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Sora will never say it out loud, but he loves Drive Forms with them.
Beyond the flow of their power flooding under his skin, twisting and twining and melting into his own; beyond the battle thrill of their combined strength lifting him up, making his limbs feel impossibly light and his blows have the weight of a mountain, wild, sometimes alien magic spinning out effortlessly from his keyblade...
He treasures the strength they lend him, he has to - that power has carried him through unspeakable danger and brought terrible enemies low. But more than any power, its the feeling of having their hearts nestled close to his. Its selfish, he knows, but feeling the echo of another heartbeat beside his own, beating in wild harmony as adrenaline pushes them-him-them-him across their battlefield of the moment is as close as he’s ever come to feel like he’s literally going to lose his mind.
When not pressed with the threat of death and dismemberment, the sensation was enough for Sora to drown in. Sora naturally loved, naturally kept his heart open wide to the connections and emotions of others. And when Riku’s heart or Kairi’s sat so close to his own, where he could feel the way shadow and light laid with a thick, perfect resonance or the light shone so sharp and bright that it shattered into a million prismatic colors inside his chest, he was overcome with the mad urge to pull those two most precious hearts closer. To crash them into his own, synthesize them all down into a singular, cohesive whole. Erase the lines of separation, become one.
And when the magic faded out and they were separated again, Sora would always rub over his heart, frowning at the sudden feeling of emptiness in his chest. And maybe just blush a little, embarrassed by the intensity of feeling and the possessiveness that he was sure had flooded back through the bond between them. And at first, Riku had walked a few brisk feet in front of him, refusing to allow Sora to see his face for several long minutes. Kairi just made an excuse to go use the bathroom or make a phone call.
Then Riku would simply walk beside him in a defensive slouch, eyes nailed to the floor, and Kairi would just stare into her phone.
Then they both simply...carried on. Unfolding back into reality when the magic faded, both of them would dust themselves off and continue on as if they’d not been sucked into his clothes and their hearts made to beat in another chest. A casual shrug, a laugh, feet moving onwards like it was nothing strange. Meanwhile, Sora could never truly shake the feeling of loss inside him that lingered on afterwards.
And one day, one battlefield later, it changed.
Sora had never attempted a Master Form equivalent with them, even as all three of them grew more and more comfortable with Overdrive and Paladin, and Sora learned just how little he knew about the Light and the Dark through them. His cosmology had been flipped on its ear more than once as they refined their skills with each form. Riku’s darkness was nothing like the sandpapery coldness of heartless and nobodies, nor the barbed sharpness of Organization XII. His was warm, summer nights and star-studded skies, the softness a warm bed and sweet dreams. The kind of darkness that was less like despair and more like the darkness that tucked away lovers in the night. He’d never thought he’d associate warmth with the Darkness, but then again, he’d never thought he’d come to think of sharpness with the Light, either. It was something of a personal privilege, he thought, to feel just how rapidly her own light was evolving, measuring her growing strength each time they used Paladin form. Each time the refracted colors swirling on the corners of his vision and inside his chest became brighter and the edges that wanted to pierce up from under his skin grew keener, like the edge of a cut gemstone. The light was justice, but also judgment. The righteous rage born from evil.
All he remembered was the swarm of Berserkers hammering the ground around the building, chasing the keyblade wielders around and around, trying to avoid being smashed to bits, throwing up pieces of concrete and asphalt as they made the ground shudder. Cracks webbed across the street, spidering up the sidewalk and shattering glass windows. Kairi literally had four of them chasing her as she vaulted up on a streetlight and then to a flagpole to escape the stampede. Riku came from around the corner, three more skating after him, claymores swinging and missing his head by inches. Sora watched the two groups of nobodies converge and nearly crash into each other. Seeing his chance, he lifted his keyblade and shouted Magnega! and instantly had to dodge another stampeding claymore heading straight at him. He would have to trust them to finish off that group while they were vulnerable.
Riku and Kairi did their best to mow them all down, but they were running low just as much as he was, after combing this half-dead city world for hours. A Dark Firaga and a Stock Break shatter their defenses, but the spell ends and they drop down on the cracked pavement and turn, as one, on the nearest target: Kairi.
She cartwheels, more like dives, to the side, a wall of claymores whistling past her heels. They miss her, to both boys immense relief, but Kairi had been standing straight in front of the building that they’d trashed in this tussle. The nobodies missed her, but they didn’t miss the load-bearing pillar in the nearest corner of the building as they all swung through it.
Tortured steel groaned, glass shattering and pouring out of the window frames. The berserkers didn’t stop, scattering to pursue Kairi as she kept dodging her way out from under the rain of glass. An ominous squeal of metal heralded the sound of the building beginning to crunch in on itself and tip over.
Sora was further up the street, his own group of berserkers forcing him to dash around to find openings. The sound of the skyscraper twisting and the earth shaking under his feet as it fell apart distracts him and he turns to watch an entire side of the building shear itself off and crash into the ground. It kicked up a dense cloud of dust, and Sora was distracted enough to not dodge the backwards swing from his target.
Pain exploded across his body, his hearing going soft and cottony, and his vision dancing with stars. He hits the road hard, hazily blinking up at the collapsing building, then Riku and Kairi, them both screaming out his name, and the sound of his breathing and the feeling of the ground flipping upside down with him still attached to it. There was a passing breeze over his head and a shadow swooping down in the shape of a skyscraper.
Master Form was cerebral, planned, calculated. Sora knew how to measure its power, how to wrap it around him, channel it down the haft of each keyblade. It was purposeful and ready, all of Goofy’s steady strength and Donalds cunning condensed into the blades in his hands.
Feeling Riku and Kairi’s hearts flare into existence inside his chest hurt. Hurt and burned out his vision and ripped the breath out of his throat and made his ribs nearly crack with the pressure of too many hearts pounding inside such a small space instead of subliminating. He was gonna explode from the pressure, it hurt, it hurt, it hurt so bad!
The vicious possessiveness that made him reach out for them, want to crush them close to him, snarled and tangled them up and their hearts resisted and thrashed backwards and Sora screamed on his last thread of breath stop, stop, stop resisting me!
You idiot, came the reply, stop resisting us!
Staring blindly at the building about to crush him, Sora tilted his head, blinked, and said “Huh?”
Click.
Everything, his skin and breath and his ribcage collapsed back into place as the tangle of need, need, need found opposition and compliment in an answering yes, yes, need you, too! And he breathed deep, his chest no longer feeling like lava was trying to melt through him. The heat cooled and he was left with a warm, pulsing weight around his heart that felt like two sets of hands holding it gently.
Oh.
Those weeks of simply rolling with the punches as he merged with them and tried to crush them to him, completely refusing to listen and see how they’d been trying to show him how much they needed him in return. But now, now that he was listening…
Maybe you should look down.
He focused on the outside world and looked down. And down, and down, past his feet and the thick cloud of dust that obscured the ruin of the skyscraper that’d nearly fell on them only moments before. It was a good view, mostly because he was several hundreds of feet in the air.
He was - they were - flying.
“Ha!” He dipped left and right, fluttered upwards and plummeted down, corkscrewed his way through the air. Oblivion and Oathkeeper cut and whistled the air over his hands, shuddering with barely restrained strength, and Way to the Dawn and Destiny’s Embrace rotating almost lazily at each shoulder blade. He didn’t even flex so much as think about swinging his arm and both borrowed keyblades snapped to attention, locking into a shadowed position by his primary ones. He swung Oblivion down and Way to the Dawn copied the same move seconds after. And then swung back around to strike a second, third, and fourth time on its own in an identical arc of Riku’s practiced combo. He tries the same with the other arm and Destiny’s Embrace circles in a stationary Strike Raid, rather like a buzzsaw.
Are you guys doing this?
Yeah, I think? Maybe!
Skimming through the air, he tested the speed of this drive, whooping loudly as they rocketed through the air at break-neck speed, their reflection a shooting star blazing above the city streets. They reached the end of the city, made a wide bank over the river that marked its border, and flew back the way they came. All in all, a circuit that would’ve taken hours was done in less than ten minutes.
Heeeey, check us out!
Sora turned, finally taking the time to inspect them in the reflective glass windows. Touches of armor under his jacket and over his shoes, vambraces and pauldrons, all in gleaming silver were inherited from Paladin form. But the winged embellishments over the armor, along the hem of his hood and the bottom of his jacket, the stripes of yellow down each sleeve, were all from Overdrive.
Pretty snazzy! We don’t look completely awful.
Deciphering whose voice was whose was way too distracting from the fact that, as Sora raised both keyblades again, they were limned in hypnotic, swirling shadow-light, much in the way that Kairi’s Seiken skills cloaked her keyblades. The mirroring keyblades snapped out, burning with the same melded power, and Sora swung out.
All four blades cut through the air, discharging their payload as four parallel, slicing arcs of energy thrice as tall as Sora and just as broad. The poor building they’d been modeling in front of was gutted, bisected from roof to foundations and sent collapsing in upon itself to join the first building that’d nearly killed them.
Holy shit! Whoah!
That was just a swing! The cloud of debris below didn’t reach them all the way up here, but Sora fluttered upwards anyways.
We’re gonna need practice controlling this. This is kinda dangerous!
Maybe we should land for now? So that we don’t all accidentally fall to our deaths?
Oh, yeah, who knows how long they had in this form? Sora glided over to the next roof and touched down, gently, and gave the rubble on the street one last look before reaching inside himself and taking a moment to savor the too-close, too-perfect, too-right feeling of the three-way harmony inside him. His heart glowing from the completed circuit of emotion. It wasn’t just him trying to force them into closeness, it was all three of them pressing close willingly. He exhaled and cut off the drive form magic.
The both popped back into reality, stumbling, inexplicably breathless and blushing. Sora’d often wondered what it was like to be taken by the drive form, to be unwoven and rethreaded into someone else’s existence, like Kairi said once. But beyond that strange metaphor, both admitted it was really hard to describe discorporation like that. It just had to be experienced.
“That was,” Kairi licked her lips, trying to pat down her fly away hair in her bluster. “Amazing, actually.”
“Good someone finally figured out how to listen before we all became a pancake,” Riku elbowed Sora in the side, but easily. “Seriously, how many weeks did it take?”
Normally Sora was a little bit surly after a drive, his chest still burning with the phantom feeling of a raw, open wound. Like something had been ripped out and not sutured up. But now, he felt tingly, that warmth and frothy sweetness was lingering around his heart. He laughed, and instead of returning Riku’s taunt, grabbed the both of them into a smothering hug.
“Hey, sorry. About taking so long to realize that.” Kairi kissed his cheek and Riku nudged their foreheads together. “But hey, at least its a really cool drive, right?”
“Yeah! Gonna need a name for it, though!”
“What about Highwind?”
Sora actually belted out a laugh at the memory that name conjured and Kairi pulled a face. “Really? After Cid? No thank you.”
“Yeah, sorry, Riku. Vetoed.”
“We’re gonna name something Highwind someday,” he grumbled.
“What about Paopu form?” Kairi was already laughing at the faces they made.
“How about not naming our super awesome drive form after a fruit?”
“Well you’re not making any suggestions, Sora, so don’t complain!”
“Hmmm.” Looking down at the well between their legs, at their shoes, as his arms dropped to circle their waists. “What about Destiny form?”
Riku’s head was resting on both of theirs, so nobody saw his thoughtful expression. “A bit sappy, but… yeah. Feels right.”
“It’s perfect,” Kairi nodded, and that was that. “At least that didn’t take as long as you two deciding what to call Overdrive.”
“Ugh, don’t remind me!” Sora whines and Riku hip-checks him for his sass.
“Don’t blame me because you were stuck on Supremacy, of all things!”
“Its a cool name!”
“Uh huh, nothing pretentious about it at all.”
“It does sound a bit arrogant.”
“Kaaaaairi, don’t take his side!”
“Sorry, but it does!”
“And Overdrive sounds cooler, admit it.”
“Uuuuuugh, I’m being ganged up on!”
They both laugh, kissing either side of his pout. He can’t hold on to it with that kind of affection being showered on him and kisses them both back. “Wanna go home? I could use a nap.”
“Tell us something new,” Riku summoned Way to the Dawn and called down their gummi ship. They tromped aboard, Sora never removing his arms from around them until he absolutely had to. As long as he kept holding on to them, the warmth around his heart didn’t fade.