Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A gentle voice guides him through the haze of pure rage. It reminds him of those most precious to him and of the man he must kill. It tells him he can finally have his vengeance because he has arrived.

He follows the path the voice tugs him on. His empty metal boots clank purposely with each step while his cape scrapes against sand.

He doesn’t keep track of how long he walks. Time is meaningless to him.

A figure suddenly comes into view; it stands before a group wielding keyblades. He disregards the group entirely to focus on the lone figure. He knows that heart which pulses before him.

“Xehanort.”

Standing there is the man who stole his body, he knows it. That smug, arrogant darkness pouring off him in waves is proof enough. Xehanort dashes forward towards—

Aqua. Ven. Those most precious to him.

One day, I will set this right.

The fury that fills his armor pushes him to move so fast that he bends reality to ensure it is his keyblade connecting to Xehanort’s and nothing else. He will not let that black keyblade fall towards his friends.

“Who are you?” Xehanort has the gall to ask with his own lips.

Even so, the words don’t reach him through the haze. The only thing he can hear is the beat of anger that screams for retribution and the howl that echoes for his enemy’s head.

“Got you, Xehanort.”

Every swing of his keyblade is one step to ending Xehanort for good. He loses himself in the fight, in the ensuing madness. Everything fades away except for that damnable being before him. He cannot feel anything but anger.

Perhaps that inability to recognize anything else is why he doesn’t stop even when his heart comes back to him.

It’s a sudden thing; Xehanort, near beaten and desperate, summons an unstable kind of darkness underneath them before dashing into the sky. Unwilling to let his prey escape, he points his keyblade up.

The blade reaches out to wrap around Xehanort even as darkness engulfs his legs. He pulls the man close, intending to drag them both into whatever hell is waiting for them. When Xehanort sends his Guardian to tackle him, it knocks against his breastplate. At that moment, it’s almost as if Terra’s heart is slammed into him on impact, and the heartless disappears instantly.

“You fool! This will kill us both!” Xehanort cries.

“Good,” he says before throwing them both into the darkness.

As he and his prisoner begin falling to the depths, a sense of calmness blankets the anger. There will be no escape for either of them, but there will be no more pain either. When they reach the lowest point, there will be nothing.

“No, I won’t! NO!” Xehanort screams, clawing at the keyblade still stretched and locked around him.

“What? Afraid of the darkness now, old man?”

The taunt is different from his words of single-minded pursuit, but with his rage stripped away, he can finally feel something resembling his old self. He revels in it before the darkness strips away that too.

Xehanort stops struggling, and he immediately tightens the grip on his keyblade. He maintains a sharp focus even as numbness begins raking against his mind. There is nothing more dangerous than a cornered rat, and this one is the largest rat in existence.

It would be arrogant to assume Xehanort doesn’t have some sort of last measure in case the darkness consumes him.

Something terrible and bright begins vibrating around them, and he doesn’t have to reach out to know what it is. Magic. It’s deep, powerful magic that slides over his armor to twist around Xehanort. Not light, not darkness, but something that feels like stars glittering against a night sky.

Whatever Xehanort is trying to accomplish most likely has something to do with teleportation. He has to stop it. Like hell he’s going to suffer oblivion by himself.

Magic isn’t his talent, and that’s something he’s come to peace with. He’s built up his physical strength to compensate. That doesn’t mean he stopped studying it, doesn’t mean he has no idea how to cast something intricate and powerful.

He weaves something like a Stopga around his gauntlets, allows it to travel down the length of his keybade. The darkness seeps into the edges of his armor, and he allows it to trickle into his spell too.

He knows the darkness well; it doesn’t want Xehanort to leave it any more than he does.

“Forgive me, Aqua. Forgive me, Ven. Forgive me, Master. I have failed you all.”

His words are the catalyst to the spell. There’s an explosion of light as his magic of time and darkness incases Xehanort’s magic of space. With the way the spells pull and tear at each other, he fully expects to either be frozen in time, pulled into pieces, or both.

The sun hitting his helmet as waves break against shore is more than a little bewildering.

“What have you done?”

He turns around with keyblade held high—exactly when did he let go of Xehanort?—only to freeze at the sight that awaits him. There was indeed a backlash to their magic combining; he just wasn’t the one who paid the price.

Xehanort lies against the sand, body riddled with tears and patches of darkness. Magic sizzles from torn flesh, and the remaining skin is being slowly dissolved by darkness. What little remains of Xehanort’s hands are fading fast; there will be no more holding keyblades for this man.

Yellow eyes glare up at him accusingly, and his helmet tilts as he soaks in the victory for what it is. Somewhere, deep in his heart, there is a feeling of regret and sorrow. It matters not; the ever-present wrath smothers such absurd feelings.

“Even if I die here, the cycle will only start anew,” Xehanort spits out.

“I will destroy each and every part of you until there’s no cycle left,” he says without understanding any of it.

“Fool, look around. We are not meant to be here, and so this world destroys us. But there is a me and a you that will continue on, and they will end up as we do. Our battle has no end.”

He has a vague suspicion of what Xehanort means, but he can’t bring himself to care. An end to Xehanort—any Xehanort—is worth the cost.

“To think that I came so close to understanding the darkness.” Xehanort stares up at the endless blue sky above them as more of his body dissolves.

The sound of waves crashing against the shore fills the silence left by the dying. He doesn’t think Xehanort deserves such a peaceful send off. His keyblade twitches in his hand.

“I don’t think you were anywhere near close,” he says.

It’s not hard to understand. Darkness is everything negative: the sorrow to joy, the hate to love, and the anger to calm. Just as these emotions are natural, so too is darkness. It took him until this very moment to realize that light can’t exist without darkness.

There’s no way Xehanort of all people can grasp such a simple concept. The man probably thinks there’s a god of science somewhere waiting to explain it to the minute detail.

“If you defy death, I will come for you. You will not get another chance at life,” he says, standing over what’s left of Xehanort.

Somewhere, deep in his heart, there is profound sorrow for a man once loved dearly. He pushes it away by remembering all the times Xehanort hurt the people he loved. Even a moment ago, Xehanort was dashing towards his friends with the intent to kill.

He brings his keyblade up—hilt towards the blue sky—and thrusts it down with all his strength. It slides into the sand easily. What little of his old body that was still in the middle of disappearing is now gone. It is done.

“Did you just kill that guy?”

Such a young voice and one he’s heard before. Helmet whipping around, there looking at him with unabashed curiosity is—

My successor, the one destiny led me to, the one chosen by the keyblade—the boy who will protect his friends, Riku.

“Yes,” he ends up saying.

“Huh,” Riku says, eyeing his keyblade with wariness. “What’d he do?”

The boy doesn’t look much older than when they first met. Different shirt and shorts, but those cheeks are still as chubby as he remembers them being when he passed on the keyblade. Which isn’t right. The memories are hazy, but he recalls an older Riku coming at him with a keyblade that sat between darkness and light.

“He killed my master, hurt my friends, and took my body from me,” he answers truthfully.

If Xehanort’s words and his own suspicions are correct, then he, too, will soon disappear. None of this will matter in the slightest. Which means there’s no point in holding anything back.

“Sounds like he got what was coming to him,” Riku says as if watching traumatic deaths is an everyday occurrence.

The flippant tone is at odds with how the boy stands out of a perceived reach, legs tense to run at any moment. Blue-green eyes never leave the keyblade still sunk into the sand. It must look familiar to Riku.

“I only destroyed this form. This man still survives, and he will live on to continue hurting others,” he says.

Just the thought of Xehanort, still alive and toying with his precious ones, sends a rush of rage through him. It nearly blinds him. His heart and his will must not be merged yet.

“So you’re going to go after the rest of him?”

If only he could. Picturing each and every Xehanort dying by his hand brings him great joy.

“My time is done here. I no longer belong in this world,” he says regretfully.

“Wait, you’re leaving the world?” Riku’s eyes are wide as he pulls his keyblade out of the sand.

There are no traces of anything where his keyblade struck, but even if he hadn’t hurried Xehanort along, the world would have rejected his body’s existence. He will soon share the same fate.

“I have no choice. Prepare yourself. That man, Xehanort, will be coming after you next. You have a strong heart, and he will do whatever it takes to drag you into darkness and into hurting your friends.”

Not that his words will change anything, but it’s not in him to simply be silent. Riku will have a tough journey ahead of him—and where it will end, he doesn’t know—but even so, the boy will be up the task.

His successor won’t fail. Riku is so much stronger than him after all.

“You’re leaving now?”

As if to make a point, he begins walking away. Really, he doesn’t feel like staying on the shore of this beach, and he remembers a walkway that led to a tiny island with a twisted star-shaped fruit tree. The sunset there must be quite a sight.

Despite Riku’s initial fear, tiny steps follow after his own heavy ones.

“Then take me with you!” Riku demands.

Clearly the boy doesn’t understand what he’s truly saying, but then he had been vague. He’d also forgotten that Riku was one of the few who knew there were other worlds beyond his own even at this age.

“And how should I do that?” He asks with some humor.

“You got here somehow, right? Shouldn’t you know of a way?” Riku shoots right back.

He doesn’t bother replying to that. Riku follows him to the tiny island all while pouting though doubtless the boy will say otherwise. He folds his arms and leans against the twisted star-shaped fruit tree; Riku mimics him a moment later.

Ahead of them, there is nothing but sea that reaches out to touch the horizon. It looks like an endless ocean from this point of view. Somehow it feels cramped on this tiny island.

“You had a master right? Did they teach you how to fight with that?” Riku nods to the keyblade still held in his grip.

It is against the world order to keep such a dangerous weapon out in the open when not using it, but his will that lingered on was unable to summon the keyblade once dismissed. He doesn’t feel like chancing it even with his heart back.

“Yes, and he did. He was a keyblade master.”

There’s so much he could say about Master Eraqus, of the man who raised and taught him, of the man he considers his father. It is not for Riku’s ears however, and he holds onto those feelings to send to the depths of his heart. Warmth fills him however briefly.

“Are you really the same guy?” Riku finally asks.

Though it’s not the same keyblade—Ends of the Earth was not the one used in the rite of succession—it looks near identical to the one Riku held. Combined with his slightly warped, metallic voice, he can understand the confusion.

“Yes and no. It’s complicated.”

Very complicated. He can’t say he’s completely Terra at this moment. The rage that powers his movements is still there, but it’s unfamiliar to him without the darkness to accompany it.

He decides to avert further questions of his identity by changing the topic.

“You want to come with me? Were you not going to leave this world on your on strength?”

“It’s different now. Kairi, our new friend, she—” Riku trails off with an irritated shake of the head.

He can’t say he knows what Riku’s trying to say, but when Ven came to Aqua and him, he found himself changing to better fit into their new dynamic. He certainly became a lot more protective, more willing to try riskier things.

“I need to get stronger now! Please, show me how!” Riku begs, fists balling by his side.

“Very well. I will stand right here. If both of us are here tomorrow, then I will take you on as a student.”

Riku gapes at him, expression flickering between doubt and hope.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

It’s probably mean of him to be so misleading, but he can’t bring himself to tell Riku the truth, that only one of them will be there by tomorrow. No more is spoken between them even as the sun begins setting. Riku doesn’t budge as if wanting to keep him in sight for as long as possible.

Riku leaves once his father calls for him, but he remains right where his is, leaning against the star-shaped fruit tree. Perhaps it’s only a silver lining to his situation, but he can keep to his word of standing right here while not ending up a kidnapper.

From what fuzzy memories he can recall, Riku is more than willing to say goodbye to his parents if it means being able to protect what matters most. It speaks volumes of the boy’s resolve, and he can’t deny that he’d be moved enough to snatch the child for his own, leaving grieving parents behind.

Good thing he’s going to die. Any time now. Eventually. Before sunup for sure.

Except no matter how much time passes, he doesn’t disappear. There’s not even a hint of magic eating away at his armor shell. He watches the sun rise on the horizon with something close to trepidation.

He was never good at time magic. That’s more Aqua’s specialty; though it should truly be called spatial magic rather than time. Stopping the world was more like forcing kinetic energy to be still more than anything else.

To truly travel through time, one has to give up their body. He didn’t have a body to give. Unless one counted the transfer of his heart from his old body to his armor.

But he didn’t have a body waiting for him in the past. Unless his armor is acting as the anchor.

Whatever the case may be, he finds that he is still there even when Riku comes back. The boy carries a backpack so full it looks bursting at the seams. When he sees a spiky, brown-haired boy and a short-haired, red-headed girl trailing behind with backpacks of their own, he gives Riku the blankest stare he can manage without a face.

“I can’t not bring them,” Riku says as if this is obvious, and he should have expected it.

“Riku says you’re an alien!” Sora exclaims, bouncing from one foot to the other.

“And that you might know where my home is,” Kairi adds.

Well, all true. He comes from outer space—he also has a criminal record stating that he’s an alien which will never not be weird—and he’s vaguely sure he knows where Kairi’s home world is. More than anything, younger him would have never left Aqua and Ven behind if he didn’t have a way back to them.

He just didn’t think he’d still be here, staring at three young children ready for adventure, and pinned down by a promise he made to avoid tear shed. He should really stop making such vows.

“If you come with me, you may never see your parents again,” he states, grabbing for anything to get him out of this mess.

“Yeah, I know,” Sora says, before closing his eyes and clutching his chest. “I was really scared at first, but I didn’t want to be left behind.”

Bright, blue eyes snap open to sear into his heart. Ven, he thinks with sadness.

“But now that I see you, I have to go.”

“The mayor is really nice, but my family is right here,” Kairi says, grabbing Riku and Sora’s hands.

He really did it this time, didn’t he? Still, his heart pangs as he looks down at the three of them. He never wants them to experience the pain his own group went through, never wants them to break, but Xehanort will continue to target them all.

“Riku says we’ll be learning how to fight with keyswords—” Sora begins.

“Keyblades,” Kairi and Riku correct.

“Yeah, that! While we’re going to other worlds.”

Three tiny faces beam up at him, and he’s at a loss for words. He can’t bring himself to agree or disagree. Sure, they need to learn how to fight, but they did just fine on their own the first time around.

“I’m Sora!”

“Riku.”

“And I’m Kairi! Nice to meet you!”

“I am afraid I do not have a name,” he says.

Assuming the Terra of this time still lives on—for what can be called living—then his name no longer belongs to him. Of course, it might not have been his name to start with considering he is still nothing more than a heart and a will beating inside armor.

“Should we call you Master?” Riku asks, nose scrunching up.

“No, I am no keyblade master,” he says, immediately rejecting the idea.

Being called such by those he will hurt in the future fills him with revulsion. Never mind the fact he failed his Mark of Mastery exam, or that he is no Eraqus.

“Well, if not Master, then how about Teacher?” Riku offers.

“What, like Mrs. Cheri?” Sora asks with the pout of one who hates schooling.

“Well, we are going to be learning from him,” Kairi says.

As if on cue, all three tiny heads move to give him the biggest puppy dog eyes he’s ever seen since Ven. Clearly they’ve picked up on his hesitance to take them on as students.

Master, help me. Please, he asks, reaching deep inside his heart. The only thing he gets back is an echo of laughter. He is on his own.

“I’ll go get a Gummi ship,” he says in defeat.

From what he knows about time travel, it’s supposed to be inevitable. Everything that happens is supposed to happen. Yet the children are still there when he comes back with the ship—stolen from Disney Town, but it’s not like they were using it—and they blast off into the stars without the world correcting them.

“This is so cool!” Sora shouts, straining against his seatbelt to get a better look outside the ship.

“Do you remember any of this, Kairi?” Riku asks with his eyes glued to the window.

“Nu-uh,” Kairi shakes her head, “but that’s okay! We’re going on an adventure, we’ll make new memories!”

Perhaps teaching won’t be so bad. This is a new chance to set things right. He’ll destroy Xehanort for good this time, he’ll save Aqua and Ven, and he will do his best so that these keyblade wielders won’t carry the scars of the future.

He is their teacher now, and nothing will stop him from protecting what matters most.

(He forgets to tell the children he is nothing but armor. It’s not until Sora sees him pulling his helmet off and begins screaming that he realizes this mistake.)

Chapter Text

“What does this one do?”

“Don’t touch that.”

“How about this blinking one!”

“If you don’t put your seatbelt back on, I will make you go to sleep.”

“Sora, he’ll do it,” Riku says.

“You’ll miss so much if you’re sleeping!” Kairi chimes in.

“Aw.”

The clicking of a seatbelt ensures that a certain wiggling little body is retrained properly, and he releases the low-powered Sleep spell crawling up his gauntlet. It wouldn’t have hurt anything, but Master Eraqus only ever used Sleep on his students when they got too overzealous about training.

He’s quickly coming to realize that he is nowhere near as patient as his master.

It doesn’t help that he has absolutely no idea what to do. Ultimately, his priority is to rescue Aqua and Ven, defeat Xehanort, and train up three keyblade wielders. But Aqua is lost to darkness, he has no idea where Ven is, Xehanort will need years of careful planning to stop, and as for these three, well, they’re five.

“I wonder what the world will be like!” Sora says, repeating those exact words for the tenth time.

“Maybe the sky will be yellow?” Kairi muses, answer always changing to something generally harmless.

“I bet there will be monsters with eight eyes and fangs as big as your head,” Riku says, doing his best to scare the other two as always.

“No way,” Sora replies immediately, but there’s a notable shake in his voice. “Teacher! There aren’t any worlds like that, right?”

“In some, yes.”

The silence is so loud he can practically hear them screaming inside their heads. He lets them stew for only a second more before continuing,

“But someone having eight eyes or fangs as big as your head doesn’t mean they are enemies.”

Master always took the time to turn these moments into lessons. He finds himself doing the same.

“Somewhere out there is a kid who likes racing his friends down the beach and building sandcastles. But he has wings instead of legs. It doesn’t make him any less than you, just different.”

Most worlds have a certain magic that sets everything belonging to that world as normal. Even a person with six arms may seem ordinary on certain worlds. Only outsiders can truly see past this barrier, and even then, not always.

He doesn’t know if these children will be able to perceive the differences between worlds right away, but they will in time. The tricky part will be making them fit into the world’s sphere of normality themselves.

“Teacher, are there really people with wings for legs?”

“Teacher, if we share one sky, how can it be yellow?”

“Teacher, what kind of worlds have you seen?”

The children practically trip over themselves to ask their questions, and he can barely answer before they begin anew. It soon becomes apparent that the interrogation will never end. It makes for a very long drive.

Not too much farther, he tells himself. Traverse Town isn’t that far from Destiny Islands. He can sell a few items in the Gummi ship’s storage and get the children a hotel room while he looks for answers.

The survivors from Radiant Garden should be there, and they’ll be able to point him to Merlin. If anyone can give him answers about his travel through time, it’s Merlin. Things aren’t as they should be, and he needs to know what he’s dealing with.

It’s a shame he doesn’t actually know where Traverse Town is. He’s never been there himself, and the only interest Xehanort had in the world was its magnetic ability for destroyed worlds.

When the Gummi systems alert him to an oncoming world, it’s not the one he was hoping for. In front of him is the Olympus Coliseum. He withholds a sigh even as the children strain in their seats to get a better look.

It’s not Traverse Town, but it’s as good a place as any to begin training—maybe even the best place. He takes the ship down despite the strong urge to turn around and fly away.

Is Zack still there, training to be a hero? Phil and Hercules?

He doesn’t recall using his armor back then, so hopefully no one will recognize him. He’s not sure he can take a round of questions from people who actually knew Terra.

“Leave your belongings. We will travel light. They will be safe enough, and if not, that’s a risk you’ll have to take,” he says.

Sora, Kairi, and Riku race out of the ship—Riku pushing Sora down to be first, he’ll need to have a talk about that later—only to skid to a halt, gaping at the world that awaits them. He had parked on the side of the mountain, giving them an enormous aerial view; the large marble buildings peeking through the trees must be so beautiful yet so alien from their tropical islands.

“We’re going to the Coliseum,” he says, holding a bag of synthesis items in one hand and keyblade in the other, “but we’ll stop in the town first.”

He activates the ship’s invisibility mode, and the children make the appropriate noises when it disappears. He gives them a second to adjust before moving on with a steady pace, and they hurry after as if afraid to lose sight of him.

The children follow him down the mountain with wide eyes and fingers that poke everything they come across. Nothing he spies is poisonous, so he refrains from saying anything.

He had thought it to be harder to transport items without magical pockets, but he doesn’t feel heaviness the same way he did as a human. It’s more an inconvenience to keep his gauntlet curled than anything.

His inability to dismiss his keyblade and armor is more of a hindrance than the loss of his enhanced clothing. The townspeople are not subtle in their staring.

“Hey,” Kairi tugs on the back of his cape, “those people over there are saying you must be a god.”

He can hear them just fine. He gives Kairi a considering tilt of the helmet. Does she want reassurance that he isn’t a god, or does she want him to go correct the misunderstanding?

“The gods here wear armor and have an otherworldly presence. At least that’s my understanding. I won’t agree if asked, but I won’t disagree if not. It’s more important to blend in and keep to the world order.”

“World order?” Riku asks.

“I’ll tell you about it when we get out of town.”

The munny he gets for the stolen items is far more than they are worth—no doubt due to his supposed deity status—but he doesn’t refuse it. Three growing children will need all they can get. He splits the munny into three pouches.

“If you spend it on anything other than food, then you probably won’t get to eat,” he says before handing the pouches to the children.

“You sure this is a good idea?” Riku asks, clutching his blue pouch and eyeing Sora and Kairi warily.

The two stare at the munny pouches with shiny eyes before leaning in and whispering to each other. Kairi twirls her light pink pouch carelessly while Sora shakes his red one to hear the rattling sound it makes.

“You will need to learn how to budget for yourselves. A few days hungry will teach you how not to spend.”

A cruel lesson but a necessary one. He is still nothing more than empty armor that is haunted by the wraith of rage. One day he might forget himself or that the children have needs that must be met.

Plus, he truly has no pockets.

“Sora, Kairi, you hear that? I won’t share mine with you even if you starve!” Riku calls out.

“But we’d share with you!” Kairi replies immediately with a pout.

“Besides, there’s like, a gazillion of this stuff. We can probably buy a hundred ice creams with it!” Sora, to emphasize this, shakes his pouch harder.

Riku sighs as if he’s been tasked with something arduous, and Kairi begins chanting “gazillion” like it’s a fun word to say. The scene is so silly and stupid, he wants to laugh. It is too much for him, so he walks away.

“You idiot, there’s no way there’s that much. Right, Teacher? Huh, hey wait!” Riku scrambles after him, Sora and Kairi only a step behind.

By the time they make it to Coliseum, he’s explained the basics of world order to the children—

(“But why can’t we tell people about other worlds?” Kairi asks as Sora’s nose wrinkles up beside her. “We know about it.”

“And you’ve leapt at traveling without a second thought. You may have no intention of doing anything other than finding your home, but what of the ones who decide they have something to gain from seizing other worlds?”

Like Maleficent, who has done just that: conquering Kairi’s home world and turning it into Hollow Bastion.

“Or how about the ones who now know their world is so small but are unable to leave?”

The children mutter and speculate over the last one more so than the former, but that’s fine. They’ll know in time the tragedy that awaits those with too much power in their hands and stars in their eyes.)

—and the conversation helps keep him at ease far more than he thought it would.

His fears over being recognized are put to rest. The only one puttering around inside the Coliseum is Phil, and the satyr takes one look at his armored self and begins laughing.

“What are you, a hero with a play contract?”

“Not a hero,” he says.

“Well, whatever. It’s not fun family trip time here. I’m getting ready for the games, so shoo!” Phil shows no sign of recognition over his distorted voice.

A quick glance at a poster tells him that a Preliminary Tournament is starting next week. The prize munny would be good to have, but he’d have to persuade Phil to enter in.

“He’s a goat!” Sora shouts.

“Goat? Goat? One word kid,” Phil holds up three fingers and roars, “I ain’t a goat!”

“That’s four words,” Riku says, confused.

Sora, Riku, and Kairi crowd around Phil whose face begins reddening. He plops a hand on top of Sora and Kairi’s head, both as a way to keep the children in place and to loom over Phil threateningly.

“I am training these three to fight. Do you have an obstacle course they could use?”

He’s banking on Sora or Riku saying something to anger Phil enough to lose reason. After that, it won’t be hard to get Phil to accidentally agree to the use of the arena as a temporary training ground.

“You’re going to train these shrimps? A cart could run them over and never feel the difference!” Phil sputters.

“You’re not much bigger than us,” Kairi points out.

“And this one’s an actual little girl!” Phil points at Kairi with a scowl.

“They will need to fight,” he says with certainty. “Better to start now with wooden swords against barrels than when their life is on the line.”

Disappointingly, both Sora and Riku opt to remain silent and well-behaved. Kairi wraps a tiny hand over the gauntlet still on her head, but stays quiet as well.

Phil’s eyes jump continuously from his helmet to the three children in front of him. He has no idea what’s going through Phil’s head, but whatever it is causes him to make a face.

“You part of Ody’s crew?” Phil asks suspiciously.

“No.”

“Take off your head,” Phil orders, pointing to his own horns, “so I can see you, eyes to face.”

Perhaps Phil doesn’t trust his words, or perhaps his metallic voice is finally getting to the satyr. Still, he finds no reason not to humor him. He lets go of the children to reach up and pull his helmet off.

“Sora, stop screaming!” Kairi demands, shoving her hand over Sora’s mouth.

Though Sora is the one whose eyes are blown wide in terror, Kairi doesn’t look much better. She glances to where his head should be before looking away.

“Geez, that’s not what I meant when I said take off your head!” Phil states, looking somewhat green himself.

“So that’s what you mean when you said he took your body.” Riku stares.

He shoves his helmet back on, feeling somewhat foolish. He had forgotten that the children hadn’t known about his state of being.

“Wait, someone took your body?” Sora goes from terrified to angry in a blink of the eye.

The sudden change in his student startles him, and for a second, he swears he hears Ven echoing the words. Kairi grabs his gauntlet as if to comfort him, and her touch is so light he barely detects it.

“Yes, and the one responsible will be coming for you next, for your strong heart.” He ruffles Sora’s hair before looking at Phil. “This is what I wish to prevent happening to these three. Will you help me?”

Phil moans and groans, rubbing his face with the air of the doomed, but gives in with a slump of the shoulders. Barrels are set up, and wooden training swords of roughly the right size are found.

Nothing too strenuous for the first day: learning the stances and how to swing without breaking an arm is the only thing he cares about for the moment.

“You gotta teach ‘em how to fall too,” Phil says, making a list for him. “That needs to come next. And don’t forget the grandiose lectures. Gotta put the fear of you into ‘em. Not that that’ll be hard.”

Sora, Riku, and Kairi, despite being so young and eager to see the rest of the world, take to their training with complete seriousness. There’s no backtalk, no complaints, just a fierce determination to get the sword forms right. He remembers being the same way with Master Eraqus and thinks nothing of it.

On the third day, when the children are allowed to actually attack the barrels, he gets an inkling that there’s more going on than a desire to defend themselves.

Destroying barrels isn’t anything to a trained warrior, but to small children it should seem to be a near impossible task. Sora, Riku, and Kairi tear through barrel after barrel, coming together in a unified attack every so often, with no intention of stopping any time soon.

“Holy moly, those kids are vicious. You’re gonna have a heck of a time, chump!” Phil watches in awe.

It’s not until they are in there sleeping bags on the verge of passing out that he asks,

“There is time to ease you into training. Why do you try so hard?”

“We want to be awesome?” Kairi offers; it’s more of a question than a statement.

“So we can visit more worlds?” Sora tries next.

“You can’t protect us forever,” Riku eventually says, rolling over onto his side with a huff.

It’s clear none of them wish to tell him the truth, and he supposes there’s no reason he needs to know. He leaves them to their sleep, taking guard outside the converted storage room for the night.

(“I feel bad,” Sora whispers once their teacher leaves the room.

“Don’t. He’ll just stop us if he knew,” Riku whispers back.

“We’ll get his body back, and then it won’t be a secret.” Kairi yawns before saying pointedly, “Now goodnight.”)

The rest of the week goes smoothly, and the children are able to wield their wooden swords somewhat professionally. The sheer progress the three make leaves Phil speechless. He’s not quite as surprised. He knew what they were capable of from the beginning, but he remains impressed regardless.

The memories of when Master Eraqus took him in and first trained him are hazy. He can’t recall his first milestones or the pacing of those days. That may be why he doesn’t realize when the children begin overreaching in their effort to grow strong quickly.

As payment to Phil, he goes out for a few hours each day to round up monsters for the upcoming games. He’s not there when his students decide they can take on one of the monsters and open one of the cages.

When a blast comes from the Coliseum, he drops the struggling, feral centaur to transform his keyblade into a glider. He forces the glider to go as fast as possible before pushing past that limit. He breaks through rocks, through mountainside, through walls—whatever will get him to his students the quickest.

When he finds them in the arena, they are hiding beneath rubble as a large beast with a lion’s head snarls above them. Riku is still and unmoving, Sora is clutching his arm, and Kairi is crying and attempting to pour an empty potion onto Riku.

The rage takes over, and he sees nothing else.

(Their teacher bursts into the scene by ramming his keyblade glider into the beast above them. The glider transforms back into a normal keyblade that goes on to stretch and wrap around the beast’s neck. Their teacher throws it into a wall and away from them.

From there, the beast is unable to fight back as their teacher tears into it with a feral ferocity. Slice after slice sinks into the beast even as it goes limp. Their teacher makes no noise, but if they strain their ears they can almost hear inhuman screaming.

Sora and Kairi glance at each other, sharing the same uneasy feeling of being safe yet frightened. Riku coughs, and they immediately stop caring about anything else.)

When he comes back to awareness, a skinny and awkward Hercules is attempting to get his attention. Hercules doesn’t look much older than when he last saw him.

“You with me?” Hercules asks.

He lowers his keyblade and regards the bloody mess in front of him. He doesn’t recall what that’s even supposed to be.

“Your students are all fine. Phil got them some medicine and some soup. They’re sleeping now,” Hercules says slowly and evenly. “They thought they were ready to take on a chimera and released it. Phil’s not happy, hoo-boy.”

Anger crackles beneath his armor, but it’s thankfully not aimed at the children. He should have never left them, never allowed for them to push themselves to such extremes. He’s a terrible teacher as he knew he would be.

“Phil’s mad at the state of the Coliseum, but he’s mostly angry he didn’t keep an eye on the kids like he said he would,” Hercules tells him, looking at the damage with pursed lips. “I have an idea on how to smooth things over, if you want to play along.”

“Do we have to?” Riku scowls from beneath his horned hood.

“Yeah, do we?” Sora pouts, rubbing at the goat tail sticking out of his pants.

“I think we look cute,” Kairi says, hiding a giggle behind too-long sleeves.

The three of them are dressed in a poor imitation of Phil while a large sign advertising Olympus Coliseum hangs around their necks. They do, in fact, look adorable, and it is no doubt part of the marketing strategy to sell tickets.

“Everything has a consequence. You’ll need to pay Phil back for the repairs,” he says. “Now what are your lines?”

The children give him mortified looks before reluctantly reciting,

“Battle is fun, when someone else’s won. Come for the epic fights, and stay for the violent sights. Won’t you be there, pwease?”

(He watches over them while pretending to be a statue as to not get in their way. Kairi plays it straight with her lines, causing everyone to coo over her; Sora is pouty which works against him by making him more adorable, and Riku says his lines like he’s begging someone to kill him. He laughs.)