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“Do you think it’s strange,” Riku asks, brow furrowed, “That they’re using humans to fight their war?”
Sora looks up at him and blinks, blood-stained blade resting casually on his lap.
“Well,” he replies, tilting his head, “We’re not really human anymore, are we?”
Riku stares back at him for a few long seconds. Sora, with his bedraggled brown hair and big blue eyes, specks of blood spattered about his clothing. A few splashes on his cheek. He looks like Riku. He looks like Kairi. He looks like all of them, all the Children, and looks nothing like the Fae Masters who command them.
Riku turns his gaze forwards again, towards the vast stretches of battle-torn wasteland in front of them. To the purple and pink-clouded sky, dark and heavy with storm, the world’s twin moons hidden. The distant rumble of thunder, and the sound of boots pounding against the ground. Of steel clanging on steel. Of screams and cries and shouts. Sounds he’s well familiar with. A landscape and background he feels like he’s always known. A home of blood and fighting, carnage and glory hand in hand together. This is his childhood.
“No,” he says finally, “I suppose not.”
--
None of them remember before. None of them even think about before, really. Why would they? They’ve been chosen for something magnificent, something glorious and celebrated, and they are all thankful that they were removed from their boring lives in the human world, among their simple human families.
Humans are frail and stupid and weak, they all know this to be true. To be the Children raised by the Fae is a great honour. None of them are silly enough to regret being chosen, or to think back on a past they’ve been allowed to forget.
“ ‘Allowed to forget’” Roxas echoes, something biting in his tone, “I’ve only just now realized, how awful that is. ‘Allowed’. What is that saying, really? That we’re to be grateful?”
“Of course,” says Naminé, her tone without inflection, “Obviously, because now our lives have always been within the Faerie realm. We have no memories of our terrible, boring, human lives. Why shouldn’t we be grateful?”
Roxas stares at her, and she stares back. Her voice was so emotionless that it rang with irony, and she knows it, and knows that Roxas hasn’t missed it.
“Obviously,” Roxas repeats, eyes tightening, “Of course, what was I thinking? Ha.”
He turns from her, and Naminé watches him. His dual blades, strapped to his back. The heavy cloth of his battle clothes, though he is without his armour. She can see scars on the bare areas of his arms, not from battle, but from marking. They all bear them. Sigils of the Fae who raised them, who own them, who stole them away and now send them into war.
Naminé watches Roxas. The tense line of his shoulders. His stiff back. The clenched fists at his sides. He has been too long off the field. It’s been days since Xion was killed, and still he hasn’t returned to the battle. They won’t stand for it much longer. There are too few war-ready Children, too few with the ability to wield the Blades of Light, for them to allow him to rest longer. They were brought here to fight, and their lives hold no meaning without it. That is what it means to be a Child of the Fae, once human, now a soldier.
“Do you want to remember, Roxas?” Naminé asks quietly, hands clasped together, “Do you wish you weren’t one of the Children? That whatever life you once lived was still your own? Even if it was clumsy and mortal and blinded, as the humans are?”
Roxas keeps his gaze downwards, fiddling with one of the bands around his wrist. His eyes are far away, shadowed. He looks tired. But the Children do not need sleep; the food and drink of the Fae make it so.
And still, he looks tired.
“Xion remembered beaches, sand and ocean,” he says, nearly inaudible, “None of those exist in the Faerie realm. She wanted to see it again, badly. Seashells, that contained the sound of waves crashing within them. She remembered the sound.”
A long silence falls between them, and Naminé stares at him, at his faraway gaze and grief-stricken form. Memories, the things that the Fae scorn above all us. The first thing they always aim to strip away.
“There’s a reason we don’t remember, Roxas,” she says gently, “Don't do this to yourself, please.” Don’t make them do to you what they did to her.
“This isn’t our war,” he retorts, voice sharp, whiplike. He’s still turned away from her. Still refuses to face her. “This isn’t our world, and this isn’t our war.”
Do you want to be erased? This is the only existence left to us now.
Naminé closes her eyes for a brief moment, taking a deep breath.
“It is now, Roxas,” she says firmly, opening her eyes, “We are the Children under the Fae, saved by them, and repaying them by serving them in war. We are the Children, and this is our life.”
--
“One, two- Again, Kairi! Harder!”
Kairi staggers back a few paces, the breath knocked out of her lungs, and arms ringing from the strength of Aqua’s blow. In front of her, her sparring partner and teacher looks on sternly, blade still brandished in her hands. Her arms shine in the light, the pink of her scars, the stark colour of the Sigils burnt into her skin. The lines of muscles, and the marks of an eternity of battle. She is the oldest of the Children, and one most favoured by the Masters. Kairi struggles to remain surefooted in front of her, to not be unbalanced by her fatigue and aches.
“You don’t want to be behind the safety of our lines, healing and helping troops recuperate?” Aqua demands, “You want to be with your boys in the fighting? Then you need to learn to hit, and you need to learn to take a hit. Again! Don’t lower your arms!”
Kairi grits her teeth, and raises her own weapon to respond to Aqua’s next series of blows. To match her, to rise to meet her. Her hands are sore with new formed and new popped callouses, body throbbing with bruises and abuse. But Aqua is right. She does not wish to wait with Naminé in the background, away from war. She wants to be where her boys are. She wants to fight with Sora and Riku. She wants to serve their Fae Masters, to preserve the light they protect. She was given a Blade of Light, and she means to use it for more then healing spells. She will fight, as the Children are meant to.
“Again!” barks Aqua, and Kairi charges with a shout.
--
Ventus is sleeping.
Terra watches him, stretched out serenely on a cot by the window. Light from their twin moons spills over his sleeping form, casting him in an ethereal glow, made more prominent by the plain white clothes he’s clad in. His pale hair, round face, fair lashes fluttering lightly in sleep. The barely there movement of his chest, up and down. To see him so still is jarring. Ventus, ‘Wind Child’ some of the Fae courtiers would titter, watching him soar about. They’ve served as Children together for countless years, centuries perhaps, or millennia, and in all that time, Terra has never known him to be still for so long. Fast, nimble, the darling Child of their court.
And now he is sleeping, motionless. Near to lifeless.
“You mustn’t blame yourself, Terra.”
He turns, head lifting, shoulders squaring at the familiar voice of one of the Fae Masters. Master Eraqus is the one who owns him, Ventus, and Aqua, the one who they have served faithfully since they were saved. But Master Xehanort has always been a frequent visitor, and they have served under him during campaigns as well. It is he who Terra bows to now.
“It happens, despite our best efforts,” Xehanort says, continuing forward, “We try to save you from your mortal lives in the human realm, from the mundane, from the inglorious, and lift you up to a life of valour, prestige, and longevity among us, the Fae.”
He crosses the room at his usual slow, deliberate pace, pausing in front of Ventus’s sleeping form, fingers resting on the pristine white sheets.
“But this, we cannot seem to prevent,” says the Master, making a tsking sound with his tongue, “You live for so long among us, eating our food and drinking our drink, and one day your formally mortal bodies decide they can handle it no longer. They begin to crumble, to crack. Your souls splinter, your minds shatter. We cannot stop it. All we can do is put you to sleep when we sense it happening, so that you may be spared the indignity of losing everything that makes you ‘you’ before death.”
“And he will die?” Terra asks, voice cracking, “There’s nothing that can be done?”
Master Xehanort makes a grave sound at the back of his throat, shaking his head. Terra barely stops an agonized noise from emerging from his throat, closing his eyes and biting back his grief. Not now. Not in front of the Master. Not here.
“Thank you,” Terra says, hoarse, eyes still shut. “Thank you, for all you do. For saving us from humanity, for making us your Children, for giving us the glory of war.”
He takes a deep, shuddering breath, opening his eyes again. “And for allowing us to go peacefully, after your freely given magic can no longer sustain us. Thank you, Master.”
The Master gives him a wane, thin smile, and nods once.
“Do not dally here long, Terra,” he says sternly, “The war still wages, and Aqua does her part, training the new recruits. See to Eraqus, if he has new areas for you to reap for him.”
Terra hesitates, and then feels ashamed for it. He does not want to leave Ventus’s side, not if it is truly the end of days for him. But he cannot disobey a Master. He cannot.
“As you say,” he responds deferentially, bowing low. His legs are stiff, his walk awkward and resistant as he leave Ventus’s side. His brother. His eyes sting and he keeps his head high as he walks past Master Xehanort, hoping to hide his weakness.
When he is gone, Xehanort turns his gaze back to Ventus’s slumbering form, shaking his head once.
“Another one down,” he comments with a sigh, “How regretful.”
There are so few Children now. Where once they had legions, now they only have a handful. Mickey’s new crop are promising, though he is too soft on them, to lenient in their training. But that Fae Master is strangely fond of the Children he steals. As if they were more than simply tools of war to him. Foolish.
“What, no mention of me?”
A voice from behind him, familiar. Xehanort doesn’t bother turning. He knows who he’ll see. A dark mirror version of the form in front of him. A soul splinter, a shard of a shattered mind. A mistake they made on purpose, to lessen their losses.
“No, Vanitas, Terra doesn’t need to know about you,” he says, back still turned. “Let him believe his brother is completely at rest. That time will come soon enough. When you fall in battle, Ventus will die as well. But until then, you will serve as he cannot. I don’t have time to be coddling new Human babes, not when we’ve trained Terra, Aqua and Ventus so well. You have his knowledge, you’ll take his place in battle until you fall. Twisted though you may be, a Blade of Light still comes when you call.”
“Wringing the last uses out of a tool that’s broken,” Vanitas sneers from the shadows he’s lurking in, golden eyes glinting. “You could have put him to sleep earlier, both you and Eraqus, but you let him break. You let me be created, so there’d be something left of him that could still fight.”
“Yes,” Xehanort agrees, honest as the Fae are, “The purpose of the Children is to fight for us. To wield our Blades. We raise you up from humanity, and for that you are bound to our service, for as long as we will it.”
“ ‘Saved’, to die at your leisure’,” Vanitas laughs bitterly, “Our benevolent Masters. If they knew. If only they knew the truth of it. Those willfully blind idiots who call themselves your ‘Children’.”
“But they don’t know,” counters Xehanort with a laugh of his own, “They never do, not until they break and see our true natures. Not until they become a creature of shade and shadow, like you. No,”
The Fae Master turns, smiling. “No, they do not know. And so, we own them. They are our Children and they are ours entirely.”