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"Son, if you don't hurry back you'll be late for your wedding, and your mother would start to get worried. Come, lets go back to the house together." the man smiled brightly, and motioned his hand forward. "I know I've told you this plenty of times, but I want you to know that I'm proud of you. I never thought I'd see the day when you would get married to that lovely young lady."

How was this happening? Prinz's father was long dead, and he accepted that fact. Just when doubt was starting to wash over him, the sound of his wedding perked up his eye. Looking at his attire for the first time since he had arrived at Traverse Town again, he saw that he was fashioned in a flattering white suit, and his hair was cut significantly short. It was spiked up in a duck tail short of style, and his hands were empty of his keyblade. Memories of the battle of the Destiny Islands started to slip away from him as his father spoke to him. That young lady. It had to be Thrais, and she was waiting for him. Had they time skipped? No, it wasn't possible. "T-Thank you, father." he found himself smiling overjoyed.
Running over to his father, he gently patted his shoulder. He felt the man's warmth, this couldn't have been an illusion. Right? Following his father back to their house, he turned his back on the world exit; of which had a small glint of light shining from the other side of it.

as vice looked around him, all he saw was ruin and death "no, this can't be" he says, falling down to his knees and growling, then shoving both his swords into the ground, crossing them midway along the blades "this will not happen, Asmodeus, you don't even have to power to conquer my heart, weak though it may be" he says calmly, then stands up and smiles "if you cannot conquer me, then you cannot conquer zife and the others" he said cheerfully, drawing his swords from the ground and getting into a battle stance "the only happiness that i can ever achieve now is fighting alongside Zife and the others" he says, as heartless appear around him "eradicating all Nobodies, Heartless, and Endless with these two blades!" he yells, lunging at them and smiling "this is true joy! give me everything you have, Asmodeus!"

Orphen followed Zwels example and started to walk in the opposite direction, his steps slow and deliberate. So all he had to do to get out this darkness was defeat his old rival.


Zwel stopped in his tracks, lightning sparking frm his fingertips. "Ready anytime you are, old friend. "


Orphen smirked, creating a spear in his hands. "Just say the word, chum."




*rix's cloud*


"Hmmmmm....you sure look like that wench...ah well. You still look kinda tasty." Zwel said, lickiing his lips in eager anticipation. "What say you and i ....have a little fun together...." he said, his fingertips sparking.

The warrior glanced down and saw Maki looking as if she was about to burst into tears. "What's wrong?! Are you hurt?!" He exclaimed, reaching to hold her but holding back himself.

"I-I thought that you were trapped...in the darkness." Maki choked to say. "And I thought that I might not see you again."

"The darkness?" Zain raised an eyebrow. "What are you talking about? I just saw you earlier this evening. I think you need to lay off the noodles." He did a small but honest smile, tapping his hand on her forehead.

It was the same. The same habit he did. She felt the same small sting on her forehead. But he was trapped in the darkness. She saw his shadow message to her just before the battle. But what? Was it all a dream before? No way!

Zain felt her forehead for a temperature as she was panicking over what was happening. He shook his head, she didn't have a fever. He stood up, "C'mon. Let's get deeper into the pyramid to get away from the crisis outside." He replied and started moving carefully down the corridor.

Maki jolted up, "Wait Zain! No! Not that way!" But her words didn't seem to have any effect on Zain, or he simply didn't hear her and kept moving on. "Zain, we can't go down here again! Zain!" He had disappeared down the hallways into the darkness that she wasn't able to follow him. "I remember this..." She muttered quietly. Her arms were close to her body as she was moving along the pathway, her fear of the darkness made her not want to reach out to anything, especially in the creepy catacombs of the pyramids. "A battle between the clans broke out for the pyramids...I went to search for Zain and my brothers. Naoto and Yuto were in the battle outside...but Junichi was in the middle of the pyramid...dammit...I remember!" She burst, then broke into a run, "He was summoning the darkness to the world! And Zain's going to get caught in it!"

Rix immediatley shot up a sharp ice barricade around her, cutting herself off from Zwel's vines. Alright......Let's do it. Pyra.... you can become fully a part of me... It's about time I see how I truly feel about my friends besides the very basics of happy, sad, and curious.
Ok... It'll take a while, but you'll know when I become a part of you. You may not be fully human, but you certainly won't be a nobody anymore.
Yeah. I know...... Pyra..... Thank you...
A vision appeared in front of Rix of a girl with red hair and light skin, just about the same height as Rix but a bit shorter. "Your welcome Rix. Remember, everything that you will feel is completely of your own. You will have to figure out everything else by yourself from now on. You'll be fine though. I know you will."
Rix created a small smile, and then watching Pyra disappear into small glittering specks, she felt a warmth surround her and then enter her chest. It then became a burning feeling, hurting quite a bit. But then finally, it subsided after a couple seconds. Then, taking out Pale Smile out of it's sheath, she brought it up in front of her in a horizontal positon, taking down the barriers.

Dorinda faced her darkself now with a new thought, a new feeling, and a new goal in mind. Control of darkness: to have it, it must be defeated so one can control it at all levels and strengths. The only difference that will make her different from others, like Asmodeous, is that she will use it to protect the light.
Holding Sin with both hands, Dorinda stood at a stand still with her darkself. Both facing each other, staring each other, daring each other to make a move. Then, both, moved at the exact same time. Clashing of the swords could be heard echoing, the slicing of the air as it move to try to make contact with or block the opponent. Sometimes there will be sounds of the two metals grinding against each other, neither willing to budge or give until the two are seperate to make new attacks.
Thinking of all the attacks that had happened, Dorinda realized that everything she had done, her darkself knows. She had to push herself harder to become stronger, and/or create a new attack. Moving to hold Sin with right hand, she held it backwards and behind her, using her other hand, palm facing the opponent and in front. Let this work. She thought as she watched her darkself prepare for an attack that it knew that something different was about to happen.

[No, this isn't a repost, I took the others down because of a disagreement with myself over timing and delivery.]

Gabriel closed his eyes as the darkness washed over him. When he opened them, he stood in his old hangar, the travel-worn Horizon behind him beside the rebuilt Hellwind and Nightingale. The metal was warm to the touch, the props still spinning as if he'd just landed. His old chair, the couch where he and his fiancee would canoodle, Isabel's hammock, everything was exactly as he remembered it...

"Papa, tell us a story!"

His long-lost betrothed came in with a gaggle of laughing, bright-eyed children clutching her skirts. He touched her face, and she was as warm and soft as he remembered, her eyes every bit as blue. The baby in her arms had those same eyes, and his own black hair. "Yes, love, tell them the one about the girl with wings and the boy with the key. They never get tired of it." Her voice was like music, like the murmur of the water and the rush of the wind. He brought his lips to hers for a moment, and they still felt like rose petals. She let him linger before playfully pushing him away. "Later, hotshot. It's family time first."

One of the children, a girl, jumped into his arms, warm and heavy and solid and as real as he could have wanted. She had her mother's spun-gold hair and deep violet eyes that would steal hearts when she grew up. Her weight pushed him down into his chair, and Gabriel couldn't help but laugh with her as the chair spun squeakily on its bearings. Another, easily the girl's twin, jumped on the back of the chair and made it spin even faster, until Gabriel was sure the sky was about to fall on his head if he didn't fall off the chair first.

Isabel straggled in with more children about her. All were full of questions, begging to hear Papa's stories about the war, about what lay beyond the Vanishing Point, about the Keyblades. "Go on, I'll get the kettle on. Tell them about the battle with the Dreadnought, something they haven't already heard." Gabriel grabbed his sister's hand. She held his in return, strong and gentle and whole and unharmed. She gave him that knowing, capable look that she always wore when she knew she had everything under control."Something eating you, ace? Go on, sit down and take a load off, you've had a long day." The children were climbing all over him now, begging Papa for a story with a dozen little voices. It was tempting to just give in and wow them, to let the happy ending wash over him and sweep him away...

Isabel pushed a mug into his hand, filled with the cider she'd invented herself. The steam brushed his face as he lifted it to his lips, and his tongue found itself immersed in one of its greatest joys once again. The children were gathered at his feet now, staring up at him eagerly, waiting for Papa to tell them about all his adventures....



Darkness clouded his vision once again, this time by his own command, not Asmodeus' will.



Gabriel found himself alone, where he'd stood when Asmodeus had tried to trap him in a memory of his old desires. The island all around him was silent, almost frozen in time and space. The other Chasers, the Order, everything was gone. There were no stars, no sun, no clouds, only the cold sand and the faint susurrus of the ocean. The last piece of Gabriel's heart fell beyond Asmodeus' reach, beyond where the Order's master could try to fool him with illusions of his desires, and so the darkness could create only what Gabriel had foreseen as his future- emptiness and death.

He walked along the sand slowly, listening as the waves faded away, the ocean vanishing into the darkness. He walked back again to where he'd stood when the spell took hold, staring at the hollow silhouettes of Asmodeus and the Order, mere echoes in the night. The island began to crumble around the edges, the trees and bushes blinking out like dying stars as the sand fell away into nothingness.



Gabriel stood alone facing the outline of Asmodeus, staring up into eyes that did nothing but reflect his own.



He closed his eyes and opened the last fleeting fragment of his heart, the most precious and painful memories that defined all that he had become in his short, wasted life, and gave the Order, the Chasers, Kingdom Hearts and the whole of the darkness a taste of his real, long-buried feelings.



Gabriel ran along the outer walkway like a leaf on the wind, vaulting age-old debris that none had ever cared to clear as he made his way to his old stargazing spot. Isabel would be waiting there. She'd wanted to speak with him about something special she'd wanted to share only with him.

That morning had been utter chaos, which began with Isabel running from the fortress in hysterics, only to return just after the last skirmishes of the day. Father had been too terrified that she'd been captured to be outraged at her absence from the battle, which was triply odd, given that Isabel's skills could easily have prevented a great deal of the damage sustained in said battle, that he frowned on such behavior with a severity matched only by his hatred for slavers, and that he was drunk as a vintner's donkey when she landed, and getting sloshed always made him irritable.

She had her back to him even as he skidded to a stop, her hair let down from its usual martial bun, hiding her face from him as it spilled over her shoulders. Her huddled, almost demure pose was so out of character that Gabriel had to look twice to be sure it wasn't his fiancee playing silly buggers with his head.

"It's about time, I was starting to wonder."

"Sorry, I had to take the long way to get past Guy and Armand."

"Gabriel...do you remember the stories Mother used to tell us? About what our world was like in the time of the Saints? I've been thinking...what if this isn't their world? What if we're just on the edge and the real world is out there, just beyond the haze?"

"Would we have built the Horizon if I didn't remember? There's something beyond that blue veil, we all know it. And we're going to be the ones to find it. No matter what it is, it's ours."

"I...I've been thinking about her a lot lately, the things she told me before...before she died. There's something special in those stories, it's not just because she told them. There's a place waiting out there for us, Gabriel, we HAVE to find it before it's too late."

"Too late? Too late for what? Is there something going on that you're not telling us, Isabel?"

"Gabriel Aristophanes St. Germaine, you know better than to ask me that."

Uh oh, full name. Never a good sign. "So...um...speaking of which...are you okay? I mean, the way you took off this morning, some of us were scared that you weren't coming back..."

"Oh, that...just nerves. I'm alright now."

Isabel turned at last, smiling as warmly and gently as Gabriel could ever remember. She held a strange star-shaped fruit in her hands, cradling it with the same excitement with which she'd held the starter for the Nightingale when Father had given it to her. "But I found the most amazing merchant while I was out today. He was this little white fluffy thing with red wings and a big red pompom on his head, and he was selling the cutest things out of his zeppelin." She flicked her wrists lightly, breaking the star in half. "Here, try this."

Gabriel took the offered half and bit into it, his eyes first widening, then falling closed as he sucked at the delicious juice out of the fruit. He leaned over the stone railing as he nibbled, watching the stars dancing in the distance. "It's amazing...what is it?"

"He called it a paopu." Isabel leaned over the rail beside him, daintily pecking at her half. "He told me it comes from a place far away from here, an island in the middle of a sky made of water. He called it an ocean...can you imagine that? Enough water that you can't see the far shore..."

Gabriel was almost halfway through his piece of the paopu. "Enough land to hold that much water...he didn't say which way to get there, did he?"

Isabel shook her head, crunching wistfully. "He said that he wasn't sure if there was any way to get there from here. But he did tell me a story about the fruit. He had so many stories...I could have sat and listened all day. Stories about other places, almost like they were whole other worlds. Oceans so deep that there are cities even bigger than ours on the bottom. Mountains so tall that only the gods can reach the top, where they can pick down the stars and rearrange them to make pictures of great heroes. Ships big enough to hold every city in the world as we know it, powered by machines we can't even begin to understand, drifting out there between the stars." She let out a sigh that could have been dreamy, or possibly regretful. "Where was I? Right, the paopu. He said that the people of the islands where it grows have a special legend about it, that if two people share a paopu fruit, their hearts will be connected and their destinies intertwined forever. "

Gabriel paused, the last piece of the fruit inches from his mouth. "No fooling? What if...more than two people share it?"

"I dunno...but I don't want you to even think about what I know you're thinking about." Isabel turned to him, looking painfully serious. "I know you two are going to get married tomorrow, but I'm tired of always having to give you up to her all the time. I know it sounds selfish, but...I'm scared, Gabriel. I have a bad feeling about tomorrow. I keep having this....I don't even know how to say it, but, every time she takes you away, I keep getting this feeling like you won't ever come back. I need to have something that's just ours, something she's not a part of, or I feel like I'll lose you completely. Please, Gabriel, can't we keep this just between us for once? Just like this place, just our secret?"

Gabriel froze, searching desperately for some sort of answer that wouldn't sound either callous or patronizing, then he smiled and popped the last tail of his half-star into his mouth, chomping loudly for her benefit. "Alright. I won't pretend to understand it, but alright. I won't tell her about it at all, I swear on my wings. But you know you're not going to get shut out of my life just because I'm marrying her. You're more than just my sister, Isabel, you're my best friend, and always have been. I wouldn't have wanted you to come with us when we take the Horizon and leave this place if I didn't want you to be part of our lives too. You're the only one of the three of us with a grain of common sense. Nobody's going to lose anybody, we're going to stick together no matter what it takes."

Isabel smiled up at him, but there were tears already spilling down her cheeks...



The memory froze there, just as Isabel threw her arms around her brother and wept. Gabriel faded back in, looking at his own surprised expression. Bit by bit, the memory faded away, until all that remained was the sparkle of the starlight on Isabel's tears.





Alarms sounded throughout the castle and the city below. Pilots, gunners, guards and terrified civilians scrambled to and fro like ants, trampling one another trying to reach a safe shelter or a battle station. The warships loomed over the St. Germaine fortress like miniature cities, bristling with more guns than the naked eye could count and swarming with twice as many planes.

Gabriel was already in the hangar when his blond betrothed arrived, his back turned to fasten his boots. Dust and debris rattled to the floor with every thud of the ancient automata cannons above them.

"You can't go out there, Gabe. There's too many of them, they'll kill you!"

"But I can't just sit here! My whole family is already out there fighting for our lives and freedom, and with Isabel MIA they need all the planes they can get! I can't just turn tail and hide!" He stood, grabbing the starter pistol for the Horizon.

"And what about me? You'll just fly off and leave me here? What happens to me if they kill you? What if the castle gets hit while you're up there? I won't go back to being anyone's slave!"

"Nobody's going to be a slave and nobody's going to die if I can get out there and stop them! And they can't hit the castle, you know our defense arrays are impenetrable." Gabriel threw the hatch of his hand-built airship open-

And the bullet sent him tumbling to the floor.

"Of course I do, you cloud-brained clod, why do you think I'm so sure they'll get through them?"

The old musket was still smoking as his betrothed dropped it, picking up the fire axe from its hook. "Thanks for showing me where the master line is, you idiot." She sneered and slammed the axe into the exposed cables in the wall. The thunder of the cannons died off, but the shaking grew worse instead as the battleships bombarded the defenseless castle and city.

"You were too easy to use, Gabe, so damned easy it was almost embarrassing. You and your whole damned family, you fell for it like magpies for a rhinestone. Speaking of which, that ring was simply tasteless. You can have it back. Oh wait, you DO have it back. BACK, get it?" She kicked the wound in Gabriel's back just to rub his face both in her victory and her terrible pun.

A sudden jolt shook Gabriel from within. He forced his eyes to look upward in time to see his brother's planes falling out of the sky, some in flames, some in fragments. One by one, jolt by jolt, Gabriel watched his family die because he'd fallen in love with a spy.

"And you're going to find out what it's like losing everything, you putrid ape. What it's like being a slave. And if you beg hard enough, maybe I'll buy you back when I run this castle."

A golden speck turned crimson, then black, and began to plummet, and Gabriel could feel his father's pain and anguish, right up to the moment that his ruined fighter crashed into the city square below. Blood and bile welled up in his throat as he struggled to move, but his captor's heel against the wound in his back stopped him.

"Stop squirming, gooney bird, it'll all be over soon. Well, for ME it will be. But it'll just be beginning for you."

Gabriel looked up through the smoke, no longer listening to her triumphant taunting. A glittering blue speck had broken through the flak beyond the invading ships.

"Isabel....no....go back....get away....

His tormentor didn't seem to hear his desperate whisper, nor did the gods or the pilot of that blue speck, as she tore toward her besieged home with all guns blazing. But for all her skill, all her fancy maneuvers and marksmanship, Isabel could not take on an armada alone.

"Isabel...no...run away...."

The blue speck turned crimson and began to fall toward the hangar.

"Isabel!"

The pressure let up suddenly. "What? How...she's not supposed-no!"

The crimson turned to yellow flames and fell past the castle, past the city and the island, into the endless depths below.

NO!

There came a tortured scream, every fiber of Gabriel's being caught fire and all other sound ceased in that terrible moment- the roar of cannons, the crumble of stone, the crackle of flames and shouts of fear. Blinding pain shot through Gabriel's entire body as he threw himself blindly into the Horizon and fired the engines. Time itself seemed to slow as the Horizon took blast after blast from the warships and pursuing fighters. The engines fell away one by one, the fuselage shredded like tissue paper behind him. He felt heat at his back and face as shrapnel tore at him, but his eyes never left that burning, plummeting speck. The dive was too much for the now-ruined vessel, and Gabriel found himself reaching through empty air toward Isabel's falling star. There was no more sound of any kind, no feelings but pure, raw, unrelenting pain. Pain of the flesh, pain of the heart, pain of the soul.

In the last moments of that terrible memory, the very sky itself tore apart, the arching blue falling in tatters to reveal an endless sea of squirming flesh, staring, alien eyes bigger than the city itself, and drooling, cavernous jaws rimmed with mountainous teeth. And Isabel was falling right into one of those fathomless mouthes....

If any god can hear me who has the power to stop this, I shall pay any price, ANYTHING!



And all was silent. Gabriel stood alone in the empty darkness, clutching in his hand a faint sparkle of light.



The light in Gabriel's hand began to shine brighter as he stepped forward, trying to push through the darkness, through the illusion.



Gabriel plunged on blindly through Asmodeus' shadows, clutching tighter the tiny spark of light that held him together for so many years. He felt anger, even flashes of hatred, but these passed with each painful, awkward step. It was like trying to walk up an acid waterfall, yet there was no way he could turn back now. Turning back hadn't been an option since before he'd left the Chasers' fortress.



Gabriel staggered in the torrent of darkness, but the light he held didn't fade or flicker. He could feel his body breaking down, his tired hand drying and wilting like a flower in the desert, but his grip on that precious spark did not weaken as its light began to pierce the oppressive shadows all around him.

((oh goodness *smacks forehead* where has Zife run off to?))