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For as long as he could remember, the first and only face Jason ever saw was Foreteller Lupa, tall and severe in her heavy robes and hidden behind the mask of a wolf. According to her, he was destined for greatness and left in her hands to train, to mold into a Hero of Light, one who would save Kingdom Hearts itself from falling into ruin. She told him there was a prophecy, told to her countless lifetimes ago during the Age of Fairy Tails, that the Seven Heroes – Duty, Love, Creation, Wisdom, Loyalty, Courage, and Justice – would rise to defeat those who sought to plunge the worlds into unending Darkness. She told him he was the first, he was Duty, and he would lead his fellow warriors to greatness.
Sometimes, he couldn’t help but doubt her. He was too small, too young. How could his Master ask this of him? She grew quiet when he brought his doubts to her, watching him with eyes that he would never see. She told him that he was too small and far too young, but that he would grow. She would train him until he was ready to face a destiny too great for one so it had to be shouldered by seven. She always sounded sad when she spoke of his destiny, so he’d learned not to ask about it.
He trained with Foreteller Lupa for sixteen years. Sixteen years of learning to wield a Keyblade. Sixteen years of honing his magical ability. Sixteen years of running up and down the beautiful, sterile, empty streets of Scala ad Caelum, searching for a single other living person and finding no one. Sixteen years of learning to carry his destiny. Sixteen years of becoming Duty.
But now, his Mark of Mastery exam was upon him. He was going to prove that all of Foreteller Lupa’s years and efforts in training him hadn’t been a waste. His mission was simple: As he was Duty, he would be the one to gather the Seven Heroes. She told him that at one point, back when she was young, all of the many worlds had been one, and the connection point was the very world he’s been calling home his whole live. Since then, the universe had become fractured, each world isolated and separated by endless Darkness. Now, he would need to navigate the Ocean Between, to find Love and Creation, and bring them back beyond the edge of the world to train for their shared destiny. Jason took his mission like a solemn oath, swore to return with the other Keybearers of prophecy, and took off on his Keyblade glider.
At first, he’d worried that finding his charges would be the difficult part. A vast universe for him to explore in search of two singular people? It seemed impossible. But his Master had told him it was possible. May your heart be your guiding key. He would find them, he would find Love and Creation. He just had to follow where his heart led.
It took him a long time, and many, many failed attempts. He landed first on a world of magic that looked nothing like his own, with kings and knights. Then another of gods and heroes, but not the right sort of heroes. Yet another, completely bizarre and alien to him, full of things apparently called “cars” and “boybands” that scared him more than he cared to admit. None of those worlds were wrong, exactly, but they weren’t right. Not yet, at least.
So he kept going. He journeyed farther and farther from home until he found a little speck of a world, one that was caught in the realm between Light and Dark. A place that collected those that the universe had let slip between the cracks. Jason landed and found himself in a city, not entirely unlike Scala ad Caelum, but built with dark worn brick instead of brilliant white marble and full of neon lights instead of gleaming bronze. Really, he supposed, it wasn’t actually all that similar, but there was something to it that felt familiar. He knew that this world was right. This was where he’d find Love and Creation.
Or, rather, Love and Creation would find him.
Jason knew what he was expecting to find. He was expecting to find a pair of Keybearers, stern and serious who carried their part of their shared destiny on their shoulders. He wasn’t expecting perfection, Foreteller Lupa had warned him that only Wisdom had his level of training, but he was expecting capability.
He was not expecting to be thrown to the ground when two almost concerningly small bodies jumped out a window and landed on him. He wasn’t expecting Keybearers who had only managed to summon their weapons for the first time that day when they were running from Shadow Heartless. He wasn’t expecting blunt accusations or shouting or laughter or teasing. In short he was not expecting Piper and Leo.
Fortunately, Jason was able to easily dispatch the Heartless chasing them. Once they were safe, Piper and Leo were more than willing to share their story, and it was a story Foreteller Lupa had warned him to expect. The two of them, like all the other residents of Traverse Town, were originally from another world, Radiant Garden, but it fell to Darkness one day when they were young. Since then, they’d lived in peace under Cid’s guardianship, roaming the twisted streets of the world they now called home. Today those monsters, the same ones who had invaded Radiant Garden, had shown up, and in their desperate attempts to protect this world they’d summoned Keyblades for the very first time.
It was… not an encouraging origin story, to say the least. Piper and Leo didn’t know about the prophecy, they didn’t know about their destiny, they didn’t know they were Love and Creation speaking directly with Duty. They didn’t know how to fight or use magic or strategize for battle. Piper was better with her words than anyone in the heroic stories Foreteller Lupa used to tell him, and Leo could make just about anything with seemingly nothing more than a free hand and a grin, but that wasn’t enough. They weren’t ready to be Heroes of Light.
And besides all that, they weren’t even allowed to try.
Piper and Leo had taken him to Cid, a gruff blond man who ran a Gummi Ship depot. He’d heard Jason’s story, his mission, and his destiny. He’d nodded along while Jason told him that Piper and Leo were part of a prophecy, that he needed to take them to Scala ad Caelum to train so that they could one day save the world. When Jason was done, Cid had looked him in the eye and told him no. He didn’t care about prophecy or destiny or Mark of Mastery exams. Piper and Leo would save the world one day, he wouldn’t argue the point of a massive key made of Light, but they weren’t setting foot off that world until they’d trained as best they could with Leon and Cloud first.
Jason had asked what he was meant to do in the mean time, Cid told him that wasn’t his concern. If he wanted, he could go find the other four Heroes of Light, but he couldn’t have Piper and Leo. Jason knew that wasn’t acceptable. He’d been sent to find Love and Creation, and he would succeed, no matter how long it took. If that meant he would be spending the next several years on an unfamiliar world, learning techniques he’d mastered by the age of six, so be it.
Piper and Leo did not agree. As Jason would soon come to learn, they rarely, if ever agreed to confinement. Instead, they found Jason in the night, and told him that they were leaving with him then and there. They were taking a Gummi Ship, one Leo had been building himself, and they would be sailing to their destiny before the sun rose on Traverse Town.
Jason refused. Of course he did. He’d been given his orders, and he wasn’t about to commit larceny at the behest of two teenagers who didn’t even know what they were asking him to do. Piper and Leo had exchanged a look, and in a moment that was too embarrassing for Jason to ever reflect on, he found himself waking up in the passenger seat of a Gummi Ship and told to smile because the ship “ran on happy faces.”
Jason considered taking command of the vessel and flying it back to Traverse Town, really he did. The problem was, quite frankly, he didn’t know how to fly a Gummi Ship. He briefly weighed the pros and cons of hitching it to his Keyblade glider, but he wasn’t sure if that was possible, much less feasible. Besides, this… was kind of what he wanted in the first place. His mission was to retrieve Love and Creation. He wasn’t about to deliberately make that mission last several years longer than it needed to. So, they sailed on, beyond the edge of the world, to Scala ad Caelum to face their shared destiny.
Or, rather they would have, if pesky things like reality didn’t thoroughly get in the way. As it turned out, the Gummi Ship Leo had built wasn’t designed for long interspace voyages, Frankly, according to Leo, no Gummi Ship would survive an uninterrupted trek of that length, but Festus was only really intended for short little skips from world to world. They’d need to stop regularly for refueling and repairs, meaning their journey would take a bit longer than expected. Not years, though, for which Jason was grateful.
To be honest, Jason found he didn’t actually mind their meandering journey through the Ocean Between. He’d lived his whole life being told that he was a Hero of Light, but he’d never been able to do anything with that knowledge. Now, he was. He was saving worlds from falling to Darkness, locking and unlocking the hearts of the world. He was helping people with each and every world they landed on, and for the first time in his life, he felt like he was truly doing something worthwhile instead of waiting for the day when he would.
In addition, each new world was a fantastic training ground for Piper and Leo. They worked together seamlessly, solving problems and covering each other’s backs in a fight without needing to share more than a glance. Piper found a niche with up close and personal combat, and Leo was, quite frankly, breathtaking when he unleashed Fire Magic, and both of them fell in line with Jason’s command without issue. They were a flawless team already, and Piper and Leo were improving as warriors in leaps and bounds. Quite frankly, Jason was beginning to naively think that no world would ever even pose a challenge.
Then, naturally, came Wonderland.
They didn’t land on Wonderland, they crashed. There was something about the world, something about its gravity that refused to behave and it dragged them in without asking permission. Leo had struggled at the helm, trying to outmaneuver a force of nature, but a stray asteroid clipped Festus’s wing, sending them spiralling down into a crash.
Then, because the universe wasn’t done punishing Jason’s fleeting hubris, their ship was surrounded by giant sentient playing cards threatening to arrest them. Piper had nearly talked them out of trouble, but an oversized dodo bird in a waist coat had taken a liking to the way she talked, scooped her up and announced that he was taking her to have an immediate audience with the Queen of Hearts. Leo shouted and lunged, but the cards swooped in to put a stop to that, fully and totally dedicated to making sure that their Queen’s audience with the “ incredibly charming little girl” happened without a hitch.
Jason was frozen in place, still trying to wrap his head around what in the world was happening to them when Leo grabbed his wrist, a wild look gleaming in his eye. “On three, cast your highest level air magic spell at my feet.”
Jason jolted and looked at him like he was insane, which Jason hadn’t been fully convinced he wasn’t. “What?”
“No questions, just do it! One!”
“Leo, what do–”
“Two!”
“I swear don’t you–”
“Three!”
Jason gave himself a split second to growl in frustration before he thrust his Keyblade in the air and dipped into his magic. “Aeroga!”
A ball of whipping winds instantly manifested beneath Leo’s feet just as he let out his own somewhat startled yelp of “Fira!” Their magic mixed in a way Jason had never seen before, creating a massive vortex of fire – bigger than any Fire Magic Jason had seen, including from Foreteller Lupa – that radiated out from them in a devastating wall that knocked their opponents back.
Much more surprisingly, however, it launched them up.
They had essentially been fired from a cannon, and they were now soaring through the air with absolutely no way to aim. That part wasn’t too bad, but the thing about cannon balls was that they always hit the ground eventually.
“Hang on!” Jason ordered, tucking Leo’s head under his chin as they crashed through the tree canopy. Right as they were about to crash, he shouted “Air!” summoning a somewhat soft place for them to land.
Once they were on the ground, Leo rolled out of Jason’s arms with a groan like he’d just fallen asleep at Festus’s helm and regretted it. “Memo to me: Playing with fake gravity means that real math doesn’t apply.”
“Huh?” Jason demanded, bewildered. “You knew that would work?”
“I knew it shouldn’t have worked but made sense in a kinda sideways way, which meant that it should have worked here,” he said, like what he was saying wasn’t incomprehensible. “Welcome to Wonderland. Things are about to get weird.”
“What?” Jason asked, starting to get a little worried that he’d simply forgotten every other word in the English language. “You’ve been here before?”
“No, but I know of it,” Leo explained. “Traverse Town gets a lot of travelers because it’s not tied to a physical place, it just exists where you need it to. Pretty much all those travelers come to Cid’s, and Piper loves talking to them. Wonderland came up a lot because pretty much everyone needs a pit stop after this place.”
“Oh. Glad we managed to crashland here then,” Jason muttered to himself. He frowned and looked around, finding that they were in the middle of a dense, brightly colored wood. As he watched, a nearby loaf of bread came to life and each pair of slices formed a pair of wings on a little insect-like creature. Bread-and-butterflies. Jason’s brain throbbed. “What are we even supposed to do in a place like this?”
“Easy. We rescue Piper, get back to Festus, and get out of here. Maybe try and grab some Gummi components if we stumble across any.”
Jason resisted the urge to smack him. “Okay, and where, exactly, is Piper?”
“Well, we came from that way and that weird dodo guy took her that way, so we should probably go…” Leo stood up and put his thumbs together like he was about to triangulate before he just spun around a few times and picked a seemingly random direction. “This way.”
“No,” Jason said flatly. “Absolutely not. That’s not how tracking works. That’s not how anything works.”
“Oh yeah?” Leo challenged with a grin. “Wanna bet?”
Quite frankly, no, Jason didn’t want to bet. Not when Leo sounded that confident. Sure enough, Leo stepped forward and parted a bush, and beyond it was a perfectly nice little path that led right on up to the castle. Jason’s brain throbbed again.
“This place functions on chaos,” Leo told him. “You gotta lean into that or it’s just gonna chew you up, spin you around, and spit you out.”
Jason chewed his bottom lip for a moment. “I don’t really do chaos.”
“Well, lucky for you, the universe gave you the exact right partner for this,” Leo grinned. He offered Jason a hand. “Creation is chaos, my guy. Follow my lead.”
Jason hesitated. He’d never been offered a hand. Not like that. It made his heart skip a beat or two. He placed his hand in Leo’s. It was smaller than his and calloused perfectly and so, so warm. “Lead the way.”
Leo’s face lit up like the sun and he happily pulled Jason to his feet. “Come on. This way.”
“Where are we going?” Jason asked. Leo tried to drop his hand, but Jason held on tighter until Leo looked at him with pink cheeks.
“I don’t know,” Leo admitted. “But I know we’re going together, and that’s the important bit, don’t you think?”
“I guess it’ll have to be,” Jason agreed, letting himself be led for the very first time.