Hello there! This story is brought to you by impulseness XP. Though it could've have been completed without the help of my friends Madi and dragonsunlight. Thank you so much!

This is a strange story idea, but it was...well, maybe not exactly fun, but satisfying to write. It's also AU. I think the alternate universe-ness begins about halfway through the normal KH2 storyline, a little while after Sora obtains Master form.

Disclaimer: If I owned KH...well...(looks at all the unrelated AU KH fics I have)...I'd never be able to decide what to do with this crazy series.

Storytime!

An Altar of Heaven, Made of Broken Glass

"Sora," Riku spoke, almost to himself.

The boy the silver-haired teen spoke to was about a year younger than he was, fast asleep on the partially-chewed couch. His back was turned away from him as he snored loudly.

The aqua-eyed boy sighed.

"Sora. Hey Soooooraaa," he persisted, shaking the slumbering teen's shoulder.

"Whaaaat?" whined the boy called Sora, drowsily rolling over to look at his friend…only to roll right off the tiny maroon couch and onto the hard wooden floor.

"Ow!"

The boy in the yellow vest laughed heartily.

"Nice going, Sora."

"Shaddup Riku."

The more muscular boy helped to pull the boy named Sora back to his feet.

He looked almost the same. His spiky hair was as logic-ignorant as ever, his cheerful smile beamed brightly as always, and he wore the same zipper-heavy clothes and clownishly oversized shoes. He even had the same face. It was just that his hair was a little too blond and his eyes a little too pale a blue, but really, that was nothing. It was nothing.

"Whacha wake me up for, Riku?" asked Sora, stretching. "I'd been having such a nice dream of the islands."

"You remember the islands?!" Riku exclaimed happily.

"…Yeah…Yeah! I remember them now!" the blue-eyed boy chirped, smiling broadly. "We were with Kairi, building a raft to go somewhere. Or, well, at least that was what we were supposed to be doing. We kept getting sidetracked with brawls and races and stuff."

"Haha, I remember that," the aqua-eyed teen replied, smiling. It had been right before their whole adventure began, before the Keyblades, before the Heartless.

"And then we went back to the city and played with Hayner and Pence and Ol-"

"There aren't any cities on Destiny Islands, just towns," the yellow-vested boy corrected quickly, almost sternly. "And those people you mentioned, Hayner, Pence, and Olette, they weren't real. They're from an old TV show we used to watch, remember Sora?"

"..Oh yeah, I think you said something about that before," the teen with golden hair responded, looking up at the ceiling. "Guess my memory's still messed up, huh? But it seemed so real…"

"Well, you were pretty obsessed with that show," the aqua-eyed boy went on casually enough. "You fantasized about meeting them in real life all the time. It was kinda scary really."

"Hehehe…" Sora replied sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head.

"But see? You're remembering more all the time. Soon you'll be back out there kicking Heartless butt all over the galaxy again," the silver-haired teen continued. "You can tell DiZ about it. He's the one that told me to get you up anyway."

"Really? What does he want me to do?"

"See how much your Keyblade skills have returned in the past week mostly," answered the aqua-eyed boy, walking down the hall with Sora eagerly following behind. "You've been improving by leaps and bounds, after all. You've even picked up a few new tricks."

"Almost back to normal, right?"

"Yeah."

"Meaning that'll I'll be able to kick your butt soon, right?" the pale-eyed boy asked mischievously.

Riku smirked.

"You wish."

"Oh yeah?!" dared Sora.

"Yeah!"

"We'll see about that!" the boy with spiky hair exclaimed, summoning one Keyblade in each hand. One was white, Oathkeeper, and the other was black, Oblivion. He took a playful fighting pose and smirked.

"Is that a challenge?" asked the silver-haired teen slyly, bringing forth his own Keyblade, The Way to Dawn. It looked like a purple bat's wing, but it had a smaller angel wing that erupted from the tip of the point.

The boy with golden hair suddenly straightened up and lowered his Keyblades to his sides, as he rose his head up slightly. He gazed at Riku with ice-hued eyes.

"You bet it is."

The other Keyblade Master raised his weapon apprehensively.

"Sora, there's no need for you to act like that, especially toward Riku."

The battle-ready boys both turned to the crimson-clothed man walking up to them. His face was almost completely covered by red strips of cloth wrapped around his head, leaving only his mouth and one orange eye exposed. The two teens unconsciously banished their Keyblades, letting them dissolve into white light once more.

"Sorry Mr. DiZ," the spiky-haired boy answered, giving him a goofy smile. "Guess I got carried away there for a sec."

"You weren't the only one," DiZ stated, his orange eye rolling over to Riku. While the words were stern, the tone was amused.

"Yeah, I know, all fights are to be held in the fighting room," the yellow-vested boy repeated automatically, his mind drifting back to the time when DiZ came back to find half of the third dining room's floor gone, thanks to a Firaga Raid gone wrong. "But he started it!"

Sora stuck out his tongue at him.

'Well, regardless of who started it, I need Sora to come with me for a while," replied the crimson-clothed man, beckoning the blond one forth. The teen sulkily obeyed. "After that, you can play with each other all you wish. Providing that the two of you don't take out half of the mansion while you do so. Or half of the dining room floor, for that matter."

Riku chuckled in spite of himself. "Right."

"Can I have some Sea-Salt Ice Cream first?" whined the pale-eyed boy.

"…We'll see," answered DiZ, not looking pleased at the mention of the sweet.

"Aww, c'mon!"

As Sora and DiZ walked towards the end of the hall, Sora pestering for the treat all the while, Riku began to go the other way.

IIIIIIIII

Riku wasn't sure of what of what this world was called, now that he thought of it. He'd always thought of it as Traverse Town, but of course that wasn't right. It may have had fragments of that city world of misplaced souls, including the old clock tower and even that restaurant that Leon and the others used to eat at all the time, but that didn't make this world Traverse Town.

Woven between the pieces of city were small patches of desert sand and modest Buddha statues, partially overcome by the pale blue crystals that grew on everything in this world. There was a lush woodland right in the middle of this so-called Traverse Town, the roots of its mighty trees upheaving some of the street pavement as they snaked up and down the roads. Beyond the town itself were alternating patches of flowing lava and frozen tundra, separated by walls of steam and the occasional palm tree. He and Sora lived in a mostly intact mansion near the forest-bound heart of the city. Whoever had previously lived here must have loved dogs, for there were puppy prints and teeth marks on every inch of the house. He wondered where all those dogs were now.

So in a way it was Traverse Town reincarnated, only that reincarnation had somehow been mauled by all these other scattered pieces of worlds to be forgotten. A patchwork world, really. Could it still be called Traverse Town?

Riku stopped by an old grandfather clock lying in the street, its wooden surface broken and overgrown with the pale blue crystal growth, the hands twisted nearly into knots, the numbers on the edges rubbed away.

If anyone else lived on this world mended from shattered pieces, Riku had yet to see them. All he and Sora ever saw were Heartless, lots of Heartless. He didn't mind too much; it gave him something to do, and Sora needed the practice anyway. It was too bad there were none of those fluid Nobodies for them to slice up, really. Sora needed to get used to killing those too.

Aside from Heartless scurrying about, the only other sounds to be heard were the hazy tunes that drifted down the street. They came from the radios that were hooked up in the deserted buildings that once belonged to Traverse Town. He could've swore that he knew the melodies that were playing, but the disrepair of the radios twisted them to the point that they were now different songs altogether.

Of course Sora liked to fiddle with the radios and the random junk lying around. He seemed especially fascinated by the crystals that consumed everything. The crystalline crusts bothered Riku with their overpowering dominance over everything else, but Sora didn't mind them, often using their larger outgrowths to reach the higher points in the city. Riku wondered if he remembered what the old Traverse Town was like.

He had just avoided tripping over some of these crystals, shooting out from cracks in the street, when he spotted her.

Yuffie was there, curiously examining a larger crystal outgrowth that was feeding off the remains of a large mirror, rising from the reflective surface like a frozen waterfall. She skipped and hopped around it like a rabbit, pausing only to cautiously poke at the alien object before quickly bouncing away from it again. In her mouth was a sea-blue ice cream pop that could only be Sea-Salt Ice Cream.

How'd she get here? And how can she stand that stuff? Riku wondered absentmindedly, as the black-haired girl made silly faces at her distorted double on the crystal's surface. Probably through aimless wandering in her Gummi Ship, I bet. That girl's never been too great with directions.

But it was too early. Sora was still recovering. He wasn't ready to face Yuffie and the others yet.

Oh well, at it least it's not Leon or Cloud, just Yuffie. I can deal with Yuffie.

"Hey there," Riku called out, casually walking toward her. "What brings you here?"

Yuffie let out a small yelp and jumped, but she spun around with ease and flashed him a perky smile.

"Hi Riku! How's it going?" she chirped back, hopping over to him as she eagerly finished the remains of her ice-cream pop. She twisted her head around, trying to look behind him. "So where's Sora?"

The silver-haired teen suppressed a curse. So she had already seen him.

"Oh, he's off with DiZ, a good friend of the King," the aqua-eyed boy explained, smiling back. "Uh…and about Sora…there's something you should know…"

"Really? Oooo! Tell me! Tell me!" the black-clad teen yipped, a mischievous spark in her chocolate eyes.

"Well…Sora's got amnesia," Riku answered, emitting a tired sigh. "You see, he was so eager to re-learn how to fly that he jumped straight off a cliff and hit his head on the way down."

"…That sounds like Sora."

"Doesn't it though?" agreed Riku, smirking and shaking his head. "So when he woke up and didn't even remember his own name, DiZ and I started working on restoring his memory on this isolated world. Looks like the amnesia's temporary, since he's starting to remember things pretty quick. It shouldn't be long 'til he's the good ol' Sora that we all know and…occasionally want to hit with something."

Yuffie giggled.

Riku leaned against a crystal-free part of a cracked old building. "Yeah, that's been my life for the past couple of weeks, babysitting the almighty Keyblade Master. We would've told you guys about it sooner, but DiZ thought it was best that he shouldn't be exposed to too many people before he's fully recovered. Might lead enemies here."

"Hey, I understand," the chocolate-eyed girl replied, smiling. "Too bad it's like, a total lie and stuff."

The aqua-eyed boy stiffened.

"…What makes you think I'm lying to you?" he interrogated.

The dark-haired girl closed one eye and playfully gazed at him with the other.

"Weeellll, I've been watching you guys for the past few days, using my super-ninja techniques to conceal myself," the black-clad girl bragged, crossing her arms triumphantly. "And that guy, he doesn't really act like Sora. I mean, he acts mostly like Sora, but not quite. We treasure-hunters notice these kind of things, you know."

"Of course he didn't act totally like himself," the yellow-vested teen growled at her, sending her an irritated look. "He's still recovering from amnesia."

"And then I hung out with him yesterday," the ninja girl continued, blissfully ignoring Riku's comment as she unfolded her huge shuriken, a throwing weapon that looked like a metal star. "It was lotsa fun, climbing all over everything and hunting for Heartless and stuff. But you know, just chatting with him about this and that, he didn't really act like he had amnesia. It was more like Sora's memories got mixed up with someone else's. And he kinda looks different too, with blond hair and light blue eyes and stuff."

She stopped studying her shuriken to set her sepia gaze on him, still grinning cheerfully.

"In fact, he kinda looks like Roxas."

Riku's eyes narrowed.

"You know that bastard?"

"Bastard? Now that's mean," Yuffie scolded childishly, waving a finger at him with her free hand. "He's nice once you get to know him. He's just shy, that's all."

"Shy?" the silver-haired Keyblade Master hissed. "Yuffie, he was a Nobody. A member of Organization XIII, no less.They're nothing but shells. No heart, no emotions, no remorse for the ones they've killed. I'd think you'd know that after all the discussions Leon and the others have had about them."

"They've got souls, though. Souls count too, you know," the dark-haired girl answered perkily, tossing her shuriken up and down casually and watching it rise and fall. "Though it does suck that they don't have hearts."

"Yuffie, don't tell me you're a damn Nobody sympathizer," Riku growled lowly. "They're our top enemies, even above the Heartless, and the members of Organization XIII are their leaders. That kind of talk is traitorous. You do know that, don't you?"

"Oh c'mon, I haven't gone to the dark side or anything, even if they do have cookies," Yuffie protested, turning one chocolate-hued eye to him. "If a Nobody attacks me, I'm still gonna kill it. But Roxy is a good Nobody. He's never tried to attack me or anything. I mean really, he came from Sora. How could he be bad?"

Riku clenched his teeth.

How much does she know?

"But tell me," she suddenly spoke, snatching her shuriken swiftly from the air. "Why do you talk about Roxy like he's in the past? Like he's just some dust to be swept under the rug? I still see him in Sora. Do you really think you can get rid of him that easily?"

She smiled, but her sepia eyes were slits.

"So what the hell did you do to him? What have you done to Roxy?"

Beads of sweat crept out of Riku's skin.

"…How do you know about Roxas?" he finally asked. "We brainwashed him, put him back in Sora, and put him to sleep long before any of you even knew what a Nobody was."

"Oh yeah, that," the ninja girl answered, almost nonchalantly. "Have you ever helped Sora activate one of his Drive forms?"

Riku thought about it. He hadn't, now that he thought of it. He'd heard a lot about it from DiZ, how one or two other people could transfer their energy to Sora to give him enhanced powers. His clothes, made of a magic cloth, would glow and change in the process, though it was little more than a color change with a few added designs. It also allowed him to summon two Keyblades at once, something which Sora hadn't been able to do on his own until recently.

"No."

"Well, it's kinda hard to explain, but…" Yuffie began, casually walking around as she twirled her shuriken. "…it's like when you transfer energy to him, you're connected to his brain for a sec, and you can read his thoughts and stuff. And you can sense the other people connected to Sora too."

"Including Roxas."

"Yep," she chirped back. "I didn't know what he was at first, but whenever I became an energy donor to Sora, I always sensed this 'shadow' at the back of his mind. It was always unhappy and scared, but in a sleepy way. I think that made Sora unhappy and scared too, though I don't know if he realized that. But whenever that 'shadow' got really unhappy and scared it'd thrash around mentally, or something. Then the whole Drive thing would get messed up, and everybody but Sora would get knocked out."

"Anti-Form," the aqua-eyed boy stated grimly, thinking back to that one time he saw Sora's body enveloped in darkness, tendrils of darkness spouting off his shoulders and back, his eyes glowing a hollow yellow. Sora hadn't exactly been in Anti-form then, but DiZ said it looked exactly like that.

"Yeah, that thing," Yuffie answered, continuing to spin her shuriken around absentmindedly. "But I didn't sense anything evil from it, just the fear you have when you're having a bad dream. So one time during the Drive I transferred some of the energy to it instead-"

"And woke up Roxas."

"Yep."

"Even though you had no idea what would happen if you transferred energy to that 'shadow' that caused Anti-Form?"

"Yep."

"And that's why we never thought about someone interfering like that, because we never thought that anyone besides Sora would be naïve or stupid enough to do something like that," the aqua-eyed teen concluded, almost chuckling.

"All that grown-up paranoia stuff is overrated."

"That explains a lot," Riku stated, smirking. "How Roxas got loose in the first place. But that won't work this time. Sora doesn't need people to give him energy to activate Drive. He can do it by himself now. And there's nothing left of Roxas for you to revive either."

Yuffie narrowed her sepia eyes.

"You never did tell me what you did to those two. I'm not just talking about Roxy either; if you were going to remove him, then you must have done something to Sora too. He was a part of Sora, after all. And even though it took awhile, they did become friends. Sora doesn't let anything happen to his friends without a fight. So what did you do?"

The silver-haired boy let his smirk slip away, and his hands fell to his sides.

"…Nothing that wasn't going to happen in due time."

"Go ahead and tell me then," the obsidian-clad teen beckoned, leaning against a cracked wall and leering at him, her smile still intact.

Riku sighed.

"Allright then, let's start at the beginning," he spoke, walking slowly back and forth. "Back at Hollow Bastion, when you guys were fighting against Ansem and I was still possessed by darkness, Sora took the dark Keyblade that I had wielded and stabbed his heart with it to release Kairi. Then he became a Heartless."

"And with every Heartless produced there remains what the corrupted heart left behind, the body and soul," Yuffie interrupted, closing her eyes. "If that person had a strong will, though, the body and soul will begin to move on its own, instead of just dying like most bodies do when they lose their hearts. That body and soul becomes a Nobody. I know that."

"Then let me continue," growled the silver-haired Keyblade Master. "When Kairi found Sora again, she, as one of the Princesses of Hearts, was able to revive him. But she created a new body for him instead of recovering the old one, so his original physical body was lost. That would become Roxas."

"Like I said, I already know that. Roxy told me about it a while ago. What's this hafta do with now?"

"The point is that the body Kairi gave Sora was temporary at best, though none of us knew it at the time, even Sora. It was DiZ that told me about it later," Riku continued with irritation. "Eventually that temporary body would break down and Sora would become a Heartless again. Likewise, Roxas, being a Nobody, was just as unstable as Sora was, and would eventually revert to a normal Nobody, a mindless Dusk. You know those black robes Organization XIII wears? They wear them to hide the deformities that appear as they backslide to being regular Nobodies."

"Yeah, I knew about the robes," Yuffie stated. "Roxy told me about that too."

"The only way to save either one of them…" Riku added. "…Was to have one be absorbed into the other, so they would be whole again and become stable."

"And then I messed up your perfect little plan by waking up Roxy?" she asked with a perfect grin.

"Actually, it wouldn't have mattered whether you had interfered or not. Our plan was doomed from the start," Riku answered with a humorless smirk. "Too much time had passed. It was like trying to put two puzzle pieces together after they had been weathered by the rain. They couldn't fit together anymore. They had changed too much while they were separated."

"They became their own people, huh?"

"Yeah, but they couldn't change enough for them to stay alive separately," the yellow-vested boy pointed out. "They were still backsliding. Sora would still become a Heartless, and Roxas would still become a mindless Dusk. Being together wasn't enough because they didn't fit together enough to support each other. You might have noticed Sora had been having migraines and fevers a few weeks ago. And Roxas too, I imagine."

The ninja girl's smile slipped.

"So what happened when you and this DiZ guy realized your plan wasn't working?"

Riku closed his eyes.

"To make the pieces fit again…" he began. "…we had to reduce them to their most basic forms."

Yuffie clutched her shuriken tightly as she stared straight at Riku.

"…You mean you turned Sora into a Heartless and Roxy into a Dusk. Ripped them apart and sped up the process."

"It was going to happen anyway," the aqua-eyed Keyblade Master muttered, looking at the large crystal just behind the ninja girl. "But this way we had control of what was happening, and we could keep them contained when they reverted. Then it was just a matter of putting the heart and the shell back together."

The details were much more grisly than that, but that was all she needed to know.

Her sepia eyes gave him a suspicious look.

"Now, if I remember right…" she started, spinning her large metal star restlessly. "…if you put a Heartless and a Nobody in a room alone together, they fight until one kills the other. If the Heartless gets killed, then the Nobody harvests the heart it carried. If it was the Nobody's original heart, supposedly they'd return to normal. But if the Nobody dies, the body is destroyed, the soul is lost and the Heartless gets nothing."

Her eyes were relentless.

"So either the fight was rigged so the Nobody won, or…"

Riku lowered his gaze.

"…Yes, I killed the Heartless and took the heart myself," Riku finally spoke, glaring at the crystalline-crusted ground. "And then I gave it to the Dusk to absorb."

The so-called Anti-Form scuttled across his mind's eye.

"And when you put the two together, you got -"

"We got Sora," Riku answered firmly. "We weren't entirely sure who or what we would get, since this was a desperate last resort based only on theory, but we got Sora."

"That kid's not Sora and you know it," hissed the sepia-eyed girl, glaring at him. "He's not Sora, and he's not Roxy either. He's someone else, and he's always going to be someone else."

"That's a lie!" the silver-haired boy snapped, thrusting his arm out. "He still may have traces of Roxas in him, but he's still Sora!"

"Oh, he's got more than a few traces of Roxas in him," the ninja corrected, smirking ever so slightly. "Believe me, I should know. You just don't want it to see it."

"Trust me, once he's fully recovered, he'll be Sora and Nobody but Sora."

All ghosts of a grin were banished, replaced by a frosty calm.

"…Do you really think you can pass him as Sora?" she challenged, her hand loosely holding her shuriken. "C'mon, you're not gonna fool anyone. Well, okay, you might trick Donald or Goofy, or maybe even Cid, but do you really think Aerith isn't going to see the difference? Or Cloud? Or Leon?"

"It'll be easy enough to change his hair and eye color back to the way they're supposed to be. You won't be able to tell the difference."

"…That won't change anything," the obsidian-clad girl countered far too quietly. "It might buy you some time, that's it. They're gonna see it in the way he talks, in the way he acts, in the way he fights, that he's not Sora. They'll be able to tell that he's not Sora because he's not going to be a carbon-copy of Sora, not even close. He's not going to be Sora because Sora's already gone…along with Roxy."

She looked away.

"….I'm sorry, but your little experiment failed. You didn't save anyone. You only killed them. Both of them."

"No!" the aqua-eyed boy barked.

"Face it, Riku," the sepia-eyed ninja murmured, her eyes gazing at him tiredly. "Even if the others take the bait, Kairi's gonna take one look at him and know it's not Sora."

Riku was silent.

"Of course, I can just go tell the others now and save you the humiliation," Yuffie abruptly chirped, with a grin that was almost cheerful. She turned around and began to walk away.

The silver-haired teen smirked.

"Sure, go ahead. I'm sure they'd love to hear that you were in love with a Nobody. I wonder what they'd think of you flirting with the enemy."

Yuffie froze.

"That's the only way that Roxas could have gotten as strong as he did, because you kept feeding him energy whenever Sora was going into Drive form," he went on in a smug tone. "That's why sometimes I saw Roxas walking around instead of Sora. That's why I saw you hanging around Sora so much, both of you munching on Sea-Salt Ice Cream. Sora can't stand he stuff any more than I can, but Roxas loved it. All this time I thought you had a crush on Sora, but it was really Roxas, or should I say Roxy, you were meeting with, pretending to be Sora. You used the ice cream to tell who was in charge of Sora's body at the moment. I can't believe I didn't see it sooner."

She clenched her metal star so hard that it shook.

"And I'm sure Leon and the others would love to know why our plans always backfire whenever we try to strike a major blow to Organization XIII and the Nobodies," Riku added. "So go ahead and tell them all about Sora, because you'd have to tell them about everything else too, wouldn't you? Or I can explain in better detail when they come to me and DiZ for answers. I wonder whose motives are going to sound better?"

Yuffie said nothing.

She spun around with the swiftness and grace of a river, flinging her huge shuriken right at Riku, her dark eyes ablaze. The aqua-eyed boy ducked quickly, letting the oversized metal star buzz right over his head and into the large blue crystal behind him. It exploded into a thousand pieces on impact, the fragments falling powerlessly onto the broken street. The pale blue crystal didn't even have a scratch on its glassy surface.

She stood there, shaking with rage, before she dashed away without another word.

IIIIIIIII

The shattering of the shuriken still reverberated through his mind.

Riku sat in his favorite torn-up chair in the mansion, almost swallowed by its blue fluffiness, looking at the pages of a book he had randomly plucked off the crusty shelves. An old jukebox he had scavenged from outside blared hard rock throughout the large room as he read. But neither of the wailing guitars or artistic descriptions of the sea stood a chance against Yuffie's hushed voice in his mind.

…I'm sorry, but your little experiment failed

No, we didn't fail. We got Sora backWe saved Sora.

For a moment he was back in DiZ's room, where the crimson-clothed man offered to take on the Heartless in his place. He refused. It was his duty, his debt.

You didn't save anyone.

The scene suddenly jerked to him opening the door, to seeing that black form with blank golden eyes, parodying his friend's looks, his identity. It turned and hissed, arching its back like a stray cat. He suddenly stepped back.

You only-

His mind hit fast-forward, and the dark creature holding Sora's heart was sprawled out on the floor, its form torn by the furious wounds of a Keyblade. He loomed just by its side, raising his darkness-stained weapon above his head with both hands. The blade rushed downward-

"RIKUUU!"

CRASH!

The raging jukebox was silenced as a certain spiky-haired boy came flying, literally, into the room at an uncontrollable speed, swiftly colliding into the ancient noisemaker. The golden-haired teen let out a faint moan as he laid across the now-broken music machine.

"Sora!" Riku cried out, leaping out of his chair and running over to the scene. "Are you allright?!"

The younger Keyblade Master pushed himself up to a sitting position and rubbed his head. Then he gave the yellow-vested boy a wide grin.

"Riku! I can fly! I can fly!" he exclaimed, suddenly floating just out of Riku's grasp and circling the ceiling happily. "I finally did it! I've been trying so hard, and now I can fly!"

"Seems you'll need to work on the brakes, though," DiZ chuckled as he strode into the room, watching the flying boy with satisfaction. "Didn't give you too much of a scare, did he Riku?"

"Only a heart attack or two," the silver-eyed teen grumbled. "When'd he learn to fly?"

"Just an hour ago, actually," the crimson-clothed man explained, still watching the pale-eyed boy coast around the room weightlessly. "Apparently it's a new Drive form, one even more powerful than the Master form. Such astounding progress! I never dreamed that the recovery process would go so well! Only a couple of weeks and he's even more powerful than before!"

Something about the way that orange eye blazed made Riku's gut clench.

"Hey, Mr. DiZ?" the blond boy asked, narrowing avoiding a head-on fender-bender with the ceiling's chandelier.

"Yes, Arcelio?"

The aqua-eyed boy snapped his head in DiZ's direction.

"…Arcelio?"

"Oh yes, I've been meaning to tell you," the orange-eyed man began. "I've decided that, in order to help confuse our foes, Sora will go by two names, his original name and that of Arcelio. By doing this, our enemies will think there are dealing with two threats from unrelated sides instead of just one."

Riku started to say something, but decided against it. Instead he too watched Sora glide around the room like a runaway kite.

…Why do we need to feign a new threat? Sora's a big enough threat as he is. Having him go by another name won't change anything…the others will still recognize him…

"The name means 'the altar of heaven'. Fitting, isn't it?" DiZ added with amusement, before looking up the to the spiky-haired teen drifting above him. "Arcelio."

The blond boy floated down obediently at his beckoning, a cheerful smile on his face, and the two of them strolled out of the room.

Riku observed the scene silently.

Why does Sora answer to that name so easily?

He turned away, and ambled over to the grimy window. Pushing them open with a loud creak, he looked down upon the city he once knew so well. The pale blue crystals coated more and more of this world every day. It was even starting to crawl up the mansion walls now.

Off in the distance, the old clocktower gonged with an odd twang that wasn't there the day before.

…Could he still call this place Traverse Town?

Somehow this turned out a bit darker than expected. I mean, I knew it wasn't going to be happy, but I expected more of a spark of hope at the end...oh well.

I MIGHT continue this fic at a later date if people like it enough, but it will need planning, and. more importantly, I've already got two big stories in mind (first finishing up Gilded, and then starting on the Glitch Chronicles for the Pokemon series. Soo...it could take awhile...

Please tell me what you think!

Cya!