A/N: This was a scene from an earlier draft that I ended up cutting, but I still want to share it with you all! Usually I just post the final version of my pieces, but I thought it would be fun to give a sneak peak of what goes into my writing process. I have pages and pages worth of cut scenes or alternate versions of scenes like this that I sometimes use later on, or even for different fics.

Sora let the door to his room close and collapsed against it, then took a deep breath and summoned his Keyblade. Something he'd done a million times, and yet his hand was shaking like he was fighting Heartless for the first time.

He stared at the weapon in his grasp. Its smooth silver blade ended in… well, teeth, just like every other key. Except not, because the teeth on this key had a pretty unique design.

They formed a crown. His free hand shot up to his crown necklace and fiddled with it, his fingers feeling its familiar edges.

"I wasn't imagining it, was I? Her Keyblade… has a king chess piece on it, and it's connected to the paopu fruit with a red string."

His face was hot and his breathing was the only sound in the room besides the faint hum of the air conditioning in the background.

"It represents me, doesn't it?"

His heart raced at the thought. Who else could it even be? And Keyblades didn't lie. They reflected the hearts of their wielders. At least, that was what he'd been told.

"Kairi, I mean so much to you that… that I'm a part of your heart? A part of your Keyblade, even?"

He sank the rest of the way to the ground because his legs had turned to mush at the thought. A warm feeling bubbled up inside him and spread throughout his whole body, and he stared at his Keyblade and grinned.

She likes me. She really likes me.

He hardly dared to hope, but… could it be more than that, even? First the paopu drawing in the Secret Place, and now this. It was hard not to wonder.

Then why… why had she tried to hide it? He frowned. It was weird that he hadn't gotten to see her Keyblade until today. And she'd been all reluctant about it, too, blushing and stuttering when normally she was so confident and teasing. She'd avoided his hints and had been strangely cold and short with him on the Gummi Ship ride back home, too.

He leaned his head against the door and sighed. "Why were you embarrassed? You have nothing to be ashamed of. Kairi, if only you could see how much you mean to me, too."

Oh.

Oh.

He placed his palm over his face. "Oh man, is that why?" He groaned and smacked himself a few times. "Boy, am I an idiot."

He let the Kingdom Key disappear and sprang to his feet.

Time to clear this up once and for all.

A/N: So yeah, you can see how parts of this conversation were absorbed into the part where Sora talks to Kairi about the Keyblade in the final version. I also changed the internal dialogue for the other parts of the fic (represented with italics) into part of the narrative for later versions for consistency. The final version is entirely from Kairi's POV as well, whereas this scene is from Sora's POV.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading this! And thank you for all the feedback on the story itself, I really appreciate it!