion. Come on inside, I'll get you some drinks."


	5. The Girl in the Desert, Part Four

**The Girl in the Desert, Part Four**

A few hours before, the only other person in the world Kairi really knew was Roxas, and now in a matter of minutes she knew so many people that all their names and faces made her head swim with information. She sat on the far side of a long conference table in a room hung with bright red and yellow drapes over the hodgepodge walls, a glass of fizzing whitefruit juice with a few precious ice cubes clinking around inside sweating between her hands, shifting on her creaking wooden chair and watching people come and go for the better part of an hour. Roxas paced back and forth from the small, foggy window that faced the shaded street and the doorway, never leaving the room but pausing several times to stare out through the glass with his arms folded, or arguing with whomever had come inside. Usually it was Leon, their driver, who just stared down at Roxas until he ran out of words, then told him to sit down and shut up.

The woman who greeted them was Tifa, and she brought Kairi the whitefruit juice and refilled it when it ran out. She smiled and asked for names and introduced herself, explained that she and Leon and some of the other names Kairi had heard since they arrived were sort of the village council, and that they'd all be here shortly and then everything would be straightened out. Roxas looked dubious, and then went to argue with the older guy from the barricade compound whose name she thought was Cid, who proceeded to cuff him in the ear and take a seat at the table's far end without further comment. Roxas rubbed his ear and sat down to sulk instead.

"So," Kairi mused aloud finally when Tifa was seated across from her, "why did you guys put up a barricade just for one truck? How did you even know we were coming?"

Tifa blinked for a moment, then laughed brightly and Cid chuckled from his end of the table, leaning back in the chair with his feet up. His voice was rough and crackled through the air. "The barricade has always been up, we usually keep the gates open is all. Otherwise people might pass us by in the dark, and the next waypoint isn't for another three thousand miles."

"I'm sure the boys came up with some ridiculous ploy when they saw you coming." Tifa's voice was, by contrast, mocking but fond. She smiled in reassurance. "You'll have to excuse them, things are kind of..."

Kairi shifted when her voice trailed off, chair making a protesting squeak against the floorboards. "What's going on, exactly?"

Tifa regarded her with wide brown eyes, lips pursing together for a moment, thoughtful and tense. She let out a breath, finally, sat back in the chair and crossed her legs, reached back to tug the ponytail out of her hair and fiddled with the elastic for a moment before clapping both hands over her knee like coming to a decision, returning her attention to Kairi. "They'll explain when they get here. Someone will, anyway."

Voices burst through the front entry as though to prove her point, drawing the attention of everyone present and Tifa sighed again, climbed to her feet and cast Kairi a smile. "And here they are. Just sit tight a few more minutes."

When the voices moved from the building's entry to the door of the red room, Kairi scrambled to remember names and assign them to people. They all kind of floated around in her head, wavering over the table like waves of heat curling up off of sun-baked pavement and the knot of people by the door bled together into one mass of color indistinguishable as separate beings.

Except for the Replican--he was separate, off to the side and leaned back against the wall by the door, dressed normally now in dark colors, blue and black and something yellow near his wrists, silver hair tied back neatly in contrast to the mess that had tumbled out under his helmet earlier. He exchanged a glare across the table with Roxas, then pushed his hands in his pockets and turned his attention to Kairi instead. His eyes, she thought, were the color of water--like the fountain in the square where her friends used to play, like how she imagined the ocean to be, clear blue-green over shifting white sand.

He blinked at her impassively for a moment, then turned to stare at the wall, waiting for the room to settle.

Kairi was waiting patiently, and trying to remember the Replican's name while watching Roxas's fingers fidget against the edge of the table, when a single person wriggled out of the knot at the door. He dodged and laughed and hurried around the table, past the Replican and past where Cid was still leaning back and grumbling about kids and all their damn energy and he stopped, finally, just beside her chair, sitting back against the table and smiling down at her.

And she knew by the smile it was the guy from the parapet, the one with the grin and the cannon who had wordlessly guided her in what to do and how to diffuse the situation. The smile was attached to someone gangly and tanned. A boy. Brown hair messy with spikes and blue, blue eyes.

Her voice caught on a lump in her throat, the fog of her memory seethed and surged and her heart _ached_. The images there were vague; she remembered silvery light filtering through the cut glass windows lining a winding stair. Her fingers curled around a staff, a--no, it was a halberd, wickedly curved and spiked blade glinting in the moonlight. Her knees were skinned, her left wrist hot and painful and a hand on her elbow dragged her forward, protesting and stumbling on the stone steps. She didn't want to leave, she wasn't going to run away, she wasn't going to leave without--

_Kairi, they're coming!_

"It's you," she breathed aloud, through the haze and memory and painful uncertainty swirling through her vision, and the sense of joy and relief in those words and that moment were so overwhelming that for a moment the fog engulfed everything but her and him and whatever was tumbling around beneath it that remembered. She wanted to gather him up in her arms, hold him tight and cry and cry and beg forgiveness until her heart was empty. Until the world ended.

"Whoa--_whoa_, are you okay?"

Kairi blinked and she was back in the room, and the smiling boy's eyes were wide and concerned and his hand was on her shoulder, warm, and there were tears streaming down her cheeks. She gasped, reached up to brush them away and sniffled, breath uncertain and confused at her own reaction. "I'm--I'm sorry, I don't know what came over me."

"It's okay." The boy flailed around for a moment, patting his pockets and ultimately looked up when Roxas moved, on her other side, and held out a handkerchief. The boy murmured his thanks and took it, and it was strange how they were both very, very careful not to brush fingers even the slightest bit, both of them staring at the other for far longer than was really necessary, both of them so uncertain and wondering it was painful. She looked from one to the other, wondering, and then abruptly it broke and the boy was smiling at her again, handing over the bit of white cloth. "Here. I'm Sora, by the way."

"Kairi. Thanks." She swiped the cloth over her eyes, blew her nose and it was all very unladylike, and Roxas snickered into his hand.

Sora grinned as though this satisfied his concerns, and he sat back against the table again, folding his arms. "I just wanted to thank you. You know, for figuring out what to do." His smile softened and he was like the fading light over the desert; deep and bright colors, stars beginning to twinkle where the sky was violet. The warmth of the waning day. "We weren't sure what to expect, but when I saw you--" he shrugged, all limbs and was just a boy again, laughing for a brief instant. "Well, this was the better way. Right?"

"Right," Kairi echoed, smile creeping onto her own face as his mood infected her, lifted her spirits. He grinned again and pushed away from the table, waved just a bit as he backed off, past Roxas--careful not to touch so much as a hair--and jogged around to sit beside Leon at the foot of the table, nearest to where the Replican was leaned by the door.

Chairs creaked and Tifa hurried around the table, urging everyone to get settled and handing out drinks from a carefully balanced tray, iced water and juice in glasses, desert tea and other, stronger libations in cups. She was the last to sit, across from Kairi, who took the extra time to look around the table and do her best to identify everyone.

"Well then, priestess," Cid said after Tifa was seated and the chatter had died down, kicking his feet back to the floor and lowering his chair with a loud thump, "you volunteered to mediate, where'd you like to begin?"

Kairi almost remembered all of the names. Almost. A few she wasn't entirely sure of; she still couldn't bring up what the Replican had been called, and the sprightly girl sitting next to Tifa was probably the one from the barricade, but her name was just as elusive. There was a man on the end nearest Cid with dark clothes and spiked blond hair that she didn't remember meeting. She licked her lips, tasting whitefruit and ice, chair squeaking as she shifted and thought, wondered how best to approach this. It was best, if she remembered correctly, to hear out both sides first, let each tell their story in full, before allowing detraction. She turned, settled on Roxas. "Do you want to make a statement?"

He sighed through his teeth, head lowered and hand rubbing the back of his neck. There was a thin silver chain there, just above the line of his collar, that she hadn't noticed before, whatever it was holding well-hidden under his shirt. He looked tired and uncooperative, but straightened in his chair and finally leaned forward on his elbows to address the table's gnarled, knotted surface. "Fine, look. I'm going to Luma, and I have to get there absolutely as fast as possible. I can't give you my truck and I can't sit here and argue over it with you, either, so it would be really great if you all would respect my property rights and find transportation elsewhere. Like maybe that caravan you have parked by the perimeter."

For perhaps a minute, the table was silent in a pensive way, as though they expected him to elaborate. But when Roxas simply stopped, sat back in his chair after a moment and folded his arms, the mood shifted, undercurrent of irritation and mistrust circulating through the council members.

"Why are you in such a hurry?" Leon asked from his end of the table, hands folded in front of his face.

Roxas stared back at him and said nothing.

Leon's countenance darkened, and it was just shy of being completely terrifying. The scar across his nose seemed to highlight the way his eyes narrowed, the way the corners of his mouth pulled even further down. "Why aren't you in a caravan?"

He was playing a dangerous game, Kairi realized--a very dangerous game, keeping secrets from these people when they were trying to gain some grain of trust or understanding. Roxas, though; he didn't flinch when faced with Leon, just gave him a cool stare, unmoving, unflinching. Leon was no threat to him, no--the _real_ threat came at the end of this meeting, at the decision of whether he'd be able to continue or remain trapped in this town.

The real threat was whatever would happen after that.

"Obviously, because I'm in a hurry." Roxas presented it as simple fact, supporting evidence, refusal to back down. "Caravans are too slow."

Sora made a humming noise and abruptly, like a flip of a switch, everyone's attention was on him. Kairi frowned, silently, trying to read this shift in attitude, why Sora was neither at the head or foot of the table yet held some kind of sway over everyone present, why the Replican was hovering against the wall behind him. Even Roxas tilted forward in his chair and folded his hands on the table instead and there was something in his eyes that was captivated. Something in his frown that was curious, something in the set of his shoulders that was deeply mistrustful.

"You understand half our dilemma already," Sora said, smile warm and inviting and he met Roxas stare for stare. Something in the air between them went heavy and electric, almost crackling with static. "Why did you lie to us?"

Roxas held the stare for a long moment, then made a hissing noise that was mostly aggravation at himself, fingers curling against the table. Whatever had passed between them in that space of silence broke and dissipated. "You're the Truthsayer."

"You're shielded," Sora responded easily, honest curiosity and concern almost more insidious than an accusation. "What are you hiding?"

The struggle between them was almost visible, then, though there was nothing tangible about it--Sora fighting to see the truth on Roxas's heart and Roxas evading him, pushing him away, drawing the blinds and shielding himself from Sora's deep blue eyes. There was something dark behind it all, sinister and looming and Kairi was more certain than ever that one way or another, they needed that truck.

She interjected before anything could escalate, looking from Leon to Cid and back. "Would one of you like to state your case?"

A few glances were exchanged, between almost everyone at the table, and ultimately it was Tifa who spoke, leaned back and legs crossed in the seat across from her. "One of our people is very ill. He's been seen by several shrine priestesses already but none of them are powerful enough to heal him. His only chance is to be taken to the temple in Eden immediately, and our options are limited. None of our hoppers have enough cargo space for supplies to last through to the next waypoint, and the caravan you saw just arrived here yesterday. They won't be leaving again for weeks, they need every truck they have, and as your companion here already noted, caravans are slow. What we need is a truck light enough for speed but heavy enough to travel solo. Yours would do nicely, and you're both young and healthy and can stand to wait and leave with the caravan."

Roxas's tone was biting and final. "We can't do that."

"The Bastion is a pretty damn hospitable place if you give it a chance." This came from the girl from the barricade, the one who had commandeered the truck. Kairi still couldn't remember her name. "It's not like we're just going to cast you out into the desert or something. We'll take good care of you here, Tifa has rooms and plenty of food, and--"

"That's not the point." Roxas bit out the words one by one, palm falling heavy on the table. "We _can't wait_. It is _not_ an _option_."

It was strange and ironic, Kairi thought, how the council believed that Roxas was being obstinate and unreasonable, while Roxas himself thought the same of them. Explaining his situation with increasing shortness and frustration, like a parent tired of telling their child no. No, no, _no_, NO.

This meeting was going to stalemate, very fast and very soon, and Kairi still didn't feel like she knew everything and certainly didn't have any solutions in mind. She watched the way everyone shifted, defensive movements, coiling back to regroup and plan a different route, another angle of attack. Searching for the weakness that would assure victory.

If this continued, she would lose them. Kairi sat straight in her chair, holding her own composure and hoping they could still place some trust and faith in the presence of a priestess, the god-knot at her throat proof that she knew what she was doing. Fortunately, only Roxas knew that she barely remembered what she was doing.

Curiously, it was the Replican who spoke next, shifting against the wall by the door, hands in his pockets and staring directly at Roxas. "If you don't give us your truck," he advised softly, a dangerous lilt just at the end that added to the suggestion, "then he's going to die. Do you want that on your head?"

After a moment of thought, a cursory contemplation that wasn't nearly enough to mollify anyone, Roxas sat back in his chair, arms folded and impassive. "Sorry."

His name was Riku, Kairi remembered suddenly. His name was Riku, and Leon had said that if he belonged to anyone it was Sora. There was a connection waiting to be made, somewhere in the back of her mind, but in reality it was set aside because the Replican's teeth were baring in a grimace, all but snarling. "Are you saying that whatever it is _you_ have to do is more important?"

Roxas barely moved, a flinch at the corner of his mouth, cold as mountain snow. "Yes."

The Replican lunged in a flurry of silver and dark blue and Kairi would have expected several people to jump up to hold him back but Sora was the only one that moved, and all he did was turn in his chair, lift one hand and rest it against Riku's chest. He stopped, almost immediately, right behind Sora's chair, arms dropping to his sides, fists balled and seething quietly.

Tifa's clear voice spoke next, elegant and practical, skirts swishing as she uncrossed and recrossed her legs. "What do you have to do that's so important?"

Roxas groaned, dropped his head to bury in his hands. "Look, I can't tell you people, okay? I'm sorry, but _I can't tell you_."

"You're full of shit," Riku muttered, but didn't move from his spot.

"_Dammit!_" Roxas exploded, slammed both hands against the edge of the table so the whole thing shook, cups and glasses rattled and his chair squeaked backwards a good inch. "You all think you have me figured out, don't you? You think I'm full of it, that I'm an unconscionable asshole, that I'm some princeling prick from a falling House who doesn't give a fuck who he has to walk over to get out of the desert. That's what you think, isn't it? You're all so fucking smug and sure of yourselves but you have _no idea_." Roxas fists were balled against the table, shaking, and his voice dropped to a lower tone, quieter, pleading. "I'm sorry I can't help you, I really, truly am but you have to believe me. You have _no idea_ what you're doing."

If she was honest with herself, Kairi would have thought the same thing. There was no reason for these people to believe Roxas and he'd given them no reason to sympathize. He was cold and unyielding and refused to even explain himself and Kairi wouldn't trust him either if she hadn't seen the honest fear in Roxas's eyes. There was something true behind that, something lurking, and he wasn't telling not because he was belligerent or distrusting (although he was that, too) but because knowing put others in danger, made the danger grow.

She had an idea, suddenly, and turned back to Tifa before another argument could spring up. "This person who's ill," she said in a rush, hope stirring for a solution. "Is he contagious?"

Tifa blinked at her and her excitement, belatedly responding with, "No, no it's an infection, there's no contagion."

She wasn't sure whether to address Cid or Leon for permission, but decided on Cid as he was the elder of the group, looking up the table at him plaintively. "May I speak with my companion privately for a moment?"

There were a few grumbles, mostly from Leon and Riku, but Cid gave a short nod, waved a hand toward the door. Kairi jumped up, hauled a very dubious Roxas out of his chair and along by the elbow. Riku glared at them as they passed, and she couldn't help feeling like she didn't deserve his ire simply by association with the person who caused it.

Once the door was closed, and the people within were discussing things that murmured meaninglessly through the walls, she turned to face Roxas with hands clasped at her stomach. "I have an idea."

Roxas, if possible, looked even more dubious, mouth set in a scowl and composure ruffled from his outburst, frustrated by the lack of confidence from the council. "Great. Because they've worked out so well for me so far."

"We--" she started, then thought better of using that particular pronoun and revised the statement, fingers twined together and palms spread open before you as she explained. "_You_ need to offer to take the patient with us."

Roxas blinked once, twice, as though he was waiting for her to take it back, laugh it off like a joke. When she didn't, his scowl deepened, hardened, icy like the stare he'd leveled at Riku. "No way."

No, no he had to see the reason in this. Kairi squared her shoulders, drew herself up to match his height (it only took an inch) and folded her arms, prepared to argue with him as long as necessary. "Think about it, Roxas. You make the offer to take the patient and an attendant to take care of him so we don't have to. In exchange they provide supplies from here to Eden. You save barter, and with three healthy people in the truck, one of us can always be awake to drive while the others sleep, which means we move even faster." She paused, licked her lips and took a chance on touching on one last thing, since Roxas's face was still impassive. "And you wouldn't always have to drive at night, either."

His expression melted slightly, but the frown remained. "I don't like this. I don't want to involve other people."

"Well, you didn't exactly endear yourself to anyone in there." Kairi backed down just slightly, gave him room to feel in control of the decision, voice softening. "If you don't at least _make_ the offer, even if they refuse it, I doubt they're going to agree to give your truck back."

Roxas rubbed one hand over his face, into his hair, muttered, "Fuck," a few times and finally dropped his arms with a huff. "Fine, okay, I'll make the damn offer, but I can tell you right now that the clone isn't going to have it."

"How do you know that?"

Roxas looked around the room, up to the ceiling as though searching past it for the heavens where the gods watched but no longer got involved, everywhere except at her, and finally stalked back into the conference room without answering.

The offer didn't go over as well as she'd hoped, especially with the Replican, who stood and wrapped his fingers around the back of Sora's chair and seethed at Roxas for even suggesting such a thing. "You lie to us, you refuse to answer our questions, you claim to be more important than the death of someone you don't even know and yet you expect us to trust you enough to send two of our people out into the desert with you?"

"He's traveling with a priestess," Tifa offered, shrugging but still pragmatic.

A man at the end of the table nearest Cid who hadn't spoken until now, blond and silent and watching the entire affair far too keenly to be disinterested, finally pointed out the one thing Kairi had been hoping to avoid for the entire discussion. "Yes, but the god-knots are only given out at the temple in Luma. This girl is from the East--how did she get out here to begin with?"

There was a brief, heavy silence in the air, curling around and drawing the question taut, the creak of chairs snapping loud through the tension.

"No one travels west," Yuffie said from the center of the table--that was her name, the girl from the barricade. "We would have seen them. No one's traveled west in over fifty years."

Kairi was losing them, one by one, the table falling to the silence and all the thoughts and doubts behind all their eyes loud in comparison. She felt small and childlike in her chair, wondering how her idea had failed so quickly, feeling fear stirring like a coiled snake in her chest. She wondered what it was that Roxas was so afraid of and at the same time was glad she didn't know, because she was almost positive, now, that the truck was lost.

Then Sora sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, and said, "I trust them."

The table shuffled and shifted and murmured, and Riku looked down at Sora's closed eyes, said his name in a sigh and shook his head. Leon grunted in agreement. "I don't think this is wise."

"I trust them," Sora repeated, opening his eyes to look up at the Replican, reaching up for his hand and smiling in a way that was far too private for Kairi to be looking at. She turned away from them, looking at Roxas instead, the way his shoulders were tense and his fingers curled against the table's edge, knuckles white. "They have secrets that I can't read, but their intentions are good."

"Good intentions don't always lead to good ends," Cid intoned from the head of the table.

"We won't take their truck," Sora said, and his voice was short and definite. "So either accept the offer or let them go."

Looks passed around among the council, and finally Cid lifted a hand, palm up in offering toward the foot of the table and the three people there, apparently more invested than anyone else. "It's your call."

Leon looked up at Riku for approval, and after a long moment of staring down at Sora and his smile, the Replican nodded very, very slightly, untangled himself from where Sora's fingers were twined with his against the back of the chair, turned and walked out the door silently.

"Deal," Leon said, and Kairi and Roxas let out identical breaths of relief.

Chairs creaked and squeaked and scraped against the wood floor, murmuring started around them as feet shuffled, Cid exchanging plans with Leon, Yuffie darting out the door first to relay the message to the barricade. Tifa leaned over the table and assured Kairi that she'd make up rooms for them and they were welcome to have something to eat at the bar. The blond man, the one whose name she never learned, nodded to her as he passed, respectful acknowledgment despite the fact that he'd been her main detractor. Cid assured her before he and Leon left that they'd be in touch.

Roxas had both hands over his face and stayed that way, motionless against the table until the room was clear aside from them and Sora, still in his chair and smiling, pleased that everything had worked out.

"It's going to be a pleasure traveling with you," he assured them, slipping out of his chair and disappearing through the door with a wave, and when Kairi murmured, "What?" into the quiet that followed, Roxas finally lowered his hands and turned to her, face drawn with exhaustion.

"Sora," he said slowly, "is the one that's sick."

Kairi blinked at Roxas, the matter-of-fact delivery of that statement, and then turned to stare at Sora's empty seat. Wondered at his smile, his energy, everything about him that appeared perfectly normal and healthy and wondered just what on earth could be wrong with him, what could be so dire that he and his neighbors had felt the need to hold up a pair of refugees innocently crossing the wasteland at cannonpoint just to get their truck.

"How did you know?" she asked again, but again Roxas simply jerked out of his chair and stalked away into the lateness of the day, and the shadows.


	6. Intermission: Hot Pursuit, Part One

Don't get too excited, guys, this part is short. There will be 'intermissions' at the end of each section of the story, and as they're pretty small, I'll be posting at the same time as the previous chapter. Now, have some Axel. ^^

* * *

**Intermission: Hot Pursuit, Part One**

"Number eight, this is number two; confirm your position. Over."

The sonex snapped into static at the end of the sentence, settled back into a hum. Axel pulled his hand away from his right eye just enough to glare at it, momentarily, as the waveline on its monitor jumped and wriggled along with the sounds. Having glared sufficiently, he resettled his arm over his eyes and recrossed his ankles (which were still hanging out the open door of the hopper, warming in the sunlight) and prepared to return to sleeping. As that was preferable to whatever Xigbar might think he ought to be doing.

"Number eight, wake your lazy ass up and confirm or I'll snipe your tires and leave you out overnight. Over."

He muttered a few random and half-formed curses and flung out his free arm, blindly grabbing for the sonex's mic. He ended up batting it out of its clasp onto the floor, then under the seat when he swiped for it again, and eventually had to remove the arm over his eyes and sit up slightly to retrieve it. Which only made him curse more.

"Number eight--"

"You're a bastard, you know that?" Axel growled into the mic, kicking ineffectually at the grass under his heels just because he could. It didn't really make him feel better. "What the hell do you want?"

"If you ever bothered to fucking listen, eight, you would know that I asked you to confirm your position. Twice."

He grumbled to himself--more curse words, something about losing another eye, something else about codgy old bastards who liked to pick on the young, handsome guys out of jealousy--and shoved stray hair back out of his face, scratching one hand through the mess at the back of his head and squinting in the sunlight angling through the hopper's windshield. "I'm on the floodlight perimeter just outside of Rhohadam--which, if _you_ ever bothered to listen, is the exact same place I _have_ been for the last two days." Axel swung his legs back inside the vehicle with another huff, straightening in the driver's seat and reaching up to pull the hatch-door closed. "And before you ask--no, I haven't seen a goddamn thing. But if you really want to know, I'm pretty damn sure the desert wasn't this close to the city the last time I was here."

"Uh, guys," a third voice crackled over the sonex, higher tone distorting the waveline. It died for a moment, then crackled again. "I mean--uh, Roger ten-forty, this is Demyx."

Of course it was. Axel rolled his eyes, was suitably unhappy for a moment that no one was present to see his rolling of eyes, and slammed the door shut just as Xigbar's voice snapped over the sonex again.

"How many times do I have to tell you, nine--_numbers_ on the airwaves. Numbers!"

"Oh right. Um... this is--no, wait. Come in number--oh, what the fuck _ever_. You guys need to see this."

Shit, the kid had actually found something. Axel paused to frown at the steering console, one finger tapping against the ignition switch and letting the conversation on the sonex go on without him.

"What's your location?"

"About ten miles into the desert from the Rhohadam border."

This was it. Time to play non-involvement.

He flipped the switch and threw the vehicle into gear, speeding out of the small patch of vegetation that separated the tile-roofed city from the encroaching desert and kicking up bits of grass and wildflowers behind him. The hopper skidded when the tires met gravel, dust billowing around it as he crossed the bridge over the city's muddy little irrigation canal and then the safety of the floodlight-ring was behind him. The tires stabilized on the sun-bleached pavement of the refugee road that wound away into the desert. Ten thousand miles of heat and dirt and nothing between Rhohadam and the Seven Cities.

There was a school of thought, in the West, that those cities didn't actually exist, and that all the people who escaped their failing homeland into the desert were doomed to die on its endless road. Axel didn't hold with that, personally--he knew better, after all. But if he were to harbor a superstition or, failing that, a general fear of the unknown... well. Crossing the floodlight perimeter sent chills down his spine, despite the high midday sun assuring him that it wouldn't be dark for hours yet.

It took less than ten minutes to reach the spot on the roadside where Demyx's hopper was pulled over, gleaming stain of metal-black against the baked earth, tires sprawled in the gravel like the limbs of a giant insect. It was, however, enough time for Axel to decide he hated the desert for three very important reasons: One, he couldn't stand sitting in the driver's seat and staring at nothing for even that long, let alone any longer. Two, even with the climate controls holding steady over the hopper's interior, the sun slanting in through the windshield made the air around him bake. And three--

Well, with the lack of landscape in general, it was that much easier to see the crack in the sky.

He skidded to a halt deliberately, kicking up a cloud of sand around his vehicle, and predictably Demyx walked through it anyway, waving his arms in front of himself and coughing. Axel waited for it to settle before opening the door.

"Oh, shit." And promptly slammed it back closed.

Demyx tapped on the window, dead frown on his mouth and a definite wilt to his countenance. "Axel."

"It's fucking hot!"

"Get out of the car."

Axel grumbled under his breath--he seemed to be doing that a lot today, he thought--and opened the door again, wincing at the heat that slammed into him with the force of a hammerfall. He shrugged quickly out of his coat and tossed it back inside before climbing out.

Demyx was definitely wilting--his annoyingly perky hair was curling down a bit around the edges and there was a ring of sweat around the collar of his shirt. He'd ditched the coat, too. "Who ever heard of a pyrologist having a bitch fit about heat?"

"Fire is one thing. This--" Axel explained, waving one hand through air so hot it felt thick against his skin, "is something else."

"I think I'm dehydrating."

"Unlikely. What did you find?"

Demyx took a step back and another to the side, motioning for Axel to follow. "Vexen's gonna be pissed." Their feet left the pavement and started crunching through the gravel and sand that lined the side of the road, dipping down into a hollow that fell a few feet below. "Speaking of which--why the hell isn't _he_ here enduring this torment for the sake of science, or whatever it is? Or is that beside the point?"

"Missed it, I think." Axel reached back to pull his mess of hair up off the back of his neck, curling one hand around it and pondering whether he had anything to tie it with. "Vexen's still busy being insanely pissed and chasing after those lab rats that ran away from him last year. I think he set Xaldin and another horde of Replicans on them. Fuck knows what he's doing himself."

"Yet another creepy experiment. Maybe he'll make us a new teammate again. This way." Demyx turned and skidded on the gravel when it dipped lower, deeper into the hollow and into a sliver of blessed shade. "It's here."

And sure enough, there it was.

...Huh.

Demyx looked bored--or possibly just overheated and in need of a large body of water. "What the hell is it, anyway?"

Axel approached the metal and glass contraption with a certain level of trepidation. It was pretty big, as scrap metal went--about six feet long and egg-shaped. From the crack in the large, glossy cover it looked like it was probably broken, but the buttons and switches and LEDs all along the sides gave it an ominous look, like it would whirr and blink itself back to functionality at any moment. "I think it's a stasis pod."

"Oh. That's not good, right?"

His professional opinion, strangely enough, echoed Demyx's. "Vexen's gonna be pissed."

"Understatement of the fucking century," Xigbar's voice muttered behind them, accompanied by the crunching of gravel. The man had also discarded his coat, white shirt sleeves rolled up to his armpits and he regarded his two subordinates and the broken machinery beyond them with one good eye. After a moment, while they all stood there in the ungodly heat in silence for absolutely no good reason (Axel thought), he reached over and clapped Demyx on the shoulder. "Good work, kid. How'd you find it?"

Demyx shrugged a little, still wilting and not looking particularly happy at how pleased Xigbar was to find a heap of scrap metal. "Stopped to take a leak."

Xigbar barked a laugh, brief and not quite humorous enough to be believable, and stepped between them to examine the abandoned pod. Circling it slowly. "Yep, he definitely ditched this. That's bad news, but at least we know he went into the desert now."

"Well," Demyx piped up unexpectedly, just as Axel opened his mouth to interject--and damn if help didn't come from strange places, some days. "Not necessarily. I mean, he could have left it as a--whatchacallit. A decoy."

"As much as I hate to admit it, Dem has a point, there." Axel kept his grin carefully wry, like it was meant to poke fun at Demyx rather than triumphantly support his fantastic theory.

"Not so sure about that--he's a direct guy. Leaving red herrings around doesn't seem like his style." Xigbar paused on the other side of the pod, crouching a bit to squint at something.

Axel scowled where he couldn't see--no, no, listen to the idiot's theory, dammit!

"Well, yeah, but--" Demyx, at least, was defending himself. Axel was still scowling. "He's not suicidal, either. He can't want us following him." He paused and turned his wilted, rather confused expression on Axel, questioning. "Right?"

Axel swallowed. "Can't see why."

"It's a note!" Xigbar straightened abruptly, tugging a folded slip of paper out from a gap between glass and metal. He opened it quickly, scanning the surface and then made a low, exasperated sound and rolled his one good eye skyward, thrusting the paper in Axel's general direction. "It's for you."

Axel blinked for a moment, heat clouding his senses until Xigbar's glare spurred him into motion and he stepped forward to snatch up the paper, straightening the folds and returning the glare before holding it up to read the large, blocky black text. Something in his chest bounced and pulsed out of time with the rest of his heart (what was left of it, anyway) and he had to thump himself in the sternum with a fist a couple times to get it to settle down and return to existing quietly like it was supposed to.

The note read:

**LOVE YOU, BABE**

**XOXOXO**

**xoxxx**

**x**

--and Roxas's sense of humor still sucked.

Demyx hovered over his shoulder to sneak a peek and snorted. "Oh, now he's just fucking with us." He paused, just to one side and halfheartedly patted Axel on the shoulder in a gesture of discomfited sympathy. "Sorry, man."

Axel made sure his grin was a little wistful and slightly pained. "Don't suppose we could just let him go, huh boss?" He refolded the paper carefully, focusing all his attention on the little creases and edges because if he didn't he might just laugh in their faces and tell them all about it. That would probably be a bad idea. "You know, ten generations of Nocturne University destroying whatever was left of the House of the Wise trying to synthesize cardiopathy, and we're going to kill the only real success they ever had? Sounds like one of those self-defeating prophecies. Or... whatever."

"Not a chance." Xigbar kicked idly at the broken pod and crunched through the gravel back around it, passing between the two of them again and climbing back up through the slippery rocks back to the parked hoppers. "We're back in Rhohadam tonight. Stock up, fuel up, get Xemnas on the sonex and tell him Roxas is somewhere on the refugee road."

"And then?" Demyx asked with something approaching his usual brightness.

"And then," Xigbar echoed, pausing to shoot him a look of restrained exasperation, "we go _after_ him. Move out."

The crunch of gravel was loud behind him, two sets leaving and then one returning, heavier, and Xigbar's hand landed on his arm with even more force than the crushing heat and jerked Axel back around towards the road.

"The kid's a traitor." Xigbar growled the words with a kind of emphatic tilt to his voice, like he was telling himself this as much as Axel. "Fuck if I want to chase him down, either, but unfortunately Nocturne's been having this epidemic of runaways lately. Vexen has all his resources on those two kids from the labs, Marly's up in arms over his damned witch going missing, and as Roxas so conveniently killed the only other two people with enough free time to take on another manhunt, we're it. Little bastard had all his ducks in a row."

You have no idea, Axel thought, and kept his face in a careful mask of slightly cowed despair--because that was probably how he ought to look, right? Just match their expectations, Roxas had said--do that, and they'll never think twice.

Axel dragged his feet back to the car and was only climbing inside and turning the climate controls back on full blast when Xigbar pealed out, back towards town, and Demyx followed just as he closed the door and settled into his seat.

When they were both out of sight, he unfolded the paper in his hand again and raised it up to his nose, inhaling deeply. It smelled like desert. Like heat and sand and a bit like the ink the note was written in--seriously, X's and O's. What the hell?

Somewhere beneath that, though, he was almost positive he could smell something like the skin on Roxas's neck. And that distracted him enough that he spent ten minutes longer than he even intended to still in the desert, remembering playing hooky from supply runs in this very hopper to make out in the driver's seat, horn blaring when he forgot where they were and pressed Roxas back against the wheel--because clearly, that was more fun. Who needed rations and fuel cores, anyway?

He remembered somewhere in the middle of this fantasy (and it involved Roxas's neck and little pants of breath against his ear and an apparent lack of clothing that his fantasies never bothered to explain) that he was actually supposed to be doing something important--making sure that neither he nor the rest of his unit actually found Roxas, for one; Axel rather preferred him alive and whole and therefore his role in this entire scheme would have to be played to perfection.

Axel pressed a soft kiss to the paper and folded it back up, pushing the note into his back pocket before reaching for the ignition and the gear shift. "Love you, too."

_And it goddamn well better be worth having to follow you through this fucking desert._


	7. The Plot, Part One

So, college tends to eat one pretty easily, but I figure if I schedule myself just a little bit of writing time each week, that should at least keep me going a bit. Right? Well, first day out of the chute, and I've finally got this chapter ready to go. And I signed in to discover that I hadn't updated in so long that my document manager was completely empty. Damn. Hopefully everyone remembers this sucker.

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**The Plot, Part One**

Roxas remembered the temple.

It was a sprawling patch of dead grass and rubble near the outskirts of Nocturne, surrounded by long abandoned tile-roofed houses, glass windows cracked and broken, holes blown in the walls and corners of each from a House war long since past. They blocked the distant view of the floodlight perimeter where it climbed into the hills before stretching back towards the sea, still circling wide to protect this deserted arm of the city despite the fact that there were no families to occupy the tile-roofed houses, no devotees to make their weekly trek to the broken temple.

Brown stone walls crumbled at the edges, taller bits in jagged teeth reached skyward, flagstone walkways circled it and branched out towards the dirt path that had been a road at one time before the cobbles were dug up and relocated somewhere that saw more use. Deeper within, among the fallen stones and broken walls, though, one could almost always detect movement, flashes of color, bright laughter, because in its state of dejection and disrepair, the temple was the one place in the city free and open to house whomever needed shelter, and that was where the orphans lived.

Aerith guided them there from the ruins of the fishing village, children clinging to her skirts, too many of them for her to favor any with being carried in her arms. Behind them, though, bringing up the rear and hurrying along any stragglers, a man with dark brown hair and blast armor on his shoulders had scooped up the littlest of them, Olette, arms still wrapped around the bear Roxas had offered her. He told her a story in hushed tones, drawing out muffled giggles from time to time.

Aerith was a priestess of Eden, Axel explained to him as they walked. Zack was her guard, and they made sure the temple was safe for them to stay at, and brought them food and toys and other things they needed from the city. The youngest children would go stay at the shrine with her, but it was too small for all of them to live there, he explained. They lived at the temple instead, and the grownups left them alone because they thought the place was cursed.

"Don't worry, though," Axel said, swinging his arms as they walked. "Aerith says that's silly."

"Why do they think it's cursed?" Roxas wondered anyway.

Axel's eyes were big, watching him like he was wondering how Roxas didn't know such a thing. "Because this is where they used to worship the sky."

There was an area in the center where everyone slept at night, blankets and cushions lining the floor and lower walls, the one room of the entire sprawling building where the ceiling was intact and in no danger of crumbling inward. There was a round fire cage in the middle, but in the warm summer nights it was only lit for light to keep the younger children from crying. The older ones, like Seifer, would haul baskets of spent fuel cores to be refilled at the mana refinery on the city's south end during the warm months, and in the winters, Axel told him, they would take turns switching them out and hang old, heavy rugs over the entries, and that was how everyone kept warm.

For the first few weeks, Roxas spent most of his time near the old dirt road. There was a pile of flagstones situated around what might have been a little fountain, once, just aside from the main entrance, and it made for a perfect spot to sit and watch the road, or to look past it, out through the tall grass that lined the floodlight perimeter and further towards where the bay was, too distant from this place to hear the lapping of waves on the shore. He sat, sometimes with his legs dangling, sometimes with his knees pulled up under his chin, sometimes crosslegged, and waited for his father to come and find him.

At first, Axel would try to get him to come and play with him and the others. He had tricky methods, and when simply asking didn't work he would do something like run up to Roxas, tap him on the shoulder, then grin and say, "Tag, you're it!" before running away. Roxas wouldn't chase him, though, and he'd come back with a frown that always made Roxas feel mean. He'd try to explain, say something like, "I can't play right now," but it never felt right and Axel still had that frown.

Later, he started coming to sit with Roxas instead. At first, it was only for a few minutes before he started fidgeting and went to see what the other kids were doing. Then his ideas grew, and he would come join Roxas with a length of twine to play birdsnest or a handful of little plastic toys, or a pair of clockwork hoppers, or once, after Zack visited them with a large box from a store in the city that was closing, a bucket of gray metal magnet blocks. They would sit on the flagstones and play, just the two of them, until the sun dipped below the horizon and it was time to go to bed.

One day, though, Seifer followed Axel to his seat on the flagstones. Axel had a scowl on his face and empty hands, and he sat next to Roxas and stared down at his toes without speaking. Seifer stood in front of him and crossed his arms, and said without a shred of kindness, "Your dad's dead."

"You jerk!" Axel growled and launched himself at the older boy, flailing with his fists and landing several ineffectual hits before Seifer grabbed him by the collar and held him still. "You didn't have to say it mean like that!"

"You're the one who didn't want to say it yourself, wuss. If you don't like my methods, tough shit."

"What," Roxas said finally, turning stunned from Seifer and his scowl and the scar across his face that Axel said was from the war he survived, to Axel, looking small and petulant and subdued, limp in Seifer's grip. "Axel?"

"You wouldn't stop coming out here." Axel's voice was quiet and he didn't look at Roxas. "You don't understand, no one lived through the night in that village unless they were in a shelter. I heard Zack say so and you know he knows what he's talking about. I didn't want to tell you but you won't stop coming out here, and Aerith says it's wrong to lie to your friends."

"That's not true," Roxas said, and his voice was calm but his insides were shaking. "He wouldn't leave me alone."

"He's not coming for you," Sefer snarled, grabbing him and hauling him off the flagstones. "Wuss. Don't you get it? We're all here because our parents got killed. All of us. Including you, so stop acting like you're so goddamn special and still have a dad to come rescue you."

Roxas had shrieked and tried to hit him, and Axel did too, and fortunately Aerith and Zack were coming up the dirt road and were able to separate the boys before any damage was done. Roxas put his hand on Zack's to stop him when Aerith led the other two back into the temple to turn their noses against opposite walls and think about what they'd done, especially Seifer who was older and should be looking after the younger kids, not fighting with them. Roxas looked at the dirt under his feet and the worn shoes Aerith had given him, and in a small, halting voice asked Zack if it was true. If his father had really died that night.

Zack knelt down in front of him, both hands on his shoulders, and Roxas jerked and ran away as fast as his legs could move before he even spoke.

* * *

One day, when the air was cooling towards fall and Roxas had decided he would speak to Axel again, he asked how the other boy knew that people used to worship the sky in this temple.

The question triggered several weeks of exploration. Most of what the children knew were the front areas of the temple, the sleeping room and what surrounded it, broken avenues of stone and walls and pillars, the entryway with silver and turquoise mosaic inlaid into the floor, and the grand sweep of grass and flagstones in front, perfect for endless games of tag and capture the flag and hide and seek.

Beyond this, though, the temple continued, huge and uncharted. Roxas was curious, and his curiosity sparked Axel's, and after some planning and enlisting the help of two other boys, they packed up canteens of water and shoulder packs of food and set out on their journey.

Hayner was the same age as Roxas, and through innumerable footrace contests had proven himself to be the fastest runner of any of the temple kids. Vivi was a year younger than them, smaller and not very surefooted and perpetually wrapped in a hat and scarf several sizes too big for him, but he was smart and had a better sense of direction than the three other boys put together. Axel was the oldest, and had the steadiest hand, so he carried the notescroll and a sharp stylus to map their progress.

Roxas carried the torchlight, and the water, and wasn't sure how much else he was really good for aside from the sheer determination to explore the entirety of this place.

Over the ensuing weeks and, ultimately, years, the group of boys discovered the mysteries of the temple. The winding hallways and the old priests' barracks, the armories and the observatory and even, once they were old enough to brave the dark confines, the catacombs that ran beneath. Axel's map was copied and recopied in an increasingly graceful hand, others joined their group and helped recover treasure or move stones and rubble that blocked their path, and once Olette was old enough to live in the temple and take an interest in the boys and their activities, her sharp eyes found more than one secret passageway that instantly renewed the interest of everyone involved.

Very early on in the adventure, however, was when they found the temple's heart, and the altar.

The room was crumbling around the edges and it was hard to tell if there had ever been a ceiling, as there wasn't enough rubble on the ground to suggest that it had fallen in. There were four pillars in various states of toppling, grass growing through the stones on the floor so thick it was almost like a meadow. On the furthest side of the room, where the wall was highest, the stones raised up a few shallow steps, and on this dais stood a crumbling altar, brown sand and plain like every other stone the temple was built with, misshapen by time and erosion.

Behind the altar, though, was something that made all four boys stop in their tracks and stare in awe.

A massive mural, taller than a grown man standing on another's shoulders and as wide as the room itself, was painted on a plaster sheet that covered the entirety of that wall. It was slightly faded, and the paint had all but washed away in one corner, and there were chips in the plaster here and there, but even so the enormity of it was breathtaking. There were symbols all around the edges that the boys couldn't hope to understand, but either side was a clear enough representation of the sky; by day on the right, by night on the left, and in the center they merged and mingled, and further towards the top of the painting the mingling resolved into outstretched arms, a smiling face, flowing hair and eyes that held the sun and clouds, the moon and the stars. Above this and along the top of the mural the sky faded into clockwork, the gears and cogs that turned the heavens from night to day and back again.

"It's the sky god," Axel said after a moment, and everyone made sounds of amazement.

"I heard that the sky cracked because somebody killed him," Hayner said as they all moved closer, crowding around the alter and peering over it.

"Don't be stupid, you can't kill a god." Axel turned his nose up flippantly, exchanging a glare with Hayner, because the two got along by never getting along. "_I_ heard that an army of brigands cracked the sky to try and stop the clockwork, so it would always be nighttime. Because it's easier to pillage stuff at night." He nodded decisively and Hayner rolled his eyes.

Vivi's voice was quiet but strong, and captured their attention for a long minute. "I heard that the sky god was betrayed by a mortal, and cracked it open himself in grief."

"Is that true?" Roxas breathed after a moment of silence.

"I don't know. Maybe." Vivi cocked his head at him. "Haven't you heard any stories, Roxas?"

He shrugged his shoulders, thought back to the old fishing boat and the sound of waves and the blanket forts in the living room, thought through all the old stories his father had told him in soft, musical tones, but there was barely a mention of the sky god in any of them. "I know that people used to love him," he said finally, looking down from the mural to the grass growing between the stones. "But they don't anymore."

That night they returned to the sleeping room silently, and Roxas sat in the corner and watched the other kids play around the softly glowing fire cage. After a while, just as the night was growing dark and he should have been more frightened of venturing away from the light, he dug the torchlight out of his shoulder pack and crept away.

He almost lost himself among the crumbling corridors in the dark, and by the time he reached the altar room his knees were trembling in fear that he'd never find his way back and would be trapped alone in the dark until morning. The altar was lit, however, old iron torches set into the floor still drawing from a mana source deep below the stones, lighting the mural with a bright yellow glow.

It was eerie there in the dark of night, with the stars and the moon and the silver edges of the crack overhead, watching the glowing altar of a god who should have been long dead, and his temple along with him.

Roxas was trembling, and was still trembling when he dropped his torchlight, picked up a stone and flung it at the painting. It bounced away harmlessly, as though some meager protection had been magicked into the plaster. Roxas choked on a sob, grabbed for another pebble and flung it again, teeth set in anger.

"This is all your fault!"

Cool hands caught his wrists, halted the next rock he had prepared to throw and lowered it, and then soft warmth was enveloping him, Aerith's arms around his back, the smell of flowers surrounding him. "Roxas, what in the blessed names of the Seven are you doing?"

"It's h-his fault," he choked out, even though out loud his reasoning sounded silly and childish. "He broke the sky and let the Shadows in and that's why my dad died."

"Roxas." Aerith sighed against his hair, and she rocked back and forth while he pressed his face against her shoulder and tried to stifle the sobs hitching in his chest. "The gods are not at fault for all that goes wrong. They do their best to help and guide us but they can't make everything right, and they can't make our lives perfect and happy."

"But it has to be someone's fault. Right?" He sniffled, tried to find some logic in what she was saying, child's mind fumbling on the abstracts. "Who did it? Who made the crack?"

"That is a mystery that only the high priestesses of Luma know." Aerith pushed him back gently, wiped the tears off his cheeks with her thumbs and settled his chin in her cupped palms, her smile reassuring. "But there is one thing I know for sure; I know that Sky didn't intend any of this. However it happened, it was an accident."

"Then why does everyone hate him now?"

"Because they're afraid." She ruffled his hair fondly and her eyes were wide and knowing. "And because they need someone to blame. Are you going to be like that, too?"

The last thing his father had told him was not to be afraid. Roxas squared his shoulders. "No."

* * *

At first, winter was fun--there were snow forts and snowball fights and snowmen and Aerith made them hot chocolate whenever she visited. Zack brought a mana generator and strung Candlemas lights all around the parts of the temple where they played, and introduced them to his friends who were guards for other shrines in the city. Two of them were always there at night by the heavy cloth covering the doors to the sleeping room, keeping the fire cage fueled and hot and sitting propped against the stones, never sleeping.

After a while, though, the novelty wore off. It was cold, and it seemed after a while that Roxas could never get warm no matter how long he sat in front of the fire cage, no matter how deeply he crawled under the pile of blankets in the corner that he and Axel shared, no matter how close and tight he curled up with his best friend. He still shivered, and he still woke in the middle of the night shivering. He played as hard as he could during the day because it warmed his muscles for a time, but the cold was perpetual and endless and there were times when he thought that spring would never come.

As the winter wore on some of the kids started to get sick. Roxas had a cold for a while, and stayed in the pile of blankets, shifted as close to the cage as Zack deemed safe, and slept until it passed. Aerith took more of the younger and sicker children back to the shrine with her and he overheard her murmuring to one of Zack's friends one evening that she had long since run out of beds, and there were children sleeping in the prayer hall, and why couldn't the people of this town see far enough past their own ignorant, greedy noses to take in an orphan or two out of the cold, anyway?

One night Roxas was jerked awake by a long, ominous howl. He twisted under the blankets just enough to see Zack shooting to his feet and slipping out the cloth-covered door, and he barely saw the edges of him grabbing up a mana rifle that had been propped outside.

Some of the younger children and the girls were crying. Axel's hand squirmed under the blankets, fingers wrapping tight around his wrist. "It's okay," he said, although his hand was the one shaking.

A few minutes later, Zack ducked back inside and smiled down at them, assuring them it was okay and to go back to sleep. Axel snuggled down under the blankets until his breath fluttered against Roxas's neck and all that could be seen of him was a red shock of spiky hair above the covers. He fell asleep first, because Roxas was watching how Zack kept pulling the blankets aside to peer out the door at the snowy landscape, still clutching the rifle.

* * *

When the snow began to melt and the chill in the air dwindled and Roxas began to feel hope for being warm again, a strange phenomenon occurred.

He was playing sticks in the grand entryway of the temple with Hayner early in the morning, a week or two after White Feast, when he saw the white truck rumbling up along the dirt road. It moved fast, kicking up mud in its wake and ground to a halt in front of the flagstones, and two men in black coats climbed out of it. Roxas had never seen a vehicle approach the temple before, and had certainly never seen any people aside from Aerith and Zack and the other guards approach the temple at all.

One of the men came down along the path towards the entryway where Roxas and Hayner were playing, and his cold eyes glanced over them before dismissing them as unnecessary. He was tall and had a frightening scowl, long ice-blue hair and a scar crossing over his face like a brand. Hayner shrank back against the wall, but Roxas just stared until the man stopped finally, several paces away, looking over and around the temple with that same scowling, disinterested ferocity.

Then he opened his mouth and bellowed, "If you are ten years of age, come forward!"

Seifer appeared from the side yard, approaching the man with his own scowl, some of his cronies trailing in his wake. "Hey! Aerith said you weren't allowed here anymore."

"The priestess has no jurisdiction over this place," the man growled at him, then continued bellowing as children poked their heads out of doorways and over the walls, curious by the commotion. "Anyone who turned ten in the last year, come forward to apply for University!"

Despite Seifer's protests, a few of the temple kids began to trickle out, waved over closer to the truck by another man with blond hair and a pinched face and made to stand in a row. Roxas frowned at this and leaned closer to Hayner, still hunched by the wall. "What's going on?"

"They come every year and round up the ten-year-olds," Hayner muttered, shifting on his feet and watching the progress outside. "They run some kind of scanex thing over you and then decide if they want to take you to the University or not. Seifer got scanned last year, they almost dragged him off but Aerith showed up at the last minute and put a stop to that. She was _pissed_, I'm surprised they dared to show their faces again."

"University is a good thing though, isn't it?" Roxas looked out to the row of boys and girls standing just beyond the flagstones, the blond man holding some kind of tech device out in front of each child, one by one. "You can become a Scholar there, learn how to wield an Art. Wouldn't that be cool?"

"It might be." Hayner shrugged against the wall, hands stuffing in his pockets against the cold. "You'd get a warm bed to sleep in, too, and plenty of food. Thing is," he sighed, pushing away finally and kicking at the floor, "once you leave here and go to Nocturne University, nobody ever sees you again. Come on, let's go find Axel."

Roxas cast one last look out at the men in black coats and the white truck and the row of children, saw the blond man pick one out, tug him by the shoulder and push him back towards the rear of the truck to climb inside. He frowned, and then turned to run after Hayner, resolved not to worry about it as it would be years before he or any of his friends were ten years old.

A few hours later Aerith arrived with a motor cart full of food and a bag of little red candies in her pocket, and Seifer told her what happened. He listed the names of the children who had been taken away in the white truck.

That was the first time Roxas ever saw her cry.

* * *

One night in the summer when it was so hot and sticky that Roxas wondered how he had ever been too cold to sleep, the entire temple trembled and shuddered beneath them, a rumble like thunder in the distance and a blazing light in the sky.

"Mana bomb," Axel said in his ear, because kids were waking up all around them and talking and yelling and crying. "Did you see that light? I think that's the linen district, in the city. There's another war."

They sat and watched the bombs go off in fear-struck awe, and after bare minutes Zack and the guards arrived, Aerith hurrying into the sleeping room first and the smallest, most frightened children ran to cling to her skirts and accept her comfort. The guards had a cart loaded with mana generators and huge black floodlights, and quickly set them up on the roof all around the sleeping room, yelling back and forth to make sure there were no gaps. Aerith was counting heads, carefully assuring that every one of her orphans was there in the room.

"They're afraid the perimeter is going to go out," Axel whispered.

Roxas pressed his palm against Axel's and curled their fingers together.

They fell asleep at some point after the noises stopped, sitting against the wall, Roxas's head resting on Axel's shoulder and Axel's head against Roxas's. Aerith woke them together when the sun was shining golden through the doors and gaps in the stones, and said, "Would you boys like to come and help me?"

* * *

Roxas didn't think he'd ever been in the linen district of Nocturne, but the smoking ruins of it reminded him of picking barefoot through the remains of his fishing village, Axel covering his eyes when they passed a dead body. He had shoes this time, and he knew to avert his eyes, and Axel was still hovering close by his side.

Seifer had the firewedge and found a shelter near the one building that was still mostly standing, sturdy brick with a collapsing roof, and they left him to deal with that. Hayner and Olette stayed with Aerith, and when they saw them next Aerith was kneeling in front of a pudgy little boy with black hair, speaking to him softly, the two children flanking him in silent support. Olette had Roxas's old teddy bear under her arm, and he wondered if she had brought it to pass along the comfort to someone else.

He walked with Axel, both of them with eyes and ears wide, watching and listening for any signs of life, any shelters or cupboards or cubbyholes where another kid might be hiding. Until finally, when they had gone so far through the district that he could hear the sound of waves, smell salt on the air and see glimpses of blue between charred walls and crumbling stone, they turned a corner and a boy was just... standing there.

Silver hair and wide eyes the color of shallow seawater meant that the boy was a Replican, the smallest one Roxas had ever seen, barely older than Axel, maybe, and yet still undoubtedly identical to all the others. He stood and stared straight ahead, barefoot, the edges of his pants singed and blackened, bloody scrapes on both of his elbows and a blank, lost expression on his face. He was staring across the cobbled avenue to a collapsed house, shifted rubble denoting where the boy had climbed out only to stand there and stare at it.

Roxas squared his shoulders and approached slowly, knowing only that he wanted to offer someone the same friendship and salvation that Axel had offered him, only a year ago. "Hi," he said cautiously, trying to remember the words the redhead had used--Axel himself hovering back and letting him do the talking. "Are you hurt?" He studied the Replican more closely, noting that he seemed unharmed other than the scrapes. "Do you... want to come with us?"

The boy turned his head slowly, eyes blinking as he took in Roxas's presence, something vacant in the look and the way his mouth dropped open. "My masters are dead."

Roxas swallowed and nodded a little, hands pushing in his pockets and gaze darting down to the ground for a moment. "Yeah."

"They covered me with their bodies," the Replican continued in a voice somewhere between awe and pained disbelief. "Why would they do that? They should have saved themselves. I'm just a clone."

"They... must have cared about you. Very much," Roxas ventured and tried not to remember the tears in his father's eyes, pushing the door to the bomb shelter closed. "What's your name?"

"J-247."

"You don't have a name?"

The Replican moved a little, shoulders almost but not quite shrugging. He turned away from Roxas to stare at the house and the rubble he'd crawled out of again. "What do I do now? I don't know what to do without my masters. There's no one to give me orders."

"Well, you can come back to the temple with us. Then at least you'd have food and a place to stay until you figure out what to do." Roxas tried smiling, just a little, even though his heart was aching and he wanted nothing more than to get out of this place, as soon and as fast as possible. He wanted the Replican boy to come with them, though--he was certain, down in his gut, that after a few weeks at the temple with the other children, that haunted look would leave his face. He held a hand out, palm open and waiting. "Want to?"

Aqua eyes slid over to regard him again, then down to the entreating hand. Finally, like clockwork left too long to rust, the Replican moved, lifted his own hand just enough to rest on Roxas's. "Okay."

* * *

For the first week or two, the little Replican spent most of his time wandering listless among the flagstones or sitting in a corner of the sleeping quarters, vague and directionless, staring at nothing. One day, Roxas shoved a daypack into his hands and told him, firm and determined, that they needed someone to carry the food and help move rocks.

It was like throwing a switch, the way the clone proceeded to discover his own usefulness. A month later he was preparing all their meals from the little pantry with the boxstove across the crumbling halls from the sleeping room, cleaning all their living areas and airing out the bedding, organizing their stores of fuel cores and the boxes of toys in the sleeping room's corners. And when it was time to explore, he was following at Roxas's heels, pack on his back and a daring grin on his face.

Summer and fall meant there were weeks and weeks spent in dedication to mapping the temple. Hayner had discovered the priests' barracks, a massive set of halls full of rubble and treasure. They worked through it systematically, splitting up and poking through rooms until someone called out in excitement and they all raced to help with whatever had been discovered. Vivi unearthed a polished mirror shield underneath a crushed bed, a few spiderwebbed cracks on the surface but still impressive. Axel and Hayner righted a toppled armoire full of moth-eaten robes and little colored glass bottles. And one day, while waving and sneezing at the dust billowing up from the door he and J forced open, Roxas caught a glint of silver from the corner of his eye.

From down in a corner of the room, almost buried under dust and pebbles and old leaves, Roxas plucked a silver chain with a silver pendant. A star with four sharp points.

In the cool evenings Roxas grabbed a torchlight and scrambled off to the mural room in the fading light and spent the pink of sunset with his fingers trailing around the plaster's edge, along the symbols painted there in silvery-white. Hundreds of stars, each with their own shape and anywhere from three to twenty points, each one marked out to painstaking perfection all around the edge. Roxas had made his way from one side to the other, and was beginning to fear that the one that matched his pendant would be along the high upper edge where he could barely see from his tiptoes standing on top of the altar. But then, just at the line where the mural showed the horizon at daylight, reds and yellows mingling bright, he found it. Four knife-like points, nearly the exact same size and shape as the silver pressed to his palm. He held the pendant up alongside the symbol, grinning broadly, and heard the crunch of footsteps behind him.

"What are you up to now?" Aerith asked, shawl around her shoulders because the days were cooling towards winter, and Roxas turned his grin to her, holding the pendant up triumphantly.

"You see what I found?"

"Ah." She knelt beside him, examining the symbol painted on the plaster and taking the pendant in her hand, chain trailing over her fingers. "It's a star of destiny. The light that guides your heart along the path of life." She smiled, taking his hand when his eyes lit with interest, lifted him up to sit on the alter with a grunt, laughing, and sat beside him. "Sky represented the wisdom of light and darkness for the masses. For the people. You know that Luma is the patron goddess, but Sky was the one turning the wheel, the clockwork of the heavens, bringing the passage of night and day. There was a time when no one feared the darkness, when we spent the nights looking up to the stars, finding the paths there that lead to destiny. The priests, and the devotees, would wear these." She held the necklace up by the chain, fingers on both ends. "I wish I could tell you which star it represented in the sky, but the old books and charts have been lost for decades."

Roxas poked at the dangling pendant, watching how it caught the red glow of sunset and torchlight as it swung. "Could it be my destiny?"

"Perhaps." Aerith's smile was soft, fond, then grew mischievous and she hopped up from the altar, crept around behind him and lowered the pendant around his neck, fastening it at the back. It was heavy, strangely warm against his chest, and once settled there Aerith took both his hands, held them out to the side, palms beneath his.

"Behold, Sky, this child of heaven," she whispered, light but honest laughter above his head, her cheek pressed against his hair. "Accept now his devotion, guide his feet along the path of fate, and may the light of his star shine forever bright."

"Does that mean I'm a priest?" Roxas asked, turning his head and tilting it back to look up at her.

"No," she said, "just that you are the master of your destiny."

* * *

Roxas only turned eight years old that year, but he took his new status as a devotee very seriously. Axel only seemed vaguely annoyed by it, appearing in the alter room to lounge against a pillar, sighing audibly until Roxas figured he'd done enough praying to a dead god for one day. They'd broken open the catacombs, although only Roxas, Axel, Hayner and J dared to venture inside, the others waiting at the dusty, cobwebbed mouth and calling out to them to assure they hadn't been eaten by ghosts.

One morning the day after Laurelmas, Roxas uncrossed his legs to let them dangle off the side of the altar and opened his eyes to discover Axel hovering at his side, leaned back against the stone, arms folded and staring intently at the mural. There was a candy stick in his mouth, and Olette had braided cheap paper ribbons into his hair, both leftovers from the holiday celebration. She had grown to the age where she was choosing a new boy each week that she would handfast with on her sixteenth birthday, chasing him down in the courtyard and sitting on him while she tied red strings around the wrong fingers. Roxas had already endured this twice and figured it was about time Axel got some attention.

"So," he muttered, unfolding his arms and tugging a red thread taut between his hands, a strange, pensive expression on his face, "do you figure you'll be a priest when you grow up?"

Roxas shrugged, arms on his knees, letting the star thump back into place on his chest. "I don't know. I'd rather do something more exciting, like working with Zack and his friends. Maybe I'll take a caravan to Luma and join the Holy Guard. That'd be pretty cool, right?" He licked his lips, watched how Axel still looked tense and unhappy, frowning. "Why? What do you want to do when you grow up?"

When Axel spoke, it was loud and abrupt, cutting like a blade. "I'm gonna be ten next year." Green eyes darted to the side, regarding Roxas for an instant before returning to his meditation on the plaster mural. "When the men in the white truck come, maybe I'll go with them."

For a few long minutes, Roxas just stared at him, throat swelling and uncertain whether he wanted to roar in anger or curl up on the alter and cry. "Why would you do that?" he asked finally, struggling to keep his voice hard and even. "Are you that mad at me for praying all the time?"

"Of course not!" Axel's head jerked to the side, confused for a moment until his normal, easy smile spread across his face and Roxas let out a breath of relief. "I want to be a Scholar. That'd be pretty exciting, right?"

"But they don't take everyone who applies." Roxas wasn't sure why he was trying to discourage his friend, because it did sound exciting, but something in the pit of his stomach felt sick. "And Hayner said that no one ever sees the kids they take away ever again."

"Yeah, I guess." Axel hung his head, shrugging, then pretended to stretch his neck to cover the sullen actions. "It doesn't have to be Nocturne University. We could go somewhere else. Another city."

"We?" Roxas paused, biting his lower lip. "All of us?"

Axel's long silence was unsettling, the way he shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the ground too brooding and unlike him for Roxas's comfort. "I guess."

"Promise me you won't go apply when the white truck comes."

"I'll do better." Axel turned abruptly, picked up Roxas's left hand and uncurled it from the tight fist he was making. The red thread was a little crushed, and Axel had never been good at tying bows, but at least he tied it around the right finger. "There." He shoved away from the alter abruptly, hands digging into his pockets as he walked away towards the path that lead back to the sleeping room, muttering. "Why'd I wanna handfast some girl anyway."

Roxas curled and uncurled his fist, feeling how the string tightened around his finger, how he could feel his pulse beneath it. "You didn't promise," he called, leaning forward to watch Axel's retreat.

"Don't worry about it," his best friend called back over his shoulder. "They'd never take me, anyway."

* * *

Roxas was sitting in exactly the same spot two weeks after White Feast the year that Axel turned ten. The only real difference, he thought when Vivi appeared in front of him, panting and gripping the cuff of his denims, was that there wasn't a red string marking the pulse on his ring finger.

"The men from the University are here," Vivi gasped out between breaths, fingers slipping from the fabric. "And--

But Roxas never heard whatever else he was going to say, because Vivi's breath was still hanging in the air the instant he was up and running. An image of exactly what was happening playing in vivid color, over and over in his mind.

Axel waiting in line.

Axel with his arms out at his sides while the blond man in the black robes waved the scanex over his head, his heart, back and forth until it buzzed like an angry bee.

Axel with calloused hands on his shoulders, being shoved into the back of the truck.

Roxas ran, breath screaming in his lungs, stubbing his toes on outcroppings of rock but not pausing enough to feel the pain, nearly toppling Pence as he passed but not pausing enough to apologize. Not even pausing when he finally pounded down the mosaic foyer and broke into the courtyard, the scene rising in front of him a nightmare made real.

"AXEL!"

"Put him in the truck," the blond man said, and the man with the scar on his face grabbed Axel by the arms just as he seemed to realize what was happening, green eyes wide and terrified and staring at Roxas.

"NO! NO! LET HIM GO, LET HIM GO!"

It was like the world had gone silent, limbs flailing, watching Axel like the clockwork of time had slowed to a crawl, struggling against the man with the scar on his face, uselessly trying to break free. Roxas felt himself off the ground, held back by the blond man, holding him perfectly still as though his fists and kicks were as ineffectual as the beat of a fly's wings.

They were only children.

He remembered being flung to the ground like a rag doll, stunned for an instant before he could scramble back to his feet, race towards the back doors of the truck just before they slammed closed, Axel still struggling and disappearing behind them, eyes wide, hands reaching, mouth screaming around his name. He remembered beating his fists against the sheet metal siding just before the truck kicked to life and sped away, spitting dust and spite back at him. He remembered chasing after it until his legs gave out and his throat was hoarse, remembered collapsing in the dirt and sobbing in silence because his voice had stopped working, fists beating the dust until the heels of his hands bled, until the sun began to set and he couldn't feel the cold anymore.

Axel was gone.

* * *

It was Seifer who came to find him when he didn't come back, dropping to sit silently on the road next to where Roxas collapsed, chewing on a strand of sweetgrass until he finally moved, pushing himself up to all fours first, then back to sit on his heels. The star of destiny thumped into place against his chest, and all he wanted was to rip it off and throw it away. Did the gods abandon everyone like this?

"Are you gonna come back," Seifer asked, pulling the sweetgrass out of his mouth, staring down the road and not at Roxas at all, "or are you gonna wuss out and freeze to death here?"

The last thing his father had told him was not to be afraid.

"I'm going to find him," Roxas said. "I'm going to find him, and I'm going to bring him back."


	8. Nightfall, Part One

Okay, so this chapter is ridiculously short, and I'm still not happy with the scene in the middle, but at this point I think we might as well run with it or I'll be stuck here for three months again. So, onward with the main plot!

* * *

**Nightfall, Part One**

Roxas had cursed, at first, the desert, the wind, the sand, the road, the ramshackle little village and the shadow of the plateau and the mana pool that created the prime location for it to begin with. He followed that up by cursing the gods, as many as he could think of, the ones who lived and the ones who were dead, the Seven in particular because they were in charge of all this, and when that avenue of spite ran out, he started in on his ancestors. The ones he knew about, first, and the ones he didn't, and the ones he made up just to get in a few more curses.

And finally, once all other options were exhausted, he cursed himself, mostly, and Naminé just a little bit, and Kairi, Kairi, Kairi, whether the girl really deserved it or not.

This was not part of the plan. It was not part of the plan to face down a damn persistent Truthsayer and perform a complicated internal dance to keep him from prodding too far past any of Roxas's shields. It was not part of the plan to invite said Truthsayer and his pissy Replican--who had far, _far_ too much opinion and free will for a normal clone--to live in his truck for the next four or five thousand miles or however long it took them to get to Eden.

It was not part of the plan for more people to get involved.

"You know," the voice at his side intoned, as expected, clearly on the verge of causing him further dismay, "whenever he wanted to be a particular annoyance, Axel used to come and sit in a corner of the lab and expound upon your virtues."

"You don't say," Roxas hissed through his teeth, because in the daylight Zexion was barely a waver of heat in the air beside him, incorporeal as the ghost he was. The last thing Roxas needed while in the middle of a town where a shaky show of trust was all that was keeping his own damn truck in his possession was to be seen walking down the street talking to himself.

"He said a number of things that I have since taken great pains to block from my memory, but I do recall him once saying something comparatively bearable about you being cute when you sulk."

Roxas nodded politely as a pair of refugee women passed on the street, heading in the opposite direction, one with a box full of spent fuel cores and the other with a pair of empty water tanks, the both of them chattering animatedly as they walked and barely noticing Roxas. Once he was past and away he grit his teeth and hissed, "I fucking hate you."

Zexion's presence wavered in the air beside him, and he supposed that was a disembodied heart's equivalent of laughter. "And that is precisely why I'm still here, Roxas."

"To make my life miserable?"

"I have to do something to entertain myself while I wait for you to die, seems how you're not interested in just getting on with it. There are various forms of suicide that I would find quite satisfactory to fulfill our contract, but as you insist on living I'm afraid you'll simply have to endure my presence." Zexion solidified just a slight bit more in the shadows, which Roxas was moving into now as he veered south, towards the caravan parked at the village outskirts. "Speaking of imminent death, how _did_ you figure out that the boy was the invalid? I thought it was harder to read a Truthsayer than that."

"It was right front and center on the Replican's heart. It's always easy to read clones, they have so few emotions, and they're never complicated." The path they were on turned and ran almost directly alongside the plateau wall, deserted and flanked by the aluminum backs of houses and things that passed for houses. Roxas shrugged in the cooler air and spoke somewhat more freely, eyes darting around through the dust and the scrap. "Did you have a look around, then?"

"I did."

"Any sign of our friends?"

"Not a whisper. Not even another Replican aside from your new acquaintance." Zexion was an outline against the stone on his left, he could almost make out the fall of his hair and the shape of his coat, hands shoved into pockets and walking as though he were still alive and needed to move his feet to get around. "If I were you, though, I would anticipate them coming up from behind, and soon."

"I've been anticipating that since I left." Hands in his pockets, Roxas increased the pace slightly and nodded towards his destination, the circle of V and Z-class trucks in a cautious ring, laundry strung between them flapping in the light desert breeze. "Did you check the caravan?"

"I can." Zexion looked at him sideways, eyebrows up and questioning, then finally shrugged and his form disintegrated as he moved away. Roxas could see his heart as a little blue ball of flame drifting along like a cottony dandry seed on the wind, but to anyone else he would be air, maybe a flicker of light in their peripheral vision. Soon even that had disappeared behind a truck, pushing the limits of how far away the thread that tied him to Roxas would allow him to venture.

Roxas arrived at the broad sweep of dust and human clutter a moment later, sidestepping to follow the perimeter of trucks, the noise and smells of the late day, dinner cooking and supplies being packed away for the night, singing in one corner where a handful of youths must have found themselves a barrel of morrelwine. There were children playing tag between the tires of the bigger trucks, a dark-skinned boy and a little girl with bouncing curls stumbling with laughter and scrambling away from an equally tiny Replican. The clone nearly collided with Roxas, skidding to a halt and ducking under his arm, barely pausing long enough for a breathless apology before taking off after his playmates. Roxas turned to watch them disappear under a Z-class, thinking about a flagstone courtyard for a moment before drawing himself straight and continuing on.

He could have slipped through the gaps between or underneath the trucks as easily as the children, but that was impolite. It was tradition and decorum for the caravan's leader to park with his back door facing out, the marked entry and greeting area for visitors. Roxas found it soon enough, the end of the largest truck of the bunch jutting out like a thumb, the edge of the open back door almost as high as Roxas's head. He climbed up on the stool sat at the bottom for just this purpose, peering inside and finding two little boys with candy sticks in their mouths, clockwork toy hoppers in their hands and blinking at him with huge eyes.

Roxas had never been that great with kids, and he couldn't imagine why there were so many in this town, anyway. It was all starting to feel too familiar, eerily familiar. He waved a little, trying to appear as nonthreatening as possible, and said, "I'm looking for a man named Rai."

"We'll get him!" one of them cried, grabbed the other and they scurried off deeper into the truck. For a moment, Roxas blinked at the place they had been sitting, and thought about flagstones again.

A moment later a darkly tanned face peered out the back door, grinned down at him and waved in a shooing gesture. "Step back."

A few kicks and creaks of metal and a set of rickety steps lowered to the ground, and a curiously small bulk of a man climbed down them, grinned again and shook his hand so hard Roxas thought his teeth might fall out. "Afternoon, I'm Rai. What can I do for you?"

"I just--" Roxas caught himself, paused, because back up in the doorway the two little boys were peering out, joined by three little girls and two older boys. He frowned just slightly, eyebrows drawing together. "Are all the kids around here from this caravan?"

"That's right. Orphans all." The grin never left Rai's face, turning up to the children in the truck and then back to Roxas. "We started in Nocturne and picked them up as we went along. The temples have been doing their best to look after the kids in their cities, you know, but the temple network has been falling apart and shutting down everywhere. It's not safe and they don't have the resources to keep going, you know? So we're taking them east. A better life, food, and a roof over their heads, and maybe some of these kids will have a future." He beamed up at the doorway again then frowned as he finally resettled on Roxas. "Why, did one of them give you some trouble?"

Roxas started and shook his head. "No, nothing like that. I just arrived here a few hours ago. I passed a T-2400 yesterday and they asked me to pass a message along to a caravan led by Rai."

"What--Hayner's truck?" The guy visibly brightened and then barked a laugh, hands clapping together in one deafening smack. "Hayner's alive! Hey!" He climbed halfway up the steps again, leaning as far into the truck as he could. "Seifer! You hear that? The brat's alive!"

"WHAT." The voice echoed within the truck's metal confines, growing in strength as it approached the door. "Fucker's not going to be alive much longer when I get my hands on him. How far out?"

"Just a day, it sounds like. He could be here tomorrow."

Roxas had already sidled away, turned his back and was tiptoeing towards the nearest bend in the ring of trucks. If he was quick enough, lucky enough, maybe he could disappear while the two were still talking. Vanish into thin air without notice.

"Well, that little shit better be wearing blast armor when he rolls in, because I'm gonna beat him to a bloody fucking pulp for--" The voice came to a sudden halt, trailing off into silence, and that might as well have been a death sentence. "Roxas?"

Seifer didn't have to recognize him by his height and build and hair and his posture when he walked, but when Roxas turned around he recognized the other boy in the exact same way. Skin too pale to be anything but a Westerner, sharp eyes, close-cropped hair and just the way he held himself, there in the truck's doorway, one hand closed around the upper frame--it was quintessentially him.

Roxas let out a breath, hands instinctively going to his pockets. "Hey."

"Holy _shit_."

He stood in the dust and waited, because Seifer was going to climb down the steps and Seifer was going to walk over to him and Seifer was going to curse at him and ask questions, and there was really nothing he could do about it, now.

"Where the fuck have you been?" The boy threw his arms out to the side, let them flop back in place and stopped just a bare span of space from Roxas, held back by the impassive expression on his face. "We waited for you to come back, dipshit. Hayner waited, he was fucking positive they couldn't hold you up in there and you were gonna come back with Axel, any day."

Roxas shrugged, slowly, looking him in the eyes without really giving anything. "Yeah, well. It wasn't that easy."

"Whatever, man. What did he say? You're the one who brought the message, right?" A mocking grin turned up the side of Seifer's mouth, all teeth. "I wanna know what that chickenshit said when he realized who he was talking to."

"I didn't tell him." Roxas set his jaw, straightened his back, not that Seifer would care one way or another. He didn't do 'intimidated'. "And neither should you. In fact, it's best you forget this ever happened."

For a long moment, Seifer just stared, the closest he ever got to expressing incredulity. Then his face twisted into a scowl. "What--what the _fuck_, man. Do you know who's in there?" Seifer gestured to the ring of trucks with one finger pointed like a knife. "Aerith. And Zack, making dinner for fifty goddamn orphan kids. You're telling me you don't want me to tell her? That you're not going to go in there and hug the woman who raised you and eat her food so she can know that at least _one_ of her kids who went into that place came out of it alive?"

Roxas swallowed hard, still meeting his eyes, and said, "Sorry," once, before turning and walking away.

Seifer didn't give up that easy, though, and he didn't expect it.

"You're telling me I'm supposed to _not_ tell that little chickenshit Hayner who sat on the flagstones in the cold all night for six months waiting for you to come back that his best friend passed him in the middle of the desert without saying a word? You're telling me I have to keep my mouth shut and pretend I never saw your sorry ass?"

Roxas paused, shoulders going tense, and turned his head to one side, just enough that he could see Seifer from the corner of his eyes. "If you want to protect all of us," he said, voice hard and flat and cold, "then yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you."

"Fuck." Seifer spat the oath at the sky, where the crack split it miles and miles above them. Roxas kept walking. "We're your family, asshole! What the fuck did the University do to you? Roxas!"

He kept walking, back around the ring towards the dusty little road along the plateau wall, until Seifer's voice faded and disappeared behind him. Until the little wisp that was Zexion's soul floated back to his side, gradually fading back into form. There was silence for a while, Roxas walking, Zexion pretending to walk.

Then, finally, "Do you think he's going to keep quiet?"

"Doesn't really matter, ultimately." Roxas shrugged, all the fight and tension disappearing from his body in one slow drain. "They have to know I'm in the desert by now, and they have to have guessed where I'm going. It's just a matter of keeping ahead of them; that's the whole point of being the bait."

"Still, discretion is vital, isn't it? You could have sent Kairi to deliver the message."

"Kairi's done enough talking for one day." Roxas shrugged the discussion off like unwanted clothing, too hot even in the cooling day. "What did you see?"

"More children than I have ever seen in one place in my entire life." Zexion smirked, form quivering the way it did when he was amused. "There were three clones, two young and one full-grown. The caravan most likely left Rhohadam long before you staged your little coup, but even so I would not underestimate the Replican network."

"That's exactly the problem." Roxas rubbed one hand back through his hair, turning as the road curved away from the plateau wall and back into town. "I have a distinct suspicion who Sora's attendant is going to be."

* * *

It had been weeks, probably, since he last watched the sky fade to night through a window without it being the windshield of his truck, without the fade including the darkness springing to life with glowing eyes and long, searching fingers. Tonight, though, the window was open to let in the cool breeze, gauzy white curtains shifting with it, and he watched the silver glow of moonlight around the frame, watched the stars come out one by one, and wondered when he'd last watched the night sky, and not the ground, where the danger was. Wondered if that was why the priests stopped watching the sky, why the maps of the heavens were lost.

If he thought about it, it was really quite beautiful. He couldn't see the crack through the window, just the velvet-dark of the sky and the white sparkle of stars and the glow of the village's floodlight perimeter from below. Roxas wasn't tired, not in the least, despite how exhausting the day had been, and so he lay on his back in the narrow little bed on the third floor of Tifa's makeshift hotel. Kairi was asleep in the next room; she was asleep and he wasn't driving, for once, which made it easier to do some maintenance and housecleaning, checking the emotions flitting around her heart and tugging the veils straight before retreating back into himself. Staring out the window, now, one hand resting palm-up on the pillow next to his head, fingers curling in the empty air.

If he closed his eyes and concentrated hard enough, he could almost feel hair between his fingers, the warm weight of a body lying alongside him. If he closed his eyes and concentrated _too_ hard, though, he'd wake up nestled deep in Axel's heart, and despite how desperately he might want to do just that, it was too risky. There was no telling where Axel was or who he might be with; putting him in a heart trance for the sake of a cuddle was tantamount to blowing their cover. Dammit.

He started to doze just a bit, eyes still mostly open but unfocused, mind drifting in a precursor to proper sleep. He tried to dream, once in a while, of the end of all of this, but it never quite worked. Even his imagination was blurry and indistinct, with particular people missing, usually himself. Roxas's eyes fluttered just as a thump and a scrape jolted him fully awake. He snapped upright, jerked back against the wall--and in instant and unforgiving retaliation, the room lit up as bright as the desert at noon.

Roxas pressed back against the wall, breath caught behind his teeth, willing his racing pulse to slow. His eyes stung in the sudden light and he blinked through forming tears to see the intruder. The room resolved eventually, painfully, into a blob of color at the door, a hand waving and a voice pleading, "Woah, tone it down! I didn't mean to scare you!"

He exhaled, slowly, relaxing a bit against the wall, and let the light dim to a more bearable, ambient yellow. Sora lowered his arm from in front of his face, blinking spots from his eyes before he straightened, grinning in a way that was half apologetic and half nothing of the sort.

"Sorry," Roxas murmured after a moment, when the fear had passed.

"Nah, a few weeks out in the desert will do that to a guy." Sora's hand settled on the doorknob, halfway between venturing further into the room and backing out of it, hovering uncertainly instead. "I've never seen photology in action, though, that was pretty cool."

Roxas was in the same state--he thought about moving to the edge of the bed, sitting less defensively. Standing, even, but he could feel the Truthsayer prodding at him already, like little fingers brushing aside the thoughts on the surface of his heart, trying to see inside. He stayed where he was, shifting to rest his arms on his knees. "You scared me just so you could see my Art?"

Sora laughed softly and shook his head, turned a bit in the doorway and the moonlight shifted over him, turned him into something ethereal for a split second. He was back in the blast armor, mostly, helmet in one hand, and there was a sword strapped on his back--long and thin and encased in lovingly decorated wood, the Eastern style of blade with a single edge. "Not that specifically, it was just an added bonus." A shrug, and he was just a boy again, smiling in Roxas's artificial light. "I came to tell you that they're loading your truck with supplies, and we'll be ready to leave first thing in the morning. Since we're both in a hurry and all."

He was turning to leave when Roxas stopped him with a hint of urgency in his voice, repressing the mysterious urge to jump up and grab him to keep him from leaving. Roxas grit his teeth and remained where he was, mentally scrabbling and flailing at the shields protecting Sora's heart from view. This was going to be their dance, he figured; both of them trying to see through to the other and constantly failing. "Sora."

Sora's eyes were wide and blue in the combined light of the moon through the window and the fading light of Roxas's Art. He didn't say anything, mouth open but paused, and that inexplicable tug in Roxas's gut might have pulled him out of bed and all the way across the room if he hadn't immediately clamped down on it. He looked away instead, off into a corner where there was nothing of interest. He cleared his throat, and figured the meaning was clear enough. "What is it?"

_What is it, this disease that you're supposedly dying of, and yet you stand here in perfect health, about to go out and patrol the perimeter of your little desert village? What are you hiding?_

Sora just smiled, in his peripheral vision, gave a little hum like a laugh. "See you at the barricade, Roxas. Bright and early."

_You keep your secrets,_ the smile and the hum and the closing door said quite plainly into the silence, _and I will keep mine._

_

* * *

  
_

Kairi woke him from a fitful sleep in the morning, in the small hours of dawn when the light was still gray and uncertain. She hovered in his doorway, wrapped in the state of preternatural calm that she existed in, and waited for him to pull himself awake and shoo her away so he could get dressed. Someone, most likely one of the women around here, had taken pity on the girl and found her some proper clothing--worn-in denim and something floral and flattering for a shirt. Whoever it was had most likely redone her plaits as well, with pins and elastic and a white kerchief to keep it neat for longer.

He thought of Naminé, suddenly, while tugging his shirt down, and figured she would have been amused by all this. Cool blue eyes regarding Kairi with the pink curve of a smile on the corners of her lips.

The village was almost too cool in the morning shade, the sunrise barely turning the top few feet of the plateau walls a brilliant orange. Tifa gave Kairi a bag to carry over her shoulder (more clothes, probably) and loaded Roxas's arms instead with chilled bottles of whitefruit juice, foil-wrapped breakfast pastries stuffed with eggs and meat and the traditional waxy yellow star paopus stacked on top, one for each of them, for luck. One of them slid to the side and landed on his arm, and felt like it had been sitting on a brick of ice all night, and fortunately at that point Tifa realized he was struggling under the load of four breakfasts and gave him a handbasket to carry it all in instead.

Leon drove them back up to the barricade in the rover again, the village still and silent as they passed through it, occupants in the process of waking in their homes, building the morning meal, preparing for the day. When they turned to climb the ramp back to the main road, he could see the ring of the caravan as still and silent as the village, laundry lines like banners hanging among the metal hulks of trucks. Their own tiny fortress.

Roxas tried not to pray anymore--he didn't believe that the Seven were still listening, and his own patron deity was dead, so he figured it was ultimately useless. He did allow himself to hope, in bits and pieces when it didn't appear misplaced, and he did that instead. He hoped, as the village and caravan disappeared below him, that their remaining journey was safe. That the East would still be there, a haven waiting to take them in.

The rover stopped in the compound behind the barricade, the main doors wide open now to let travelers pass through, and his truck was sitting there quietly, unharmed as promised. Sora was tossing bags in through the back door, and Riku was securing the outer storage compartments, and Roxas wished that his instincts weren't always right.

Cid pulled him aside just as he climbed down from the rover, waiting until Leon and Kairi had wandered toward the truck and out of earshot before letting go of his elbow, settling both hands on his hips. "There's enough fuel in your rear storage to get you to Eden, plus extra. The next waypoint is three thousand miles, just a hop skip and jump from Ivory. The boys have some barter so you can stock up on perishables there. Don't underestimate the desert though, kid--it's bigger than it used to be. The tribes' territory stops before you get to Ivory, but you'll go through there and Dawn before the _desert_ stops." He paused, looking off down the road for a moment, teeth clenching around the weave of sweetgrass in his mouth. "It's like a fuckin' plague, kid. Someday that's all this world is going to be; heat and dirt and sagebrush, and Shadows in the dark."

Roxas felt his throat going dry, fingers curling around the basket in his hand, muscles already stiff from holding it, and thought about the desert encroaching on the Seven Cities. Seven Cities for Seven Goddesses, slowly dying along with the world. "Yeah. I guess so."

"Listen, kid," Cid pulled the braid of sweetgrass out of his mouth and used it to poke him in the chest, looming over him like a stormcloud, "I don't know what you're mixed up in and I probably don't want to, but you'd better swear on your life and your patron that you'll get those two to Eden, safe and sound, or I'll drag you back to Tifa's by the ear and handcuff you to the bar, right now."

Roxas didn't figure either of those things were very much worth swearing on, but he nodded anyway, pushing the stiff sweetgrass away and backing out from Cid's shadow. "I'll do my best, but I can't promise I'll be able to keep Sora alive if he's really that sick."

Cid chuckled, but it was humorless and short. "No one can keep Sora alive, kid." He jerked his chin toward the truck, turning back to man his barricade and the boys arguing over the winch. "Get outta here."

It was masculine pride that made him climb directly into the driver's seat--it was his truck, and he was damn well going to be the one who drove it away from this scenario, just to prove the fact. Kairi was busy in the back, metal and plastic rattling as she stashed their new supplies in cupboards and pantries and closets, and at the back door Sora was crouched on the metal talking to Leon, while Riku found a cubby for their personal possessions. Roxas set the breakfast basket in the space between the seats and sat with his fingers against the steering wheel, at the bottom where the leather was worn smooth, and waited.

He started the engine when the back door finally creaked closed, all passengers inside and accounted for, and Leon appeared at his window. He didn't look happy--Roxas was starting to figure that he never did--but he raised one hand in farewell, anyway. "May the road carry you safely, and the blessings of the Seven be upon you."

Roxas nodded and murmured, "Also to you," before releasing the parking brake, and it was almost like they'd struck an agreement, finally.

Sora hopped into the passenger seat, just as they started moving and exclaimed in delight at the basket on the floorboards, snatching up one of the yellow stars and tossing it from hand to hand. "Ow, she froze them. That's how they taste the best, though. Hey, Riku! Come get your paopu, it's good luck!"

He figured there was no point in gunning the accelerator, no point in telling Sora it was too early for him to have this kind of energy and no point in asking if Kairi could sit up front instead. There was no point in changing his mind now, because this was the last, best option after all. Kairi had been right in that regard.

Just around a spike of rock as the road curved away, the barricade and the compound and the people there receding in the rearview mirror, a tin sign stood on the roadside, battered and beaten over the years but maintained with fresh paint from time to time. A list of names and miles marched down over the green surface, the numbers growing and growing as they went, more intimidating as he realized just how much further the journey was.

The bottom line said, simply, '6,581 miles to Luma', and he figured that was the most encouragement they were going to get.


	9. Nightfall, Part Two

As luck would have it, I'm almost excessively happy with this chapter, so much so that I barely messed with it at all. Thus, it can go up earlier than anticipated. Hooray.

* * *

**Nightfall, Part Two**

"You know why paopus are lucky for travelers, right?" was Sora's fifth attempt at making conversation. Roxas's starfruit was sitting idly on the dashboard, the rest of them already eaten by their intended recipients along with breakfast, but Roxas expressed his distaste for eating anything frozen and waited for his to melt, instead.

He didn't say anything in response, figuring that Sora would tell him all about it anyway, and after a moment, he did.

"It's supposed to represent the star of destiny, the light that guides you along the path the gods laid out for you." Sora was slouched down in the passenger seat, hands behind his head and feet up carelessly on the console in front of him, crossed at the ankles. He watched the desert pass through the windshield with a marked lack of concern, enigmatic little smile on his lips. "Back when the sky god still had a temple, the high priests were all astronomers and could tell you which star was your personal guide, and whenever you set out on a journey in life--not like a physical journey, necessarily, but something big and important like going to University or handfasting or something--it was traditional to eat a paopu." Sora's eyes flicked sideways to observe him for a bare moment before returning to the windshield, and the wasteland beyond. "I guess a lot of the old traditions like that stopped after the sky cracked, but we still hand out paopu to travelers, like everyone still remembers some hint of the story."

Roxas avoided looking at him, meeting that stare or allowing anything to surface enough for the Truthsayer to read him, staring instead at the waxy yellow fruit on his dashboard and feeling the metal of the chain around his neck, hidden under his shirt collar and the little four-pointed star cold against the skin over his heart. He figured, after a time, that it would be sacrilegious for a devotee to avoid his own patron's traditions, grabbed the paopu off the dashboard and bit off one of the points. The flesh inside was still icy and made his teeth hurt, but it was pleasantly sweet, and Sora had been right about the chill enhancing the flavor.

He was about halfway through it when he finally sank down more comfortably in the driver's seat and asked, "You know a lot about this sort of thing?"

"Not really." Sora's voice was bright and unapologetically honest. "I don't remember anything before a year ago, so I read a lot of books."

Roxas held the fruit halfway to his mouth and watched Sora sideways, wondering if that was some kind of tactic. If he was telling the truth, if he was lying, if he was exaggerating, if it was a trick to get Roxas to prod too deeply and leave himself vulnerable. He hovered around the questions for a moment, then let them fall away one by one, taking the statement at face value. "I'm starting to wish that sort of thing was more uncommon."

Sora's head tilted down, attention turning from the window and ceiling and back to Roxas, slow, owlish blink at him before something about his features softened. "Who is it?"

"What?"

"The person you miss." Sora's eyes flickered, wandering down to the blank space of Roxas's chest like he could see his heart, just sitting there like an open book.

Roxas shifted in his seat, squared his shoulders and focused on the road. That one was a ploy--his shields were fine, but there was no heart in the whole of the world that could build a shield powerful enough to keep that particular emotion in check. When he spoke, it was a simple statement of the obvious.

"Someone I had to leave behind."

* * *

Pride was a funny thing. Roxas felt it like a twist of bile in his stomach when his eyelids started to droop and Sora called Riku up to take the wheel. True, he hadn't slept all that well the night before, true he was used to being awake at night and sleeping in the mornings and true that schedule had been screwed all to shit, but that didn't mean he had to like it. Didn't mean he had to just hand the wheel over to Riku when he came through the pocket door and stood there hovering behind Roxas's seat.

So instead he sat there, stubbornly, until enough time had passed that he could have Sora reach over and grab the wheel so he could slip out of the driver's seat, like it had been his own idea. Exchanged an impassive look with Riku and muttered, "If you crash it, you're walking," before squeezing past him and into the living area.

Kairi was at the control panel, door hanging open, fingers running down over a row of fuses that serviced the bank of appliances. She looked up when he came in, looked back down when he promptly flopped down on the lower bunk and rested his forearm over his eyes. He could hear her shuffling around, still, hear the movements growing closer, then passing, and for a moment he held his breath, but then the pocket door slid closed.

Quiet, padding footsteps on metal, and then the sink and give of the mattress when she sat down, right next to his knee.

"Are you mad at me?"

All the air escaped his body in a protracted sigh. Roxas shifted his arm, moved it so his hand was rubbing his forehead. "No, Kairi, I'm not mad at you. I'm tired, I'm frustrated, I really didn't want to have to do this but I _did_ have to, there wasn't much choice in the matter and it's ultimately for the best and that just frustrates me more, but no. It's not your fault, you were just the catalyst." He said it all with a logical detachment, and left out the part where he was equally frustrated with _her_, albeit not necessarily mad.

He didn't open his eyes, because he didn't want to see her sitting there, perfectly and infuriatingly calm, because then he'd wish he could drop the veils just to see her freak out a bit. Just so she could experience a taste of the very real and imminent danger they were in. That wasn't part of the plan, though.

She was moving a little on the mattress, weight shifting forward. "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do, you know. I just... keep waiting and hoping for some kind of sign, or an idea or a memory. Anything that might point me in the right direction, but it hasn't come yet. So what am I supposed to do?" He could almost feel her eyes boring into him, his own shielded behind his hand. Blue-violet and unblinking, so much knowledge and years and experience behind them and at the same time absolutely nothing. Gray fog, a long and winding blank. "What is it that's going on?"

Roxas chose to answer her first question and ignore the second. "You can maintain my truck, seems how you've already proven that you're better at it than I am. Just focus on that and don't worry about the rest."

In the silence that followed, he felt the edges of sleep tugging at his senses and was glad when Kairi finally let out a breath, jostling the mattress when she stood, even though her voice was curt and annoyed. "All right, then."

She had the grace to dim the cabin lights enough that if he turned towards the wall it was almost dark. He fell asleep to the sounds of her sorting fuses, and the rumble of the truck beneath his cheek.

* * *

Roxas drove the first night, because if he was honest with himself, he didn't trust anyone else to navigate them through the Shadows. Kairi checked the lights without speaking more than two words to him at dusk, Sora switching through the fuses in the control panel while she worked, all quiet smiles and silence. Riku sat in the passenger seat the entire time, a simple dinner laid out in various places for all of them after the lights were replaced and the truck was secure--but before the world turned into a nightmare and appetite fled along with anything else save a healthy sense of self-preservation. He sat there, and Roxas sat in the driver's seat, and that was how the night progressed.

Riku wasn't anything he would ever remotely consider to be an enigma, and that much was at least refreshing. Clones were simple creatures, simple enough to be infuriating if one tried to apply something like humanity to them, or leaps of logic like free will and creative thinking, but at least they were uncomplicated. Riku was a mass of silence and blank stares, slow passage of half-formed emotions over his heart overshadowed by a layer of guilt so massive and deep and encompassing that it was like staring down brightly lit neon red letters ten stories tall. That much might have been interesting, but it was pretty easy to guess.

His master was deathly ill. The Replican, whether it was actually his fault or not, would undoubtedly feel guilty for being unable to make this right.

Roxas wished, often, that he didn't understand them so well.

If he was honest, Riku's silence wasn't the worst company in the world. He didn't stare or ponder or swing back in a way that was far too relaxed considering the wriggling darkness mere feet away from the thin metal walls of their vehicle. He just sat, and sometimes his eyes were open and sometimes they were closed, and either way it was comfortable enough having his presence.

At dawn, when the morning sunlight peeked over the distant hills and finally washed the road in gold, Roxas pressed the brakes and brought the truck to a halt. He went through the floodlights one at a time, flipping them on for a count of ten and then back off, assuring there was no nook or cranny around the vehicle's exterior for a stray Shadow to cling to. Then killed the engine and disengaged the pressure lock on his door, releasing with a hiss, and said simply, "Let's get some fresh air."

Sora and Kairi emerged from the back, stretching sleep-tired limbs and blinking in the sun, and by then Roxas was inspecting the tires and running his fingers along some tiny scratches in one of the side panels, three marks almost perfectly spaced enough for him to splay his palm against. They must have lost a track light just there, or one of the Shadows ventured close enough to try and get inside. Kairi nodded as she passed him, like she'd noticed it too, like a silent agreement to replace that bulb as soon as possible.

The morning was pleasant, the sort that called for sliced fruit and eggs and Roxas started preparing it himself, silently slicing up a mixture of velango and cakeberries and moormelon, eggs sizzling away in the boxstove, until Riku appeared at the back door, open wide to let in the cool morning breeze, and said that Kairi needed him on the roof. Something about wiring. He shrugged, handed Riku the knife and climbed up the back ladder to find her there with her kerchief and denim and the red toolbox that was more hers than his, now. She was sitting on her knees, open panel beside her forgotten, and staring down at the ground.

He'd parked in the gravel shoulder, and alongside the truck was the broad sweep of the road, dusty gray pavement wide enough for two of the biggest trucks to pass each other abreast, endless and completely empty in either direction. In the space right there, however, in the cool and gold light of the morning Sora was barefoot on the pavement, discarded shirt and the sheath of that eastern sword off to the side, and he was moving so fast that Roxas had to blink and refocus to keep up with him. Like a hummingbird, limbs so fast and sword flickering, glinting steel in the sunrise and it was amazing enough in itself that he didn't slice himself in two with how fast he was moving, how the blade spun around him, how he'd shift one foot back and stop, suddenly and so still it was like the clockwork of time had just stopped turning, inexplicably, one hand forward and the sword turned back against his side. And then, just as suddenly, he was moving again.

Roxas circled the open panel and knelt down next to Kairi, watching this with a slack expression, mouth open and eyes drooping, almost entranced. He shifted more comfortably, prepared to sink into her heart and wrap the netting tighter if she fell back too far. "Kairi?"

"He's..." Her voice was faraway, dreamlike, vague and there was something hurt and longing in the sound, like back in the meeting room, when she first saw this boy. Roxas wasn't sure what was triggering her memory; it was just something to chalk up, one more thing that wasn't going according to plan. "He's a knight," she finished, finally, certainty in her words, one hand curling against her knee. "He's a knight of the Holy Guard. I used to watch them from the tower when they practiced in the mornings, with..." Kairi trailed off, mouth opening further and closing, tongue wetting her lips. "They were like stars. Little flickers of silver, they moved so fast and all you could see was the light reflecting off their swords. It was... so incredible..."

She listed a bit to the right and Roxas reached out to catch her arm, pull her back, and used the contact to slide a little of his consciousness in to draw the veils closed, smoothing down the metaphysical fabric they represented until he was sure the memory had dimmed back into the fog, Kairi blinking rapidly in reality. She turned to look at him for a moment, that preternatural calm back in place, then looked down at Sora again.

"That's just really interesting, I guess. I mean, I didn't know people from the West knew those swordforms, too." Kairi shrugged, sat back until she could pull her legs out in front of her and cross them, watching a bit longer before her attention returned to the toolbox.

It was interesting, he supposed--interesting enough that a knight of Luma's Holy Guard was out here in the middle of the desert and had even less business being there than Kairi did. At least with Kairi there was an explanation.

For Sora, though, there was nothing; just questions and wonderings and the way none of his emotions ever slipped and skidded around, even when he wasn't paying attention. The way he was out there on the pavement performing a dangerous dance with a sword, and no one in the world would believe for a second that he was ill.

* * *

Roxas slept through the morning, deeper and longer than he had in days, frustration ebbing and giving way to exhaustion. It was fantastic, it was refreshing, and when he woke he stayed firmly under the covers in the lower bunk, stretching his limbs and sighing into the remnant of a nice dream, face turned toward the pillow. Riku's back greeted him, turned towards the laundry section on the bank of appliances, setting the washer up for a small load.

He wondered for a while, staring at the fall of silver hair on Riku's shoulders, what exactly was going on with them, anyway. Sora was sick but not sick, Riku doted on him like any Replican did on his master but carried around his giant shroud of guilt like a security blanket, other emotions swirling around behind it but as loud as the guilt was only bits and pieces could be seen, unless they came out front and center in obvious moments, like they had back at that meeting. Riku's fear telling him all about Sora's fate in simple, sad lettering.

The pocket door was open, and if he twisted his neck he could see Kairi driving, hands carefully on either side of the wheel, eyes on the road, but laughing brightly at something Sora had said from the passenger seat. Roxas couldn't see him, but could picture him there with his feet up on the console, arms crossed behind his head. Could picture that unquiet smile. He heard their talk continue, Sora relating a story slightly muffled by the rumble of the truck, and he only caught the words 'Leon' and 'hopper' and something about a watertower, and then Riku was turning around to face him.

"Morning," he mumbled, and then paused. "Afternoon, actually. You practically slept the day away."

Roxas shrugged, rolled onto his back and stretched his arms out over his head, as far as he could. "Did I miss lunch?"

"There's a sandwich in the icebox." Riku shrugged, reached down to collect a pile of folded clothes and carry them back over to the cubby where his and Sora's things were stashed.

Another peal of laughter from the front and Roxas sat up, straightening the blankets beneath him before sitting again to collect his shoes. "Sounds like they're getting along."

"Sora gets along with everyone." Riku said it as a simple measure of fact, knelt on the floor and rummaging for space. He was silent for a few minutes, until Roxas's shoes were tied and he was looking for a shirt, and Riku finished packing away the clothes and pushed the cubby shut. He sat with his hands braced on his knees, and looked up at Roxas over his shoulder. "Where did she come from, anyway?"

Roxas considered how to answer, and tried to not consider for too long on the chance that Riku would become suspicious by protracted thought. He could be vaguely honest or equally as deceitful as he was with Kairi, and wondered if a combination of the two was close enough. It wasn't exactly a lie, just not the entire truth. "I found her on the side of the road."

"Very funny."

"I'm not joking." Roxas stood up, kneeling by the drawers under the bunk to find something clean. The burlap bag he kept by the foot of the bunk for laundry was empty, and he ventured a guess that Riku had the grace to do everyone's laundry while he was at it. Always nice, how domestically efficient Replicans were. "She was just lying there, so I stopped and picked her up."

Riku continued to hold his position and stare for another minute while Roxas pulled a green shirt out, stood and closed the drawer with one foot while he pulled it on. He buttoned from top to bottom while Riku's gaze and expression dropped simultaneously, mouth settling into a flat, pursed line just before he turned away. Shoes rattled violently inside the cubbyhole and the shroud of distemper that fell over the Replican was more than enough to speak for him.

Roxas chose the wisest route and didn't say anything further. This whole issue of trust was going to cause a problem, so long as he couldn't safely tell anyone the truth.

* * *

He made the concession that night, and thought it was pretty big of him, to let Riku drive. It was only mildly harrowing, not having the wheel to clutch while the sun set, right hand instead wrapped around a sweating bottle of tea, glass creaking to inform him that he really was holding it too hard. He schooled himself to breathe, closed his eyes and realized that he really could do that since he wasn't driving, and willed his body to relax.

It would be a while, he figured, before he'd ever be able to go into the living area, close the pocket door and sleep like none of this was going on.

For the first hour or so, they sat in the same silence as before; Roxas finished his drink, Riku held the wheel steady and stared out at the spread of headlights on the road, the wriggle of darkness at the edges. The silence wasn't quite as comfortable as before, more disquiet, occasional bursts of mistrustful anger popping through the red swath of guilt over Riku's heart. He wasn't comfortable with this, with Roxas and this arrangement and the incomplete idea of what might be happening, who they were and why they were out here traveling alone in a V-class truck, barely protected enough against the dark and the desert to survive all the way to the East.

If he really thought about it, put himself in Riku's shoes for a moment--not that he had any idea what it was like to be a clone and so limited in scope--he didn't really blame him. Roxas would be suspicious and uneasy, too.

When the tea was gone, Roxas stared for a while, and when staring only served to set his nerves on edge, he closed his eyes and tried to think instead. Pleasant thoughts, childhood thoughts, the temple and his friends and Aerith and the little metal star against his heart. Cold winters wrapped up in a blanket, snuggled together so the younger kids could sleep by the fire.

The beeping noise brought him back to reality, inhaling in a rush and straightening where he'd slumped in his chair, grabbing the armrests for balance. "What?"

Riku was examining a monitor above and to his right, reaching up to fiddle with the dial and tap at the static on the screen. "It's the proximity alarm, but nothing's coming up on the videx."

Roxas swallowed, hard because his throat had gone dry, his tongue along with it and he stood up, moved behind Riku's seat to examine the videx screen. It was the rear camera, tilted down to show the truck's back door but all that could be seen were the tracklights there, the darkness on the edges and the road passing beneath.

"You have a scope?" Riku asked over the beep, increasing now in volume and frequency.

Roxas pushed open a panel in the ceiling above his head, dragging the scope controls down to eye level. He flipped the device on with his thumb and peered through the eyeholes, waiting while it powered up and swung a view around the roof once before settling. A flick of the toggle to raise it higher, then the knob that turned it to the side, around until it was watching the rear of the truck, track lights glowing in the night.

It was vague, back there in the dark beyond where the lights disappeared and the darkness closed in, but he could make out a shape in the dim reflection of light from the truck. Just an outline, but that was more than enough.

A sleek black hopper riding on stealth, lights out, bare yards of distance behind them and gaining fast.

Roxas flipped the scope off and all but shoved the controls back up into the ceiling panel, Riku staring up over his shoulder in concern. Roxas ignored him, turning the knob to keep the panel shut. "Turn on the rear floodlights."

"What are you doing?" Riku's voice was raising with concern alongside the angry beeping of the proximity alarm. "What's back there?"

"Just turn them on." Roxas slid the pocket door open and tromped into the back, flicking the interior lights on high. Sora and Kairi, in the upper and lower bunks respectively, glowered at him from their pillows. "You two, grab torchlights," he said in the same firm tone he'd used with Riku, stalking directly past them to the back door. "Have them ready just in case. Stay in the bunks."

Sora opened his mouth, eyebrows drawing together, on the verge of saying something and Roxas turned his back, put both hands on the wheel pressurizing the back door, and called to Riku, "Did you turn on the rear floodlights?"

"Yes, what--" Riku turned just enough to look back through the pocket door at Roxas, poised to spin the wheel and disengage the lock, and at that precise moment all three of his passengers screeched at him some variation of:

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"

Roxas paused, hands still on the wheel and scowled down at it for a moment before spinning around and addressing the truck at large, one hand flung out to indicate all three of them and spat, "Would all of you shut the fuck up and trust me for five seconds? STAY WHERE YOU ARE," he added, because Sora looked like he was about to jump down from the top bunk.

With silence at his back, aside from some hissing from the drivers seat that was probably Riku cursing his name to the Replican god, Roxas grabbed the wheel again, and turned it.

The door hissed, air rushing through it and past it and shuddered on its hinges as Roxas pushed it open, almost flung away from him in the tailwind the truck created. He grabbed the bar just outside to steady himself, raised one hand at the force of air blowing his bangs into his face, and ducked down until he found the space where it was least invasive, then opened his eyes.

The night was dark and bare around him, beyond the edges of the brilliant white floodlight, Shadows swarming, wriggling and writhing and racing now to keep up with the truck, limpid yellow eyes blinking up at their prey right there in the open, unprotected, and some ventured to spread reaching talons into the pool of light surrounding him. A tremor ran up his spine, looking down for a moment at the pavement speeding away beneath his feet before closing his eyes firmly and resolving not to look that direction again. Fantasies in his head of losing his grip and falling, faded blacktop eating away his skin as his body tumbled and skidded along it, followed closely by the Shadows finishing him off, his poor wayward heart left to be slowly digested into nonexistence in one of their bloated bellies.

When he opened his eyes again, he looked out, past the rush of air and road and away from the darkness, to the light providing a sweep of what lay behind them, and like knowing what he had planned, the hopper tailing them had edged into the light, revealing itself. It was an Organization model, that was for sure, oblong and black with four widespread wheels, designed for speed and stealth and not at all for being this far out in the desert. They must have brought a truck, somewhere further behind, to carry their supplies.

He wondered, just for a moment, who had finally caught up with him, but as the shiny black nose of the hopper drew closer to the truck's rear bumper, a small, resonating jump of his heart in his chest told him who was behind the tinted sheen of the windshield, even before he squinted to make out the sharp silhouette there.

Roxas smiled.

"Hey, baby," he drawled, lazy, leaning to the side against the door as though this was just a casual encounter, as though they weren't clipping along through the desert in the dead of night with Shadows swarming all around them, as though Roxas wasn't running and Axel wasn't chasing and all was well and normal. He might have been standing in the doorway to Axel's room back at the University, one arm on the frame, lazy smile spreading across his face and suggestion dripping everywhere.

It could have been that, and he played it just that way, just for Axel.

He could almost see the answering smirk through the windshield and lifted his free hand, raised it to his lips to plant a kiss there, slow and teasing, then held his palm flat and blew the kiss out into the night. Through the hopper's windshield, he thought he saw a hand raise up from the steering wheel to catch it.

"Sorry," he murmured softly, smiled beatifically, and raised his hand again. Two fingers pointing, and he drew a wall of blinding light across the road.

Roxas shut his own eyes at the intensity, and the sound of wheels screeching, and offered a prayer to whoever would listen that the hopper didn't overturn, or crash, or go off the road into the tribes' territory. He didn't think it would--Axel knew him, Axel knew the plan and he would have known what Roxas was going to do. He wouldn't have shown himself otherwise.

This time, when he opened his eyes, the light was gone, and the road behind the truck was empty aside from the mass of darkness.

He pulled back quickly and jerked the door shut, struggling against the wind holding it open until Sora appeared at his side to help haul it closed. He spun the wheel until the door hissed and pressured itself fully shut, not so much as a crack for a Shadow to slink through. "Take the torchlights, check everywhere, cupboards, drawers, panels, everything. Don't turn the lights out back here until morning, not even to dim. Okay?" He watched Sora, stared hard until he nodded, then stalked back to the front and pushed the pocket door closed tight.

Riku's hands were white-knuckled, gripping the wheel. "You didn't tell us you were being followed."

"You didn't ask," Roxas shot back, one hand grabbing his shoulder. "Let me drive."

Riku gave him a hard stare, for a long moment, then stood, one hand on the wheel as he shifted to the side to take the passenger seat until Roxas could slip in and grab it, hold it steady while he settled in.

"Is this why you didn't want us coming with you?" Riku asked at length, elbows settled on the armrests and still staring, eyes going narrower and narrower as he did.

"Not my fault it took you until now to realize that I was _fucking serious_." Roxas spat the words out at the consoles in front of him, reaching forward to flip the rear floodlight off, then slowly, one by one, he started turning the lights off. One set of tracks at a time, toggles flipping off in loud clicks of metal on metal.

He closed his eyes, and focused.

"_What the hell are you doing?_" Riku hissed, voice strained and panicked and two beats from jumping from his seat.

Roxas kept him in place with a sidelong look, brief but meaningful. "I told you to trust me. I'm not going to put myself in danger; you can believe that if nothing else." He closed his eyes again. "Don't break my concentration, or we'll all die."

He flattened his fingers on the wheel and dug down deep, drawing off the pool of the photology Art deep in his gut to create the field around the truck. It would take a lot to keep it up, but he could make it for a few hours, maybe. He licked his lips, spoke through the process for Riku's benefit. "There's a spectrum of light called infrared. It's invisible to the human eye but as far as the Shadows are concerned, it's still light." He flipped off the last of the exterior lights, opening his eyes and bending the spectrum in front of his face so he could see the road, the Shadows little green blurs on either side of it, still moving and scampering out of the way as though the headlights were still on.

"You can see it?"

"Yes."

Riku was silent for several minutes, aside from a bare gasp as Roxas reached up to flip off the cabin lights, nothing left but the few dim LEDs on the consoles. He could hear the creak of leather, Riku grabbing the armrests of his seat and the steady rise of breath, trying not to panic in the darkness. Finally, a swallow, and a long breath. "Can you see them?"

"Yes. They're staying away."

"How long do we have to do this?"

"I threw one of them off our tail, but there'll be more. So... as long as possible."

Roxas tried to settle in his seat, not willing to admit that his own palms were sweating against the wheel. Just a couple of hours. A couple of hours of green non-light and knowing, like his skin crawling, that everything around him was pitch black.

Riku's breathing steadied after a while, cautiously optimistic that Roxas's light trick was working. Sora and Kairi were still safe in the light, back in the living area behind him; he could hear them thumping around, still checking every nook and corner for stray Shadows. At length, there was another breath, and then Riku asked what Roxas was afraid he was going to. "Who are they? Why are they following you?"

"I took something of theirs." Roxas decided that was the safest answer, and left it at that. Riku made a dubious noise, and when Roxas flicked his attention over he was just as green as everything else. "You want the truth?"

"Of course."

"You're going to laugh." Roxas sat back in his seat, holding still in hopes his nerves would stop jumping, watching the green highway and the green bob of antennae all around them. "But I'll tell you, if you really want."

Riku licked his lips, a smack in the dark. "Tell me."

Roxas felt the corners of his mouth turning up, and if Riku could see it he probably wouldn't understand how self-effacing the expression really was. "I'm trying to save the world," he said, mouth still curling. Unable to help himself, especially at Riku's silence after the declaration, he snickered and laughed out loud.


	10. Nightfall, Part Three

Sorry for the wait... sorry it's so short... but the next chapter is ready to go and will be up soon. Enjoy!

* * *

**Nightfall, Part Three**

It was exactly two hours and seven minutes later when Roxas's eyelids fluttered and he had enough presence of mind to mutter, "Turn the lights on," just loud and vague enough that Riku jumped out of his seat instantly and flipped on every toggle on the bank of controls over Roxas's head, up to and including every floodlight and cabin light until the truck was a veritable beacon. He was just fast enough, because in the next instant Roxas felt himself slumping forward, sliding down in the chair, Riku grabbing the wheel and shouting his name as the truck listed to the side.

He didn't remember anything else until he woke up in the lower bunk, twenty-six hours later.

When Roxas tried to move, his muscles turned to water. He shifted as much as he could, tried to curl up around himself, entire body weak and aching like he'd caught a fever. Opening his eyes was a feat of strength, blinking in the dim cabin light that was still too bright. And there was Sora, sitting next to the bed, blue eyes wide and watching him. The pocket doors were closed, no sounds but silence and the rumble of the truck as it continued on, so Kairi and Riku must have been up front.

Sora stared at him as he tried to lift his hand enough to rub the sleep from his eyes, barely able to move his fingers, make a few passes until his arm collapsed limp at his side. He groaned a little, closing his eyes against the light and the weight of Sora's gaze.

"You overdid it," the boy said softly, finally. "You almost hyperextended; you _would_ have if you hadn't passed out."

"I know my limits," Roxas grumbled, or tried to, into the pillow, but his voice came out too faint.

"Then you know what happens," Sora said, voice firm and serious in a way he hadn't heard before now, and when Roxas opened his eyes Sora's stare was hard, almost angry, eyebrows drawing together. "You know what it's like to die that way; your Art eating you alive from the inside out."

Roxas felt that tug in his gut again, the one that tried to draw him to Sora. He wanted to reach out, right at that moment, touch Sora's hand or cup his cheek, something soothing and altogether too familiar for the minimal relationship they had. His hand moved of its own accord, under the blankets, but didn't get far. He was too damn tired, too weak. Sora's eyes flickered, his mouth curled into a frown and his head tilted down and that thing in Roxas's stomach tugged again, harder, almost painful. His hand twitched.

They were like polarized magnets, he thought. At certain angles they were pulled inexorably towards each other; at others an invisible force stood between them, shoving them apart. He couldn't define it, whatever this was; he dug long and deep for an answer but could only recall Xemnas and his low, contemplative voice explaining that there were some mysteries in the world that even the House of the Wise had never uncovered. Naminé and her small pink smile that never revealed anything.

Sora felt it, too. He knew it by the way he shifted on his knees, the way he'd avoided touching Roxas the way Roxas avoided touching him. Because like magnets, when they did finally come in contact something would snap together, and he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know what would happen when they did.

"Just be more careful," Sora said to the floor, after the silence was drawn taut. He shifted again and stood, one hand drawing a water bottle from the floor and leaning it against Roxas's pillow. "You need protein. Lots of it. I'll go switch with Riku, I can't cook anything that requires more than unwrapping." His grin was sudden and brilliant, turned down towards Roxas like the rays of the sun, so bright it made him blink.

After he was gone, and Riku was busy clanking around the kitchen appliances, Roxas continued to lay and stare at his hand, too tired to do anything else or even begin to think about it.

* * *

Riku cooked every piece of meat in the icebox that was in danger of spoiling if left much longer, spicing and preparing each one slightly different for some variety, although Roxas ate them all as though he hadn't seen food in weeks and barely tasted any of it. He fell asleep again late in the afternoon and slept through the night, boneless and dreamless and woke when Kairi brought the truck to a halt in the morning, feeling like a whole new person.

He changed the lights on the roof with the sun warm on his shoulders and watched Sora practicing his swordforms from the corners of his eyes, a blur of movement with the flickering glint of steel. He let Riku take the wheel and cleaned up the breakfast dishes, Kairi climbing into the upper bunk and promptly falling asleep somewhere midway through the process, and he proceeded from there to tidy up the entire living area, although there wasn't much to do, seems how they had a domestically efficient Replican along for the ride.

He breathed deep, and felt relaxed all the way to his bones and couldn't remember when he'd last had that luxury. In the space of quiet in the living area, the only sound aside from the truck itself being Kairi's soft breathing, Zexion slipped out from whatever hiding place his heart utilized behind Roxas's left ear; he didn't take form, just hovered around the room as a trailing ball of light. Roxas figured that was his equivalent of stretching his legs.

If Zexion felt secure enough to wander around on his own, then it was probably as good a time as any to do some maintenance. Settled into the lower bunk, it was easy enough to check on Kairi while she was sleeping, assuring nothing had come loose or blown aside. Leaving her heart safe and secure, Roxas let himself slip deeper, into his own heart and the secret, second Art that occupied the same space. Warm and gentle and peaceful, like floating on his back in a pool of gently rolling water, warm in the sun, fingers sliding through the watery nothingness like silk.

He let himself float there, just for a moment, then took a long, cleansing breath, and let himself sink.

It was slow at first, like drifting down through water, but steadily became faster and faster, vertigo destroying his sense of which way was up. Awareness of his surroundings vanished and there was no way to tell if he was really still lying in the lower bunk of a truck as it sped across the desert in a tiny world run by clockwork, or if he was falling through the eternity of space and time.

Eventually his decent slowed from a fall into a gentle drift that automatically settled him upright, let his feet touch down slow and careful. Eyes still closed, he could sense the liquid flow of mist around him, the gentle glow that seemed to come from below his feet and nowhere at the same time. If he reached out his hands he'd feel the web of threads surrounding him, insubstantial enough for him to walk through and at the same time completely solid under his fingers. Heartspace, Naminé had explained the first time she'd pulled him down into this plane of existence, was something that the human brain couldn't comprehend, so it created images that would make sense: a floor under his feet, a light source, thick strands of fiber to represent the connection between hearts and each heart contained its own tiny universe. Even this place had looked different to Naminé-she'd seen the walls of a ruined temple, Roxas sitting on an altar in front of a fresco painting of the sky god, still a child and so bright she couldn't look directly at him.

Roxas opened his eyes to the comforting swirl of grayish mist, a few threads hovering nearby. There were others in the distance, still more that he could only sense; most were white, some were colored, some were taut and some loose and trailing on the ground and some crossed or tangled with others but each belonged to another heart, connecting him or someone he knew to another person.

He smiled, index finger wrapping around the taut red thread that tied him to Axel. That one was strong enough to allow his consciousness to travel along it, assuring him that Axel was safe-distant now, disgruntled somewhat but their encounter on the road two nights ago had done no lasting damage.

The thread that tied Zexion to him was next; it was somewhat slack but hadn't frayed, and the contract was still tied to it securely, ancient characters glowing softly through the rolled paper. Roxas moved on, taking in the two new white threads that lead back to Riku and Sora, still thin and uncertain alongside the slightly stronger one that lead to Kairi. He tugged on each, felt the connection there and gaged what could be done with it, if anything. He checked the knot that tied Kairi's thread to his thumb, giving him a direct connection to her heart on the material plane. It was still strong on both ends, with no frays or loose fibers that would damage the link. He nodded to himself, about to move on when his foot caught on something.

Roxas frowned down at the ground, which was less ground and more swirling charcoal fog with something solid underneath. He bent down and tried to wave the fog away, and when that didn't work he shuffled his feet again until his toe connected with something, then plunged his hand down to grab it.

What he lifted up was-a rope. Thick and heavy, dust falling from it like sand, the edges of it so worn that the fibers frayed out like fur. He shook it to clear more of the dust and could barely see past the dirt and wear enough to tell that it had once been bright, brilliant red, like the thread that connected him to Axel.

Red meant love. So... what in the name of the Seven was this?

It wasn't even a proper thread, it was a rope-an ancient one at that-but if it was here, that meant it belonged to him. It meant he was tied, strongly, in some way and for a very, very long time to whoever was on the other end. He wrapped his fingers around the rope, but the connection was all but dead. He could sense a presence, somewhere, but that was all.

Roxas frowned and shook the rope again, tugging it up to see how far it went. There was no telling, really, as he peered off into the murky distance, unable to really gauge anything. After a moment to consider that he'd never encountered anything like this before, that there were dangers to any Art no matter how you used it, and that there were some mysteries nobody was meant to know the answer to, he started walking his hands along the rope and followed it.

The passage of time didn't fully register in this space-it was like a dream, what felt like hours could be only seconds and what felt like seconds could last an entire night. Hand over hand, Roxas pulled himself along the rope, watching the landscape change from murky to light gray, wondering where it might ultimately lead. When he reached out to grab the next section, though, the weight of the rope changed. He paused and used both hands to lift it up, frowning at the difference, and saw that there was now a third length of rope trailing off into the fog.

He looked down at his hands, where the three intersected. The thread was _split_.

That... was _impossible_.

He nearly dropped the thread right there but caught himself at the last second for fear that he wouldn't be able to find his way back without it. He backed up first, hand over hand like he'd come, then finally spun around and ran, one hand loosely coiled around the rope to guide himself until he could see the convergence of threads where he'd started, his own heart, at which point he dropped the rope and broke into a sprint.

Once back in his own space he spun for a moment, disoriented and panicked, until he found the gold thread, the one that glimmered with its own light and felt like the softest brushed cotton under his fingers. He grabbed it, wrapped his fingers around it tight and closed his eyes, focusing on the slip of it under his palm until he felt the landscape around him shift and resettle, disoriented in liquid for a long moment, another long fall through darkness. When time slowed, and he felt something solid beneath himself again, the thread had became a small, soft hand curled in his.

He felt, for a moment, the natural resistance of a heart that wasn't his, the space pushing at him before it accepted his presence and wrapped around him. He blinked his eyes open then, to brilliant white-she was fond of it, the walls and sheets pooled and wrapped around them like light itself, ambient and endless. She was knelt before him, eyes closed and head drooping as though asleep, white cloth wrapped carelessly around her from torso to knees, one hand reached out to clasp his. Her blond hair hung in a quiet fall over one shoulder, brushing the god-knot eternally present at the hollow of her throat.

Roxas scooted forward through the pool of fabric wrapped around his waist; she had built her heartspace like this, used to his presence and prepared for the inevitable nudity. He didn't think that part of direct contact had ever been explained. "Naminé."

Her head raised, eyes blinked open, brilliant and blue against the whiteness surrounding them. They blinked once, and she smiled, white teeth all behind small, pink lips. "Roxas!"

She all but threw herself forward and almost knocked him down, laughing softly and he hugged her back just as tight, arms around her slim waist, nose pressed against her shoulder and it was comforting, just the familiarity of that. She hummed and cupped his head, rocking a bit, equally content here among him and her brilliant white sheets. The last time he'd seen her, the last fleeting glimpse before the hatch closed on the Inverse Glider they weren't even sure would work, brass batwings spread wide and gears ticking away beneath glass-_you could die_, he told her, bloody hands fisted against the metal handle, and she smiled at him with that simple upturn of petal pink lips, eyes kind and ageless.

_Which is worse?_

Roxas shivered, turned his head enough to speak against her collarbone. "You got home safe, then?"

"I did." Her voice was soothing, fingers stroking through his hair, as though she had called up the same memory. He remembered checking the threads every night afterwards, wondering how long the glider would take. Terrified that he wouldn't be able to find her, that her thread would disintegrate under his fingers. He was supposed to wait as long as possible before contacting her like this. He was supposed to refrain from contacting Axel at all-it was too dangerous, too risky, with him still among the rest of the Organization.

"How about you?" Naminé pushed him back gently, holding him by the shoulders for a long moment, checking him over with a flick of the eyes as though she could see his physical form even on this plane. "Everything okay so far?"

"I suppose." Roxas sighed as her hands moved to cradle his face, and amended, "It's fine, but nothing's going the way I expected."

Her head nodded as though she'd expected as much, blue eyes closing for a moment-she was holding something back, withdrawing a thought or a feeling or anything at all that he might perceive and react to. Roxas had seen her do that before, blocking information in this space; sometimes it was for training and sometimes it was to protect him, and sometimes he didn't know the reason, but it always made him frown. "So long as you're safe," she murmured, smiling again with her eyes still closed, and her hands resettled on his shoulders. "How's Kairi?"

Roxas groaned, slumping forward in childish exasperation, and her laugh was like bells.

"That much trouble?"

"She'll be fine," Roxas assured her, straightening and taking her hands in his because the seriousness of their situation deserved acknowledgment. Kairi was a handful, a bigger difficulty than he anticipated, but they'd manage. "We'll both be fine." He watched her nod, her smile of reassurance, squeezing his fingers. "Nami," he said and noted how her eyes widened at the tone and the quiver in his voice, "have you ever heard of a thread being split?"

Her smile fell, and her eyebrows knotted above the bridge of her nose. It was a familiar expression, the one she got whenever he asked her something difficult, something she wasn't certain she could answer-not necessarily because she didn't know, but because she wouldn't. Or couldn't. The Temple of Luma was a powerful entity, and the Oath was a force of will. He'd heard the phrase "That is a mystery" so many times during his training that he'd come to loathe the word like a bitter taste on the back of his tongue.

"There was a rope-a very old one, very worn but sturdy. It was red. Under all the dust, at least." Roxas twisted where he sat and dropped his head to rest on Naminé's knee, staring out across the folds of white fabric, clear columns of light holding up nothing, something that may have been white walls at an indefinable distance. The lack of color was disorienting; he had thought, several times just like this during training, with her fingers combing soothing trails through his hair, that she did it on purpose, so that you could never find anything. She was a master-a shiver ran down his spine at the thought.

She was more dangerous than he would ever be.

"I followed it," he continued, closing his eyes against the white, "Until it split in two." Roxas could feel her heartbeat under his cheek, through her skin, trace it back to the pulsing in her chest and feel the way it resonated with the piece of his own heart nestled in alongside it. "That's impossible, though, isn't it? That would have to mean there was another me, somewhere, or two of someone else."

"That's very strange," Naminé murmured above him, voice and fingers soft in his hair.

"A mystery?"

She hummed a bit as though considering. "Maybe. I'll have to do some research."

"I see."

For several minutes the silence rang loud in his ears, white like the space surrounding them. Finally, Roxas sucked in a breath and sat up, letting her hand drop away, shifting away from her. "I have to get back."

"Roxas." Naminé murmured, and he opened his eyes to see the frown on her face. "If I can tell you what I find out, I will."

That was probably the biggest concession she could offer him. Roxas nodded, reaching out to take her hand, reverse the connection. "Thank you."

"Be safe." She smiled again, a pink curve of lips. Demure and controlled; she never showed her teeth. "When you visit Axel," she continued, smile a little devious for a moment because she loved the way his ears went hot, "tell him I said thanks."

"We agreed that I shouldn't-"

"But you will." One of her too-blue eyes winked. "I trust you to wait until you really can't stand it any longer."

Roxas smiled in spite of himself; she really knew him far too well. It was going to get him in trouble someday. He leaned forward just enough to press a quick, soft kiss against her lips and then let his eyes close, hand on hers. "Okay."

Falling backwards through water, the membrane that was the edges of her heart struggling for a moment to keep him inside before giving way, letting him drift back into his own netherspace. When he could feel it around him, reach out to run fingers over the web of threads, he let go and pushed up, up like floating through water, towards the surface, slow but inevitable and back into himself. The end was always too fast, quicker the closer he got to the surface and then suddenly his eyes blinked open, breath rushed into his lungs, pain prickled over his skin, and the real world came back.

Zexion was lounging against the foot of the bed, transparent hands folded over his equally transparent stomach and watching Roxas with disinterest all over his stoic features. "Everything well on the astral plane?"

"As well as could be expected," Roxas muttered, sitting up slowly, feeling the blood rush to his head. Like surfacing too fast in the ocean after going too long without breathing. The world swayed around him, gradually righting itself.

"Excellent." Zexion's voice dripped with sarcasm, and Roxas decided to simply wait until the man continued, as he clearly had a grievance to voice. "I think it would behoove you to know that the invalid and his Replican are romantically involved. With each other, in case I'm not making myself plain."

Roxas raised his eyebrows, dubious. "Really."

"It would appear so, based on all the cuddling occurring in the driver's seat while you and the vegetable were sleeping."

"So long as it's just cuddling." Roxas swung his legs off the bed. "It's none of my business."

"Also," Zexion intoned, and he paused. "Although being devoured by your own Art is certainly a very nasty death, it is not particularly what I had in mind. Too brutal, not enough finesse. You are obliged by our contract to continue living until you encounter a method I approve of. Please remember to abide by that."

He didn't wait for Roxas to answer, form immediately dissipating into the little ball of light that was his core. Roxas sighed, and figured he'd take it as an approximation of concern.


	11. Nightfall, Part Four

**Nightfall, Part Four**

It was a good thing, really, that he had just replaced the fuel core. That was Roxas's immediate thought when the proximity alarm at the front console began beeping madly and Riku yelled over his shoulder, "We have incoming!"

He'd been considering making a late lunch, three pinellos in one hand and contemplating things like soup and pasta and wondering if there was any pastry dough left in the deep freeze. He was standing just so, one arm on the pantry door when the call came, and without even thinking he shoved the pinellos back into the icebox and raced to the front of the truck.

"Activate the drive accelerator, we can outrun them if they're still more than thirty clicks behind." Roxas leaned over the back of the driver's seat, peering at the rearview mirror to gauge the distance of the four specks there, approaching fast up the road, black shadows in the afternoon sun. "That's far enough, everyone strap in-"

"Oh, shit," Riku said, at the same time that Kairi, looking very small and curled in the passenger seat, uttered a tiny, throaty squeak.

Through the windshield, on the horizon, four more specks appeared, careening towards them head-on.

"Shit," Roxas echoed, and then like the thought that immediately followed, "Drive! Kairi," he grabbed her by the shoulder, shoved her onto the floor wedged between the seat and the console. "Stay low. Riku," he spun, steadied himself on the doorframe and matched stares with the Replican, Riku nodding without him even having to say it. "Whatever you do, _don't stop_."

Roxas skidded into the living area, but Sora was already tugging on his blast armor, suited from the waist up, helmet in his hands. He grinned, huge and bright and dangerous, and pulled it on. "You said you had a mana rifle?"

He nodded, scampered over to the weapons locker and jerked it open, pulled out the metal monstrosity, ten pounds of polished brass and steel, glass scope, pneumatic pump, and raw mana ammunition. He turned to pass it along to Sora, already pulling down the ladder for the roof hatch, grin still prominent beneath his helmet, the only part of his face that could be seen.

"They're coming from both directions," he offered as Sora hefted the weapon, climbing the first two rungs to push the hatch open, wind screaming through the small opening as Riku picked up speed.

"Well then," Sora intoned, settling the weapon against his shoulder. "You're the Lightwielder, come up with something fancy."

"Fancy," Roxas echoed, and hit the ground as the truck skidded to the left.

Fancy, fancy. He'd already passed out from exhaustion once, and although he'd recuperated at an excellent rate, youth being on his side, the Art itself was still depleted and hadn't had time to grow enough to fill his stores. He had a little bit available he could use without side effect and without exhaustion, but it wasn't enough to take out eight Angels, or multiple Angels at all, even assuming Sora could eliminate some. If he had a way to magnify it-

Oh. Fucking brilliant.

He scrambled around on the floor, opening doors and cupboards, clothes and other domesticities spilling out and rolling across the floor as the truck skidded and swerved, tires screeching, and Roxas clinging to keep from tumbling himself. Sharp, metallic thunks hit the outer panels, bullets not strong enough to penetrate the truck's armor but enough to cause surface damage that he didn't have the equipment to repair. Behind him, in the driver's seat Riku cursed, spun the wheel and Roxas grabbed hold of the cupboard he'd just opened, a wave of canned food rolling across the floor in a rumbling crash, and somewhere above him Sora crowed.

"I got one!"

Something that sounded like an explosion echoed beyond the truck's walls, followed by Sora cackling, another round of ammunition firing.

Roxas found his feet just long enough to stumble back to the weapons closet, where he should have looked to begin with-and sure enough, in the lowest compartment, there it was-old-fashioned for such a modern vehicle, but some people still found spyglasses useful.

He grabbed it just as the truck swerved again, grabbed a can of diced pinellos as it rolled past and used that to smash the soft brass against the floor, denting and prying it apart just enough so he could wrest out the biggest lens. He caught his finger against a raw edge, ignored the pain and left the mess to rattle across the floor with everything else.

"Roxas!" Sora's voice was high and far too excited through the open hatch, only his legs and feet visible, heat pouring down with the sunlight. "Still waiting on that something fancy!"

"I'm coming up!" Roxas scrambled across the floor, dodged rolling cans and t-shirts and a hairbrush, grabbing the ladder just in time or another, sharper swerve would have sent him toppling into the bank of appliances. "Can you cover me?"

"Sure, just stay low for a second." Sora was level with the roof, both elbows on it, rifle secure against his shoulder and neck bent so he could peer through the scope. Grin still on his face as he fired a round towards the side of the truck. "So what is it? Your something fancy?"

Roxas pulled himself up a few rungs, just until he could feel the air currents pulling at his hair. "You ever fried ants on a flagstone with a magnifying glass?"

Sora adjusted his aim, turning more to the side, and fired off another round, letting out a whoop when another explosion resounded, shaking the truck as it bounced dangerously on the road. He cackled again, then cleared his throat and said, "No, actually, I always thought that was kind of cruel."

"Yeah, so did I-but you understand the concept, right?"

"I get it." Sora's grin widened, all his teeth showing. "Almost ready."

Another turn, another fire, and then Sora twisted to face the rear of the truck, the hatch itself guarding from behind. "Okay, make this fast, and don't get shot!"

"Right, I'll just dodge bullets if I see them," Roxas muttered, and pulled himself up.

The buzz of motorbikes surrounded them on all sides, the six remaining Angels circling the truck, speeding far ahead and doubling back, racing headlong towards the front to make Riku swerve, trying to knock it to the side or make him slow down, stop, crash, anything that would result in the four occupants being dead and the truck and all its supplies in the road pirates' possession. Each pass left a series of mana bullets showering the truck in buzzing green bursts, some glancing off harmlessly and some denting the armor and some passing dangerously close to Sora's head.

"Make it fast!" Sora repeated, all but screaming over the hot wind whipping past them and Roxas gripped the lens securely in his hand, lifted it up to catch the sun, searching for an angle. He dug deep, finding the bit of Art he could draw on and gaging it, letting it help him direct the light through the lens and then, just as he opened his eyes, let it flow up and through in a blinding flash.

The light that passed over the road was like a laser, sweeping across with a flick of Roxas's wrist and instantly four of the motorbikes and their occupants screeched and tumbled and skidded away, nothing but charred, smoking wrecks of man and machine alike remaining. Roxas felt his spine go cold, felt Sora's voice rising beside him in exclamation.

"Holy Seven in the fucking sky!"

Roxas sank back against the hatch, not certain if he could afford another pass but the two remaining Angels were circling warily, considering the smoking remains of their comrades, and then abruptly fled, speeding away down the road, Sora firing a few cursory rounds in their wake.

He breathed out, felt his body starting to shake with adrenaline and finally, through the heat and the noise and the wind and the pounding of his own pulse, another sound that was part of the cacophony began to resolve itself with the way the truck was listing from side to side. Sora, still high on the fight and chuckling at his side, paused as well.

Kairi was screaming.

Roxas moved first, because he was in Sora's way, and without waiting for the other boy he dropped the lens in the mess already on the floor and hurried to the pocket door, leaning through it and taking in the scene before lurching forward and grabbing the steering wheel to steady the truck. Riku was slumped over it, one hand on his neck and deathly limp, the driver's side window a spiderweb of cracked glass around a single, tiny hole. Kairi was still where he'd left her, wedged on the floor, hands clasped over her mouth and tears rolling down her face, screaming into her own skin, eyes wide and unseeing and locked on Riku's unresponsive form.

Sora shoved through the door, hatch still flapping loose and clattering against the roof, ignored. He shoved his helmet off, reaching down to pull his Replican upright, murmuring his name and in that one brief, shining moment Roxas could see the concern and fear and _love_ rolling over his heart unfettered like a tidal wave breaking over all of his shields. Roxas turned away from them, back to Kairi, holding the wheel steady as the road sped straight ahead, not daring to stop the truck with the fight only minutes past. He knelt as far as he could like that, reached out to pull Kairi's hands from her face, blocking her view of the driver's seat. "Kairi. Look at me."

"They shot him," her voice squeaked, mouth moving over the words again and again after she said it, eyes wide and blind and staring up at him, trembling under his hand. "They shot him in the neck-I saw-there was blood, there was so much blood-"

"Shh." Roxas settled his free hand on top of her head, smoothing her hair to the side, loose and tangling out of her plaits and wet with panicked sweat and tears. He slid over the surface of her heart, watching how the netting and the veils shivered and shifted and trembled along with her, but they would solidify again on their own, in a few moments. "Breathe. Look at me, okay? Breathe."

A groan behind him and Riku shifted upright, eyes blinking open, encircled in Sora's arms and confused, hand still on his neck. Roxas looked over his shoulder, watching him. "Kairi says he was shot."

Sora smoothed Riku's hair back and the Replican sucked in another breath, teeth set and eyes pained. "Just grazed me. I'm fine."

Roxas peered at the hand on his neck, noted the redness between his fingers and nodded, turning back to Kairi. "It's fine, see? Riku's okay. It was just a graze."

Kairi blinked, eyes flicking up to Riku, to Sora, Riku again and back to Roxas. "But... but I saw it..." She reached up, rubbed her head, eyes closing and features twisted in confusion. "He was shot... there was-there was so much blood-"

"Roxas." Sora's voice made him turn again, and he nodded to the wheel. "Can you?"

"Yeah." He straightened, helped Sora pull Riku to his feet to guide him stumbling back into the living area. Roxas steadied the wheel, slipped into the driver's seat, watching Kairi more than the road. She was still shaking, but pulled herself back up into her own seat, tucking strands of hair back behind her ears, tearstreaks forgotten on her cheeks.

"I saw it," She murmured finally, staring down at the console.

"You were scared," Roxas said, keeping his voice low and comforting, blood still pumping fast, lightheaded from adrenaline but relaxing into the seat, muscles uncoiling one by one. "It just seemed worse than it was, that's all."

Kairi nodded slowly to herself, after a moment, leaned back in the seat to rub her forehead. Calm settling back over her, soothing away the trembling in her limbs.

Roxas kept the truck at the speed Riku had set, wanting to put as many miles between them and the battle before they had to stop to secure the vehicle before dusk. It was quite a while-possibly an hour, even, when Kairi spoke again, head turned to stare out her window.

"I was so sure," she murmured, voice so soft it was almost lost under the truck's engine. "I thought he was dead."

* * *

Roxas wasn't sure if any of them slept properly that night. He remembered that he was the one behind the wheel after they secured the truck for the night, but at some point he crashed off the adrenaline high and Kairi had to pull him bodily out of the seat so she could take over. He had vague memories of sleeping wedged in the space between the driver's seat and the wall, and of sitting in the passenger seat while Sora drove, though he didn't recall him trading off with Kairi. He was sure he'd taken over again at some point up until Riku appeared in the cab, white bandage on his neck, and told him to go sleep on the bunk instead of on the wheel.

He didn't remember getting to the bunk, and couldn't explain why Kairi was curled up against his back, but he woke when the truck rumbled to a halt, morning sunlight spilling through the open pocket door, and he was tired and sore everywhere and the living area was an absolute wreck, junk and cans and clothing strewn across the floor and piled in drifts in the corners, but somehow, still, when he swung the back door open and took a deep breath of fresh air, everything felt better.

The outside of the truck was pockmarked, proof of their encounter with the Angels; they'd covered over the holes that had pierced the outer layer of armor the night before with rubber plaster, sealing them against the Shadows. His truck had seen better days, Roxas figured, but was glad enough that he could lean back against it in the shade and enjoy the morning, cool whitefruit in his hand as a perfunctory breakfast. Kairi was working under the hood today, kerchief tying her hair back and hands quickly turning black from the grease and grime. Her attention had been wandering to Riku a lot, to the bandage on his neck, like she still couldn't believe the wound was that small. Riku himself, efficient Replican that he was, had begun working on the clutter inside, sweeping the actual trash out through the open back door.

Sora, without missing a beat, was out on the pavement in the sun, whirling through his swordforms like relaxing in the comfort of routine. Roxas watched him, mostly out of habit, mostly because the flickering of his sword was hypnotic, partially because the brief but beautiful breakdown of his shields the day before was intriguing. They were back in place now, of course, but Sora was starting to form an explanation. Sora and the thrill of battle, high on adrenaline and laughing amid bullets and explosions; Sora and his sword in the golden mornings, disciplined and perfect in movement and form; Sora and the bottomless pit of fear at the sight of his Replican bleeding and motionless.

Sora stuttering to a halt on his feet, breath coming fast, sword clattering to the ground. His hands shuddered in midair for a moment before his arms wrapped tight around his stomach, eyes squeezing shut and sank to his knees, doubling over with a soft groan of pain.

Sora, deathly ill-and this was the only hint of it he'd seen so far, after six days on the road.

Roxas started to climb to his feet but Riku had already jumped out the back door and was racing across the pavement, silver hair like a banner, to drop to his knees at Sora's side. Hands soft and gentle on his back, his shoulders, and for once the neon red guilt across Riku's heart was overshadowed by concern. Roxas took a few careful steps toward where they were huddled together, Kairi somewhere to the side doing the same, hands hovering in the air helplessly.

"It'll pass," Sora was saying through his teeth, voice tight and strained and his face was pale, limbs shaking, sweat beading on his forehead. Riku smoothed his hair back, murmured something vague and comforting that was lost under another pained moan, high and weak and so unlike Sora that Roxas's stomach turned, the idea of the fruit in his hand suddenly bitter and unappetizing.

Sora breathed out, finally, long exhale as his body relaxed. Riku exhaled in almost the same way, hands on Sora's shoulders and pushing him upright. "You should lie down, okay?" He licked his lips and Sora nodded, one hand up automatically to slide around Riku's shoulders so the Replican could lift him to his feet, like they'd done this so many times now it was natural.

Riku's eyes locked with his, over Sora's shoulder as they passed, a silent plea to not ask questions, to let it be for now. Roxas barely nodded, just a little tilt of the head and that was enough, staying where he was out on the pavement until they disappeared inside.

Roxas bent to pick up the sword off the ground, wooden handle still warm from Sora's hands. He turned it over, watching the glint of sunlight off the blade, then went to collect the sheath and Sora's discarded shirt.

"What do you suppose is wrong with him?" Kairi breathed out, watching him replace the sword in its sheath and shake out the shirt to clear off the sand and dust and drape it over one arm.

"No idea," Roxas muttered, and tossed the half-finished whitefruit into the pile of trash behind the truck.

* * *

Sora spent the day lying in the lower bunk with a cool, damp cloth over his eyes. Riku refused to leave his side, so Roxas and Kairi took turns driving and sleeping on the upper bunk. By the time they sealed the truck before dusk, Sora appeared to be sleeping peacefully, Riku was somewhat relaxed and cleaning up the mess in the living area again, and Roxas and Kairi were wide awake.

Kairi closed the door to the cab so Sora could sleep in peace, and curled up in the passenger seat with a book of word puzzles that had been among the household goods strewn across the cabin. She chewed on the end of a pen while she worked, occasionally begging assistance from Roxas, who did his best, and it was pleasant and quiet enough company for the night. The hum of the engine and Kairi humming under her breath, the darkness outside rolling and crawling like always, but somehow quiet as well.

If there were a few thumps and scuffles from the living area, Roxas figured it had to do with Riku's cleaning efforts, or possibly Sora waking up and going to use the shower. He didn't consider it too carefully, focused on driving and Kairi pondering a three-letter word for mischievous, and that was when Riku slid the pocket door open a few bare inches, just enough to speak through.

"Roxas," he said, and his voice was low and serious and there was an edge to it like desperation. "Stop the truck."

Roxas looked back to him, and from Riku to the windshield in front of him. "You want me to stop? In _this_? Are you fucking kidding me?"

"Please." Riku hissed the word through his teeth. "I need your help. Both of you."

Roxas swallowed, almost argued, but remembered his own complaint several nights ago, for his passengers to stop asking questions and trust him, so instead he flipped all the floodlights on and hit the brakes, bringing the truck to a slow halt. He pulled the parking brake but didn't kill the engine, leaving it to rumble as he and Kairi both stood, Riku pushing the door fully open so they could pass.

"Stay behind me," he said, looking at each of them in turn until they both nodded in understanding that he was absolutely, dead serious. "And don't panic."

Riku turned and stepped forward so they could get through the door, Roxas sliding it shut behind him, Riku's arms spread to either side as though to defend them. Roxas couldn't quite see past him in the confines of the cabin, but sliding up on tiptoes he could see that the bunk was empty, the covers thrown aside carelessly and there was still some clutter on the floor, and if he peered over toward the corner near the rear door-

There was a patch of shadow that was darker than it should have been, and as he watched it shivered, slithered, slid up and peered around the edge of the bunk with blinking yellow eyes.

Kairi's breath caught at the same time that Riku repeated, "_Don't panic_," in a tight, hard voice, at the same time that Roxas made out the edges of the shadow-not like the regular Shadows, this one had a human form, almond eyes and tendrils of darkness trailing from its limbs like tattered fabric, head tilting curiously, covered in what might have been messy, spiky hair-

Roxas's hand shot out to grab Kairi's wrist as she backed away, something meant to be both comforting and horrified when he whispered, "_It's Sora_."

The creature trilled as though it recognized the name, slinking further out of the shadows and venturing just slightly towards them on all fours, human in shape but not moving in any way remotely human, limbs bending up at unnatural angles, body twisting with animalistic grace. Riku crouched just slightly, as though anticipating a spring at any moment. "I can't catch him like this, he's too fast. I need your to help me contain him."

Roxas licked his lips-he had only fought Shadows with photology once in his life, and in a contained space like this it was a recipe for disaster. He squeezed Kairi's wrist where he was still holding it, and without even thinking it fully she straightened, still propped against the wall, but her free hand lifted up to close around the god-knot at her throat, and, voice shaky, she started to sing.

Roxas would have expected the hymn for the light, but Kairi was always smarter than he gave her credit for. It was the hymn for darkness instead, echoing, soft sounds to welcome nighttime and soothe the dark in all its unknowable vastness. The creature blinked limpid yellow eyes at her curiously, slinking a bit forward and swaying from side to side, relaxing on its limbs as its eyes drooped, lazy and pliant and almost purring along with the tune. Roxas knew that feeling-he got it, whenever Kairi sang the hymn for the light, his Art stirring and vibrating and resonating with the song, saturating his limbs and coiling around him, drowning him in peace and contentment.

"You can catch him now," Roxas whispered, low enough to go unheard by anyone but Riku. The Replican nodded, took a cautious step forward, then another when the creature on the floor continued to sway, not even noticing him. Riku knelt before it, wrapped his arms around it and the creature just purred, sank into his embrace like a loving pet. Riku looked back at Kairi and nodded, and the last note of the hymn faded away.

The creature, this thing-the bit of animated darkness that had once been Sora, maybe still was-it _screeched_, and it was the most horrifying, bone-chilling sound Roxas had ever heard and he instinctively slid closer to Kairi, whether to protect her or himself he wasn't entirely sure. The thing writhed and clawed and beat at Riku's arms, tight and strong and holding it still, shaking it slightly.

"Sora!" Riku's voice made its head jerk in attention. "Fight it. I know you can, come on..."

The thing hissed at him, thrashed and then its head tilted back almost painfully and it shuddered, darkness sliding from its face and hair and shoulders like thick black ribbons and beneath it there was Sora, as human as always, eyes closed in sleep.

Riku exhaled as the darkness slid off of his body in coils, sucked back and away into the netherspace it came from, leaving Sora limp and unconscious in his arms. The Replican cradled him for a moment, face pressed to the crook of his neck for several long seconds before he looked up at Roxas and Kairi, still by the door and frozen there like they weren't quite sure it was over.

"Thank you," Riku murmured, and the two nodded almost in tandem.

Several thoughts floated together in Roxas's mind, the way the creature had reacted to Kairi's song, Sora's lack of symptoms until just today, Sora at his bedside imploring him to be more careful with his Art and Cid, nearly a week before in the cool morning behind his barricade, telling him that no one could keep Sora alive-

"He's infected," Roxas said, finally releasing Kairi's wrist and feeling something deep in his heart and the pit of his stomach sink. "With the antiphotology Art."

Riku looked up, blue-green eyes wide and round and the pain that slid over his heart in that moment was so acute Roxas could feel it. He nodded, just once, a short jerk of the head.


	12. Intermission: Hot Pursuit, Part Two

Once again, don't get too excited; this part is short. This is also the last of the chapters that I had previously finished, and since I'm still a busy busy college kid, expect slow-ish updates in the future. From here we go into Riku's POV, and more dangerous waters. Also, for interested readers, you can find a link on my profile to the LJ post containing an encyclopedia reference for this fic's universe. I hope you enjoy it. See you soon.

* * *

**Intermission: Hot Pursuit, Part Two**

"Axel... are you in range? Come in, I'm coming up behind you."

Axel groaned against the steering wheel, enough presence of mind to reach up blindly and flick on all his primary lights at once, grabbing and fumbling for the sonex mic on the way back down. Even with the lights on it was too dark inside the hopper, but that much movement was already too much. His head ached in two places, one where it had rammed against the back of the seat and the other where it had landed on the wheel, less hard but still enough to jostle him, enough to stun him and enough to fucking _hurt_, and he stayed there, curled against it, halfway conscious until the sonex started to crackle. He thumbed the mic and growled into it, voice thick and bruised as his head and he tasted blood, might have split his lip on top of everything else. "Slow down or you'll hit me."

His eyes slid closed again, world fading out for a moment and back into the haze he'd been wallowing in, the one where Roxas was recklessly hanging on to the open back door of a V-class careening through the night with Shadows swarming all around him, looking for all the world like he was about to jump into Axel's bed, sweet smile like he wasn't really an evil little shit with teeth and demands. Blowing him a fucking kiss. That was Roxas's idea of humor. Like the note on the stasis pod, painfully obvious.

And that couldn't possibly have anything to do with the little shanty village that ventured to call itself a waypoint, and the third floor room the well-endowed hostess had sold him for the night, and the fact that he'd fallen boneless into the bed with prayers to every goddess and god in heaven thanking them for this opportunity to sleep on something that wasn't the seat of his hopper for the first time in a week-only to turn his head and smell Roxas on the pillow. Roxas on the mattress, Roxas all over the sheets.

He didn't breathe a word about it to Xigbar, or Demyx, but did drop the very quick and only slightly sheepish recommendation to the buxom hostess the next morning that she change the bedding in his room. And she'd laughed like she knew, but Axel didn't volunteer any information that had to do with making love to the smell of Roxas on the little single bed all night, of moaning his name into the pillow.

He left her a healthy tip, was all.

Demyx was saying something else over the sonex, but it was garbled and static and Axel hadn't been listening to the first part. He chose to ignore it over the throbbing in his head, waiting instead until he could hear the hum of an engine approaching, see the glare of headlights flicking on when Demyx spotted him and slowed down, finally grinding to a halt, engine dropping to a low purr.

The lights, though-they just seemed to get brighter and brighter and finally Demyx's voice snapped over the sonex clearly enough to jerk him out of his daze. "Dammit, Axel, turn on your floods."

Axel raised his arms one at at time to lever himself up off the steering wheel, pushing slowly until he was upright. He reached up and found the switch for the cabin light first, wincing when it sprang alight but the softer light over the interior hopper made the harsh white of Demyx's headlights and floodlights outside more bearable and less invasive. He found the floods next, flipped them one at a time, pressing the toggles with his thumb like trying to push boulders across dirt. Then the infrareds, turning them off methodically because there was no sense wasting power. Outside the light from both their hoppers created a perimeter several yards in radius, Shadows bobbing and scrabbling and blinking from the edges but all safely away.

A slam of a door somewhere outside and an instant later Demyx was yanking his passenger door open, all but throwing himself inside before jerking it closed. He spent a moment there in the seat, squirming and shaking the night off his limbs like his skin was crawling, little stuttered noise expressing his distaste for having to leave the safe confines of his own hopper in the dark. Even with blinding white light all around him.

Finally, though, he settled in and turned his attention to Axel, pushing him back by a shoulder before he curled down over the steering wheel again. "You hurt?"

Axel winced when Demyx reached over, slapping his hand away. "Hit my head."

"Yeah, I can see the bruise. It's starting to puff." Demyx stared hard at his forehead, then at the blood on his lip, then nodded a little as though assured that there was no serious damage. "What happened?"

"Roxas." That much there was no sense in hiding; Axel had kept his mouth shut but Xigbar had still made his own discovery after questioning around the waypoint enough. Eventually all the closed mouths gave way to the village children being the only remaining option, because children were ignorant of affairs like this. They tended to be afraid of Xigbar, but Demyx could get a quick answer from them after a few smiles and a little hydrology show. Kids were suckers for that.

Roxas had left the very morning before they arrived. Axel still didn't mention that he already knew.

"Little shit blinded me to throw me off," he clarified when Demyx blinked at him, slowly, taking all of this in.

"How long ago?"

"Not sure." Axel's brain hurt when he tried to think too much; he reached up to rub it and encountered the lump Demyx had mentioned, and hissed. That fucking hurt. "Around midnight, maybe."

"Less than an hour." Demyx considered, licking his lips, and suddenly his face lit up like a floodlight. "I can catch up to him."

"Sure, Dem. Because he's not going to be more cautious now that he knows we're on his tail."

Demyx tilted his head back and grabbed for the door handle, eyes rolling slightly. "Not like his truck is equipped with infrared."

"Roxas doesn't need to be equipped with light." Axel said it slowly, as though explaining something to a small child, because sometimes Demyx needed that. There was a reason he got along with kids so well. "Remember?"

Demyx considered that for a long moment, blinking at the dashboard, then shrugged, mouth pursed, and opened the door a crack. "Still worth a shot. Xigbar will be here with the truck in about an hour, maybe two, so just hang tight, okay?" He pushed the door up and wide, slipped out, then almost as an afterthought ducked his head back in. "And for the love of the Seven, keep your lights on, okay?"

Axel was pretty sure he slept at some point, or tried to, but soon enough another set of headlights drove like needles into his brain, and then Xigbar was dragging him bodily out of his hopper and into the truck he'd commandeered weeks ago, at the beginning of this chase, so loaded with supplies that the living area could barely be called that. He'd sat Axel on the bunk and for a blissful, ignorant moment Axel thought that maybe he'd get to sleep properly, but then Xigbar shook him and started the interrogation. Demanding details that Axel's aching head didn't want to remember.

He stumbled through the explanation as well as he could, thinking primarily about the soft mattress he was sitting on and how nice it would be to lie down on it. Most of his answers were automatic, some of them obvious, but then Xigbar brought out the big guns.

"Did you see anyone else through the open door?"

Axel blinked, exactly three times. "Anyone... else?"

Xigbar rolled his one eye, crossed his arms and regarded the ceiling as though requesting patience of the gods that might be hovering there. "While I'm aware that in the presence of your little blond brat you have eyes for absolutely nothing else, I would hope you'd be observant enough to note if there happened to be anyone else in the cabin behind him."

"I don't..." Axel began, and changed tactics midway through. "...think so?"

"Well, that begs another question, doesn't it?" Xigbar turned back to him finally, nodded once and then reached over to open the icebox, withdrawing two bottles before flicking the door closed with his toes. "If Roxas was at the back door, who the hell was driving the truck?"

Axel paused for a long moment before reaching out and taking the bottle offered to him, ice cold against his skin, and decided on the more dangerous comment. "I don't know. Who was in the stasis pod?"

Xigbar stared at him for a long moment, hands uncapping the bottle and taking a long swig without breaking the stare. Once he'd swallowed and licked his lips, thumb over the bottle's mouth, he said, "Is the kid contacting you, Axel?"

He blinked at the sudden, unexpected question, and before he could think about it and its implications he said simply and in full honesty, "No."

Not, at least, in the way that Xigbar meant. He wasn't talking about joking notes or Roxas's scent on a pillow or a sultry grin and a blown kiss. Those were simple, unintentional things, not meant to pass on any information other than: _I love you, I miss you, I'm safe and whole_.

Xigbar nodded once again, took another swig and set the bottle down with a clink on the little ledge in the appliance bank that passed for a counter. "If he tries, Axel-you should let it go. Don't listen to him. Whatever feelings you might still be harboring for him in that little slip of a heart you have left, you need to _let it go_, because I'll tell you something, Eight." Xigbar crouched down in front of him so they were eye to eye-literally, because he only had one. "Even if we take the kid alive, which I have orders to do if at all possible, he's going straight back to the labs. And when Vexen is done with him, he won't be your Roxas anymore. He'll be the weapon Xemnas intended him to be. You get it?" Xigbar's voice and mouth had twisted into a scowl, stare boring hard between Axel's eyes. "Either way, he's dead. There's no salvation, so mourn it, man it up and move on."

Axel nodded, muttered something like he understood, lowered his eyes like he wanted to deny the truth. Xigbar bought it, slammed a heavy hand against his shoulder and told him to get some sleep, they'd hunker down here until Demyx got back.

Only when Xigbar's back was turned, only when he'd disappeared into the cab and pushed the pocket door shut-only then did he let the smirk slide onto his face.

_That's what you think, old man._


	13. The Glass Walls, Part One

Yes, it exists. I do get asked once in a while if this fic is still alive, and the answer is yes. It's too awesome to die. The thing is, I'm older than most of you and time moves a lot faster for me, so it doesn't really feel like it's been all that long since the last chapter. Even though it's almost been a year now. Kind of crazy. Anyhow, here we go.

* * *

**The Glass Walls, Part One**

Riku remembered a lot of things that he kept carefully away from his thoughts. Mostly, though, he remembered the cell.

If he really tried, he could probably recall how he had ended up in the cell, but it didn't seem like a trouble worth bothering with. The fact that it never did surprise him that he was there was explanation enough, the amount of guilt weighing down his chest proof that he belonged there, even if he didn't always remember just what he had done to earn the weight. It came and went, specters in the back of his mind, and he was more than happy to leave them there, unremembered, not forgotten but not acknowledged, either.

The cell was comfortable enough. There was a shaft cut at an angle up through the roof, farther up along slippery stones than a prisoner could climb, and it allowed in daylight and moonlight but never the barest whiff of a breeze. There was a soft cushion on the floor, periodically replaced by the people maintaining the dungeons when it went flat or started to smell moldy. He laid or sat on it more often than not, mind shutting down as he drifted into a trance and remained there, catatonic and immobile, until something occurred that forced him to think again.

Usually that thing was Vexen, or who he thought was Vexen—there had been others before him, but the one who came the last few times, he thought he remembered the guards calling him Vexen. Axcut-straight blond hair and a pinched, ratlike face, stark white lab coat over the Organization's regulation black. The man didn't need guards, and he probably knew it but he brought them just the same, just in case Riku had changed his mind about being in the cell.

Each visit was essentially identical—daylight through the shaft, the guards waiting outside, one on either side of the barred door, and Vexen came in, knelt down by wherever he was without disturbing his chosen position for that particular stretch of the extended waking comas he existed in. Vexen muttered to himself about things that Riku didn't care enough to remember, and there was a prick of a needle in his arm, and that was that. Vexen would finish with something superficially concerned, like "Get up off that floor before you catch cold," even knowing how unlikely that was, and then he left.

Riku had a vague guess as to the passage of time, based on these visits. He was never positive, though, and was never really concerned with it either. He belonged here, in this dingy cell with nothing but a cushion and a minimal light source; he deserved this fate, and that was what mattered.

Then one day, for no reason he could fathom, he blinked, and realized he was thinking again.

It was night; the light through the shaft was silver and dim and threw long, black shadows across the floor. He was sitting on his cushion, back against the cold stone wall and legs stretched out in front of him, and he noted absently, in the dark, that his shoe had a hole in the toe.

He was wiggling his toe, then, and glaring at it and wondering what had disturbed him enough to make him think again, when he heard something scuffing the floor outside his cell. A voice hissed, "Woah, what's a Replican doing down here?"

Riku blinked again in the darkness, and swung his head around to blink at the voice, and there with his hands around two of Riku's bars, face pressed between them and blinking back at him, was a boy. Spiky hair around his face and eyes wide and bright in the moonlight. The oversized scrubs hanging on his body made him look too thin, almost wispy, unreal.

He wasn't sure how long it had been since he'd spoken a word to anyone or anything, and he was surprised when his voice didn't croak or crack from disuse. "What?"

"Hi." The boy waved, and his smile was brighter than the silver light illuminating him. "Are you a prisoner?"

Riku considered this and dragged his tongue across his lips. It felt strange. Feeling felt strange, after so long. "I suppose so."

"That's too bad," the boy said, and it almost sounded sad.

"Where did you come from?" Riku asked finally, at a complete loss for how to handle this new intrusion into his blank space of existence. "What are you doing down here?"

"Oh, I came from the labs." The boy said this with such a matter-of-fact air that Riku was certain something unpleasant had been done to him there. "And I came down here to escape. There's a tunnel that goes from here to the University in Nocturne, did you know that? It's the fastest route across the bay, and you don't have Shadows to worry about. That's what the big muscle guy said, anyway."

"Really," Riku murmured after a moment of silence, breathed in a tone of wonder and disbelief. He knew that, of course—he wasn't sure how he knew but the knowledge sat right there in his mind, present and accessible.

"Yup. But you know what, there's a fork in the passage up ahead, I can see it from here." The boy leaned back from the bars, hanging onto them to hold his body upright as he dropped further and further backwards, head tilting to look. He pulled himself back upright, smiling again and crossing his arms inside the bars, fingers curling around the metal opposite his elbows. "Do you know which way to go?"

Riku searched the bit of knowledge in his memory but couldn't quite grasp it—didn't know why he was even trying, in fact. This kid would never make it. "No, I don't. Sorry."

"Well, just guess then." His smile was so bright that Riku actually felt warmer, and he couldn't explain that. "Right or left?"

Riku licked his lips. "Right."

"Okay." The boy released the bars and stepped back, offering him a wave. "Thanks! I hope they let you out someday."

And then, as inexplicably as he had appeared, the boy was gone.

A few minutes later, Riku reached up to his face to discover that his cheeks were damp, and the explanation for that was bubbling up in his memory. He didn't want to see why and flopped down on the cushion instead, turned until he was facing the wall and stared at a crack in the stones, studied every minute angle of it until his mind relaxed, and his body relaxed, and his thoughts came to a halt.

It couldn't have been very long—he was starting to notice the passage of time, even in his thoughtless trance, and he was sure it had only been a few days, maybe a week, before he blinked and found himself awake again.

Just as before, it was night, silvery and otherworldly, and just as before, a scuffing at the hallway floor made him raise his head from the cushion.

And just as before, exactly as before, the same boy said, with the same voice and the same tone, "Woah, what's a Replican doing down here?" And he stood there, at the same bars in the same way, with the same expression and the same blink.

Riku choked.

"Hi." The boy's smile was exactly the same, a perfect imitation. Even the light was angled over him in the same way. "Are you a prisoner?"

He could barely get his voice to work this time, but not from disuse. No, his throat was simply closing around itself. "So—something like that."

"That's too bad," the boy said, sadly.

When Riku didn't say anything in response, voice caught somewhere below the lump in his throat, he moved slightly from side to side, eyes darting around Riku's cell in examination, and that little bit of difference gave Riku the will to continue. "What are you doing down here?"

"Oh, I came down from the labs." The boy was nodding now, shifting against the bars as he related the same story to Riku over again. "I came down here to escape, you know. There's a tunnel that goes from here to the University in Nocturne. It's the fastest route across the bay, and you don't have Shadows to worry about. That's what the big muscle guy said, anyway."

"Is that so," Riku murmured, voice so weak he wasn't sure if the boy would even hear him.

What in the name of the Seven was going on?

"Yup. But you know what, there's a fork in the passage up ahead, I can see it from here." The boy leaned back from the bars in the same way, swung on his arms and pulled himself back just as he had before, and Riku wasn't sure if he wanted to cry or retch. "Do you know which way to go?"

"No." His voice was almost a sob, and the boy's eyes softened when he looked down.

"It's okay," he said with a low tone and a smile, comforting. "Can you guess? Just guess for me, right or left."

Riku licked his lips, wished they would chap just so something would hurt, just a little. "Left."

"Thanks," the boy said before he disappeared again. "I hope they let you out someday."

Then it was dark, and he was alone, and Riku felt like something inside him was dying.

O  
OO  
O

He thought, initially, that some horrible trick had finally been played on him and the clockwork of time was rewinding itself, repeating itself, over and over just to shove him further into the depths of hell, but after a while he began to notice subtle differences. Sometimes, when the boy appeared, he was clearly too tired to be on his mission, yawning and rubbing his eyes. Sometimes he was particularly cheerful and from time to time his conversation would vary just slightly, and after a while it occurred to Riku what was happening.

The boy was a lab experiment, and every time he attempted escape, they wiped his memory.

Over time, once he'd come to this realization, Riku began to anticipate the visits-and after a while, even enjoy them a bit. It was always disconcerting that the boy didn't remember him or the dozen or so conversations they'd had before, but he was always friendly, always smiling, and always doomed to be caught. Riku felt guilty for that much, for not warning him, but there was so little point to it, when soon enough he wouldn't even remember it.

Then one night, while he was settling back against the wall after inexplicably waking from his trance, the boy appeared outside his cell, and suddenly everything was different.

He approached the bars, spiky-haired head cocked to the side, and said, "Who are you?"

Riku was so caught off-guard by the change in the usual conversation, repeated so many times that he could hear the words before they were even spoken, that for a moment he just sat, staring at the boy with his mouth hanging open. Finally, though, he settled back against the wall, palms flat on the floor, licked his lips and said, "Riku."

The boy had never asked for his name before.

"Wow," the boy breathed, smiling softly and it was different from before—this one was sympathetic, a little confused. "Most Replicans don't have names. You're pretty lucky."

"I suppose," Riku said, and wondered what had changed. The boy, he noticed after a moment, wasn't staring at him—or not at his face, at least. His gaze was fixed somewhere lower, right around the center of Riku's chest.

The boy's expression started to fall, something pained to it as his eyebrows drew together. His voice was slightly choked when he spoke. "What... what happened?"

Instinctively, he reached up and placed a hand over his heart, like he could hide it from view, pressed against the squirming feeling on his skin like the boy could look right through him, like he was transparent as a ghost. When Riku didn't respond, the boy's expression became even more distressed, and he began feeling his way over the bars to where the door was latched, and literally jumped when it opened under his hands.

"It's not locked." The boy made this observation with a frown, hands still resting on either side of the open door, eyebrows bunched together.

Riku swallowed twice before speaking. "I know."

The boy slipped inside without commenting further, face turned towards the floor with a frown while the cogs of his mind whirred around all of this information. Riku watched him approach, something tightening in his throat as he came close enough to make out his features clearly in the moonlight, the play of silver light over his messy hair. Close enough Riku could make out the distinct smell of another human being, and wondered how long it had been since he'd been aware enough to identify it. How long it had been since he'd felt another person's body heat. Touched.

By the time he dropped to his knees on Riku's cushion, the boy was looking up at him again, smiling softly. "Hi. I'm Sora."

It was almost jarring, how the nameless boy who replayed himself outside of Riku's cell night after night suddenly had a name. Riku let it roll through his mind several times before he repeated it, slowly, as though he could taste the sounds of it on his tongue. "Sora."

"Yeah." Sora peered at him, through his bangs and into his eyes for a long moment as though searching for something, before his gaze dropped back to Riku's chest and scrunched up in confusion. "I'm from the labs, you know. They gave me a Truthsayer implant. I can't always make sense of it, still. The things it shows me."

"You weren't trained." Riku shrugged, although it was unsettling that Vexen and whoever else worked up in the lab were messing around with Arts and untrained hosts. That was a dangerous game; a bad way to die, too. "At least the implant is safe. You'll figure it out with some practice."

He didn't want to think about what Sora was watching, swirling around over the surface of his heart.

"You think so?" His smile was brilliant. Like the sun, like a million stars. Riku felt a responding tug at his own mouth and didn't resist it so much as let it die.

Instead, he tried to return to the dialogue he was used to. The one where Sora was outside his cell and not close and warm at his side, close enough that Riku could tell that his eyes were impossibly blue. He cleared his throat, turning his head, trying to create a distance that didn't exist. "What are you doing down here?"

"Escaping." Sora's mouth opened to continue, probably along the spiel of how he was going to accomplish such and how he'd learned about the tunnel, but before he could launch into that, he suddenly perked up. Straighter on his knees, head lifting, and he practically bounced forward just enough to reach out and wrap his hand around Riku's wrist.

The touch felt impossibly hot. Electric. Sora's eyes bore into his, too full of hope to be real.

"You should come with me."

For a moment, Riku thought about it. Thought about leaving this place, fighting his way through and emerging out under the open sky with this bright boy at his side, seeking out shelter and evading pursuit. Gradually letting that smile find its way onto his face.

After that moment, he wrenched his hand away and turned to face the square of moonlight on the cell's stone floor. "No. I belong here."

He didn't know why the tinge of loss when Sora murmured, "Oh," made his gut wrench. Sora barely knew him—Sora never remembered anything. Why did he care? Why did he even bother to ask?

"Riku," Sora murmured after a protracted silence that felt like the bottom falling out of the world. "It was nice to meet you."

He didn't watch as Sora got up, or as he slipped out of the cell and pulled the door closed again, latched but never locked. Didn't watch as he whispered a barely audible goodbye and padded off down along the hallway towards the tunnels and eventual capture.

He didn't watch, but after a minute or so he turned his head to take in the blank space where Sora had been and wished that he could have let himself say _yes_.

O  
OO  
O

Sora was back a week later. Riku was starting to be aware enough to count the days.

Their dialogue was different now, but it still replayed itself in essentially the same way every time. Riku discovered that he could change parts of the conversation in the middle—sometimes he would talk about hearts instead of the Truthsayer implant, and then Sora was even more insistent that he come along after announcing his intended escape. Sometimes he mostly ignored Sora and then the offer was made hesitantly. Once, he told Sora the truth. What he let himself remember of it, at least.

"I did something terrible." Riku had his arms folded, staring down at his knees and trying not to look up into Sora's eyes too often, but he kept being drawn back there. "Something so terrible I can't even think about it. So I'm going to stay down here. Forever."

It was heartbreaking, how Sora's features turned down, how sad he looked for no reason, for the sake of a total stranger. "That's awful."

"It's what I deserve."

"It can't be," Sora insisted, fingers creeping towards Riku's arm. "I don't believe it."

"You don't know anything," Riku snapped, jerking his arm away, and was surprised to see Sora's expression harden. Jaw set in determination.

Suddenly, Sora was close. Not just near by his side but _close_, knees digging into Riku's thighs on either side, one hand on his shoulder and the other pressed firmly over his heart, reaching in, sinking in, the tiny bit of power the implant gave him searching and prodding so deep Riku could swear he felt it. Sora's eyes were closed, head falling forward until his forehead was pressed against Riku's.

Riku sucked in a breath. Held it, memory screaming at him.

"He wouldn't want this." Sora's eyes were open abruptly and Riku couldn't do anything but stare into them. He thought he saw stars, somewhere deep in the blue. Moonbeams passing through Sora's hair. "The one you loved. He wouldn't want you to live like this."

Riku didn't deserve forgiveness. The place in the back of his mind that remembered assured him of this and shuddered when Sora stared into his eyes and offered it to him. As though it was his to give. Riku swallowed a painful lump away from his throat, reached up and slid his palms up along either side of Sora's face, fingers curling in the hair over his ears.

_(He'd always looked best at night.)_

Sora made a small, startled noise when Riku kissed him, but didn't pull away. He didn't pull away, either, when Riku deepened the kiss, tilting Sora's head and moaning softly against his lips. Didn't pull away when Riku pressed him down against the cushion, bodies fitting together like practiced lovers, fingertips tracing a line down Sora's neck, over his shoulder, along his back.

Riku didn't realize he was crying until Sora's fingers brushed the tears off his cheeks.

"Stay," Riku breathed out in a rush, eyes open just enough to look down, watch Sora's eyelids fluttering. He could take this night, leave teardrops and fingerprints all over Sora's body, take him slowly and drown in it, sleep cradled in his arms until someone finally came looking for him. And then they'd take Sora away, and the next time Riku saw him, he wouldn't remember a single touch. They'd be strangers all over again.

"No," Sora countered almost immediately, eyes snapping open, and he knew this was coming, anyway. "Come with me."

Riku laughed, and it was bitter. Scathing. It was ridiculous, him sitting here and entertaining Sora, entertaining the idea of Sora and the idea of leaving the cell, his guilt and his punishment. "No." He drew back, sat up, left Sora free to leave and attempt his futile escape. "Go on. By tomorrow you won't remember any of this, anyway."

Sora froze, halfway to sitting. "What?"

"This is the thirty-seventh time you've tried to escape." Riku folded his arms, words biting, taking a perverse pleasure in the way Sora flinched, how his eyes widened. "Each time you come by my cell. You used to stand outside and ask whether you should go right or left, but after they gave you the implant you started coming in and trying to convince me to go with you."

"Riku..." Sora's voice trembled. "How can you—that's not possible."

"We've had the exact same conversation twenty-eight times. You've introduced yourself to me thirteen times. And all thirty-six times you've tried before you were caught, whether you went left or right." Riku did his level best to stare at Sora and not get drawn into his eyes, the way they were round and sad and betrayed. "And now you're going to leave here and get caught again, and in five to seven days you'll be right back here, having the same conversation with me as though it never happened before."

"Riku..." Sora's voice trailed off into a hurt strain, and then Sora surprised him again by standing up straight, fingers curling into fists and then relaxing before he stalked out of the cell, pulling the door shut behind him. His voice was cold, and the chill was startling. "Fine. Stay here in your unlocked prison with your precious guilt if that's what you want." He looked back just once, over his shoulder, one hand curled around a bar, and the fierce determination in his stare made Riku's mouth fall open softly. "But I'm going to remember you."

Riku stared at Sora's back, and then at the empty hallway he left behind. He stared for hours, not thinking of anything at all aside from the ring of Sora's voice that was louder than the metal door slamming shut.

O  
OO  
O

Five days passed, and then seven, and then ten. Riku couldn't get his mind to switch off, to shut down, to accept that Sora probably wouldn't come back or at least to set aside the nagging anxiety that if he shut down he'd miss Sora if he _did_ come. He'd said some cruel things, out of pain or envy or both, and he didn't know how he could apologize for something that Sora wouldn't even remember, but he was going to try, anyway.

Fifteen days passed and Riku lay on his cushion with eyes open wide, thumbnail between his teeth, and wondered if Sora had finally succeeded in escaping. If he was dead. If he remembered after all and never wanted to see Riku again. He tossed and turned, paced around his cell, tried to quiet his mind through stillness and focus but nothing worked. His skin itched. His heart raced.

Twenty days passed and Riku literally jumped to his feet when he heard a quiet shuffling in the hallway. Sora was a silhouette just outside of the moonlight, moving slowly until he could edge his way into view. His arms were wrapped around his body, and he stared up at Riku uncertainly, mouth softly open, eyes blinking, pausing there just outside the door and peering through the bars.

"I..." Sora murmured, halting as though it was painful to speak. "I know you... don't I?"

"Yeah." Riku nodded gently, one hand on the bars, tensing when Sora curled tighter around himself. Something was wrong.

"Please," he murmured, curled down so that all Riku could see was the top of his head, messy hair drooping over his face. "I want to leave." He let out a low whimper, and something buzzed over Sora's surface. An electric ripple, up from his arms and down the curve of his back.

Riku felt the bottom of his stomach fall out, yanking the door open and taking Sora by the shoulders. The energy crackled over his hands, curved around them and hummed against his skin in dark whirls, sliding between his fingers lovingly. Riku choked, pulling his hands away and absorbing the tendrils down, down into the pool at the center of his being that he hadn't drawn from since—

"Sora," he murmured, repeating the name until he had the boy's attention. "Did they give you something? With a needle, in your arm. Do you remember?"

He nodded once, slowly. "It hurt. I don't feel so good... Riku..." He doubled over abruptly, electric darkness crawling over his skin and Riku dropped to his knees along with him, grabbing at the Art crawling over its host, pulling tendrils of it away and sucking them in until Sora's breath evened.

Riku's hands were shaking and he had to repeat Sora's name again until he looked up, eyes wide and glassy, staring up at him in a sickening mixture of pain and hope. "Sora, did they teach you to Wield at all? Even a little bit?"

A long, slow blink was his response. "What?"

"Fuck," Riku muttered, just a sharp breath, one hand brushing over Sora's hair and down to cup his chin, every piece of his being quivering with nothing more than knowing that the boy his fingers were touching was going to die. If he tried he could feel the Art wriggling around in Sora's body, unchecked and uncontrolled, an infection in a host that was never trained to manage it. Riku took a shaky breath and let it rip out of his body in a barely formed scream.

His hands were trying to claw into the concrete under his knees when he felt Sora touch his shoulders. "I want to leave," he repeated, softly, so gentle Riku could hardly bear to listen. "Please. Let's go together."

If he had just gone with Sora to begin with, Riku thought, climbing to his feet and helping Sora back up as well, one arm under his, feeling his body warm and tense against him. If he had just gone with him, this never would have happened. They could be somewhere far away already, Sora living happy and healthy, Riku learning to do the same. It wouldn't have lasted forever-not for Riku, but at least it would have been years. Decades, maybe. All he had to do was give up and go with him.

He'd concede to it now, even though it was too late. He owed Sora that much.

"Get behind me if you see anyone," Riku instructed, assuring Sora could walk at a reasonable pace before guiding them back the way he'd come. "We're not taking the tunnel. The Organization controls the University and they'll be waiting for us." He wasn't entirely sure what they were going to do otherwise—he tried to call up what memory existed of the laboratory, ticked off the hours until dawn in his head.

"I knew you were a hero," Sora murmured, laughter whisper-soft, and Riku's heart broke.

O  
OO  
O

They met with the first round of resistance in the lower corridors, just past the prison block and moving towards what Riku thought might be the underground hangar where a small fleet of vehicles were kept. He wasn't sure if there was an exit that lead from there to the surface or if it only opened to the tunnel, but Riku figured that if he had to drive an armored truck through the laboratory in order to get out, he'd damn well do it.

Faced with a small garrison of armed guards, hands tugging down blast armor visors and reaching for weapons, Riku felt his blood sing with an energy he thought he'd forgotten. He reached down into the well of darkness at his center, his Art crackling and streaming through him with practiced ease, as though it, too, was excited to get back in the fray. And with Sora hovering behind him, essentially an infection-powered antiphotology battery, there was no need to hold back.

A wicked grin spread across Riku's lips. He held one hand out, channeling the darkness down through his arm and into it, and the Art remembered the form of the weapon even better than he did. A sword in the shape of a demon's wing, tendrils of the Art curving around it, waiting to blind, silence, swallow the room in shadow. It was enough to make the guards balk, wonder if what they were seeing was truth.

The moment Riku started moving he knew how much he'd missed this. The dance, the speed, the heat and strain of motion and the rip of his weapon through the air. Through anything. The darkness didn't cut flesh; it severed the energy that kept humans alive. A slice through the shoulder and that man's arm would never move again. A stab in the belly and his will to live would slowly bleed away. A cut clean through the neck and he was gone.

He paused when the last one was on his back, mostly intact but too wounded to run or fight back. Riku held the tip of his weapon against the man's throat, waiting while he gasped and babbled about how this was impossible. "Da... darkwielder..."

"Give Vexen a message," Riku said after the man quieted, whimpering when the darkness slithered down along the blade to lap at his skin. "Tell him that the Prince thanks him for his hospitality, but will be leaving now, and trusts that he's already been sufficiently compensated." Riku licked his lips, feeling the familiar unfamiliarity of formal speech. "Got it?"

The man wheezed, and Riku ignored him, turning to find Sora.

The boy was curled up on the floor against the wall, breath ragged, black electricity buzzing over him in waves. Riku grabbed for it and pulled it away, slowly absorbing as much as he could even after Sora's breath evened out and he stopped shaking. "Come on. Let's go steal a car."

Sora chuckled, almost all breath, and let himself be lifted up.


End file.
