Anyway, the premise is one that's been done quite a few times already: Sora after "the incident" and what might have happened to him, but with an AU spin to it. Cookies to anyone who can pick up on the influences that will end up showing up on subsequent chapters (of which there should be 3, for a grand total of 4 chappies as of now). Not for one who doesn't want some things spoiled. Spans episode 26 of SIGN and onward, through events in Outbreak. Also, several liberties taken in terms of appearances, names, and the like whereever details have been previously left vague. Keep in mind that events presented may or may not be in chronological order. Here's to bad habits, once more. :D ]]

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[ Chapter 1 : Memory ]

She couldn't take her eyes off him. It was one thing to grow accustomed to what could have been described as a barbarian of sorts, but even that didn't compare to the man who sat next to her in his modest white sedan. The hair was the same, and the eyes too. Toss out all that blue body paint and put some clothes on him and there he was: the same person, but not quite. He took the attention in good humor, pulling great amusement from the blush her cheeks would take whenever he smiled.

"It's just a little bit further," he announced after giving the road ahead of them a good squint through aged square glasses. Traffic in these parts consisted mainly of bicycles and those clunky trucks that took vegetables and rice from the farms in the nearby country side in to the markets at the borders between the urban and the rural. Trees, lampposts, and gray stone walls flashed by the windshields, but she wasn't looking.

"Now you'll have to excuse me if the place is still a mess. In all honesty I wasn't expecting to have you move in so soon... and it's been a while since I've had any, ah, extended visitors." The manner in which he spoke was the same as well - the kind gentleman with a heart of gold. Just like a big teddy bear.

"It's ok, Sakuma-san. I can help you clean up."

He stole another glance at her, the young woman who had dominated his thoughts in recent months. Having her there was unreal, for it was only a few days ago that she had been wrapped in the arms of a coma, and they had been fighting for the key to free her from The World. Now that she was here...

Kazuhiro Sakuma nodded. Red light... Cut the gas, ease the breaks, check the mirrors... Left, right... "Yeah, that'd be great. I started cleaning out a room for you, but cleaning in this case meant something along the lines of 'moving a pile of boxes from one room to another.'"

The girl, who he had learned was named Mitsuki Saiga, shifted the duffle bag that was currently the sole item in her possession (save the clothes she had on) on her lap. "Good thing I don't have much luggage, huh?"

Suddenly she looked very tired, and her gaze wandered towards the sidewalk. Thinking of her father, no doubt. "What about all your stuff over at his place...?"

"Don't need any of it. They'll just bring back bad memories..."

A car honked from behind them, reminding Sakuma-san of the green light that hovered on the traffic light's face. His little white car puttered itself into motion again, slowing to take a turn into a driveway not even a block or two down the street from the traffic light.

The house, just like the car that would sit in its driveway and the man who owned it, was modest. It was a two story squeezed into a square outlined with a tall stone wall, open only at the driveway's entrance and by the end of a short paved path that led up to the front door from the street. A tall tree sat just behind it, in the lot's pathetically tiny backyard, and she could hear the faint bubbling of a waterfall over the sounds of chirping birds.

The two got out of the car and made their way into the house. The interior wasn't anything fancy, either. Mitsuki grinned at the feel of soft carpeting beneath her feet. He motioned for her to follow him and marched up a flight of stairs. The upper floor held the bedrooms, apparently - they passed by a half closed door that held piles and piles of books, from what Mitsuki could see, and went down a hall that was flanked by a number of piles of boxes. The room itself was empty except for a bed that hadn't been made just yet and a desk set beside a window that had a PC sitting on top of it. A smell hung thick in the air - cigarettes...? She scrunched her nose up and gave him a glance, at which he shrugged apologetically.

"It's not much, really, but we can get you fixed up soon. There's some stores a few blocks from here that have furniture and decorations and things like that."

It was then that Mitsuki noticed something. His brow was perpetually upturned at angles that were barely noticeable, and his eyes seemed to have the darndest time keeping track of one thing for very long. Confusion would fix that in a second, though, because Mitsuki started to giggle. "What?"

"It's hard to think of you as being so nervous," she confessed in the middle of a fit of tinkling laughter. "Everything will be all right, right? I don't want you stressing yourself out just because of me."

While his nerves didn't seem to settle that much at all, he did manage to take a deep sigh and grin wearily at her. "You could have told me that in the beginning."

"Would you have listened to me back then?" she countered.

It was true that they had not met under the best conditions. She had held tightly onto the ways of a loner, rejecting his attention just as much as Mimiru's. Things were so much different then...

Kazuhiro shrugged and shook his head, solemn as an owl. "No, probably not. Trouble's meant to be taken care of."

She donned a hurt expression, flashing puppy dog eyes at her new guardian. "Trouble?! That's all I was? I see how it is!" A mock attack was launched against him, a barrage of gentle pokes and pats, but he was quick to engulf both the attacks and the attacker in a warm fatherly hug. Years had passed since he had heard laughter - pure, beautiful laughter - in that house, too many years. At long last, it was starting to feel like a home again.

Their momentary giddiness subsided, dwindling back into the semi-awkward silence that had dominated the spaces between them. Comparing expectations within The World and without was an impossible thing to do, something that Kazuhiro learned very quickly. In the beginning he was certain of what he knew: Tsukasa's tale was one not to be taken lightly, and while it was hard to believe at first, it wasn't something to be ignored either. The boy had come across something dreadfully wrong and no one knew anything about it. He remembered watching a bit of the news one evening while he was washing dishes and hearing the mention of a comatose girl rushed to a local hospital. From then on, everything changed.

Several hours ago he had been in The World himself with the rest of their unofficial party: Mimiru, Subaru, BT, Crim, and even Ginkan and the legendary Helba herself had all pushed on in an offensive that they had hoped would take aim at whatever it was that kept Tsukasa a prisoner. They had fought fiercely at the eerie cathedral hidden away in the Delta server's fields, and when Tsukasa, Subaru, and Mimiru disappeared into a warp of some sort, they had relocated to the Net Slum. When the three had returned, Aura was with them, along with a mysterious monster...

A short while after that, he received a phone call. The man on the other line had hurriedly identified himself as "Shinichiro" or something to that effect and said she was waiting for him at the hospital. Before Kazuhiro could question the man, he had muttered something about work, apologized, and hung up. A girl at the hospital...? It had to be her. So he left, and sure enough the person he had known up to then to be Tsukasa was there waiting with another girl, the Lady Subaru herself.

Sighing, she gently slid away from him and scrutinized her new room, or what there was to be scrutinized. A pang of ill tidings struck Kazuhiro when he noticed that she was looking square at the computer that sat silently atop the desk. "I, er, figured that maybe you'd need one. I had a spare anyway, so I put the newer one--"

"Is it on there?" she asked quietly.

"Err, The World? Yeah... This computer was the one I was using and I didn't think to uninstall it or anything like that. If you want, I can help take it off of there."

She shook her head and grinned faintly at him. "No, that's ok... It might be fun to really play with them sometime. Like... really play."

That's right, he thought. All she was doing before was try and figure out what was going on...

An opened her mouth as if to speak but it was not her throat that made any noise. A quiet gurgle from her stomach made her cheeks flush an embarrassed pink. "Erk... I don't suppose...?"

He was already pulling car keys back out from his pocket and making his way down the stairs. "Let's talk some more over lunch, shall we? My treat."

An was more than happy to oblige.

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Her own private paradise had never been much to look at. The sentiment was even truer now - where brown and dirty violets had dominated before, now a sickly palette of blacks and whites adorned an already ruined ruin. The prize it once held was no longer present, nor was the one who had created it in the first place. At least she was not there in the truest sense possible: a tricky feat, considering that she was the very essence of The World.

A barren place now, not worth watching. Grave for a soul already forgotten.

They never came back. They never questioned, not once! Not in the words he had scryed from the endless data streams passing through The World. When you're on the inside, such things look very different. No longer does the data that composes the ground resemble a ground, nor the data that composes a sky look like a sky. Fragments of numbers, meaningless at first glance, flowed in an ocean's worth of data all around. Outsiders would never see the basic truth. Only the ideals the truth was meant to represent. The digital frontier had two faces, only one of which was ever seen by the average user: the side dominated by vision, the ability to perceive values in the form of pictures, images. Everything from characters to the fields that they populated. However the face was not restrained to vision alone. Sound and even the illusion of touch made the package all together much more pleasant than the abstract strings of Truth he had come to recognize, and for that reason it was often taken for granted. Once upon a time, he himself was guilty of that. Now, The World was very different.

It took getting used to. The transition was abrupt, but necessary as adaptation was for any sort of creature. Change not and be crushed, whispered Fate, and leave a world better off without you.

A fate worse than death was what she promised. The initial pain of it all was unbearable - a whirlwind of blazing knives that tore him from himself, and the horrible coldness of the crimson prison he was thrust into. "Help me," he had said - tried to say. They looked at him with confusion, then fear. Weapons were raised. From beyond the boundaries of vision, a wave glinted and rose. Something was happening. Something happened. Skeith screamed, and he felt the onslaught of a sudden darkness that overtook the field he had gone to upon her command (Aura, get her). No longer did the physical exist. All around, chains of the abstract Truth that composed The World ran like currents through the blackest seas.

He was gone.

In the darkness thereafter he waited, squirming in the confines that could not be seen nor felt with the hope of Tsukasa returning holding him away from oblivion. Morganna - that was what she was called, he would learn shortly after - rarely spoke to him. No one did. No longer did Sora exist as anything besides fragments of data caught within a corrupted shell.

Eventually Skeith would happen upon another, the man known as Orca. Another memory to be forgotten, but he was not. A Twin Blade sought revenge.

Sora waited. He waited even now, hovering high in the emptiness and corrosion that had taken over the place. Myriad structures still floated about, beads on cancerous strings, but they had slowly degraded into clumps and chunks of non-matter. All of it had been mostly forgotten as well, and thus it was not needed anymore. Neither by her nor anyone else of note. Still, the crimson staff stood even in the absence of one master.

Slowly, slowly, another took the reigns. At first it was a clumsy affair, what with being trapped within the staff. Powerless. (hopeless, oh god let me-) That was before Skeith's destruction; now he was faced with the tiniest of freedoms. He did not possess a body any longer, per se: there was no room for bodies in the river of Truth. His existence was dictated by his own set of Truths, free to mingle with and through the rest of The World as he saw fit.

classid: tblade
true
chlevel: 99
true
playerid: sora
true

Sora. The name itself had no meaning on it's own; yet another string of characters meaningless without context. He puzzled, wrapping around its fragment as if to consider its finer implications. That was him in some way or fashion, or it was once upon a time. He thought -

- red light. Red light. A pulse traced over with a jagged line, headed off by a single blip of blood red. A machine fed oxygen into his lungs, another nutrient into his veins. Clothes wet with a mother's tears, air thick with her cries -

- and thought he didn't very much like what he thought.

So he stopped, and he waited. All the time in the world.

He'd come.

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[[ Edit note, 12-9-03: I checked over the grammar and spelling but neither are very strong suits. :/ Please pardon if any mistakes remain. ]]