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It takes a while for them to fall into a routine.
There’s so much adjusting that has to be done: to daylight, to eating, to moving without claws on their heels. But they find one, eventually, between fretting over Sora and Kairi’s continued absence and erecting Eraqus’s memorial at the very base of the golden staircase to the castle and remembering how to be people again. It isn’t structured so much as felt—they do what feels best to them in the moment.
Right now it’s figuring out what on earth these Gummiphones are.
There are worlds of difference between holding a Keyblade and holding this thing: for one, Ends of the Earth doesn’t scream at him out of nowhere; and for another, it doesn’t have so many buttons that are easily pressed. It’s somehow simultaneously delicate and bricklike, and he doesn’t like it. “Chip and Dale really thought we needed this thing?”
“It’s this button that takes the picture, I think—”
He’s not prepared for the bright flash of light that floods his bedroom, and sees stars long after it’s faded. Ven lights up as he presses his fingers against the bottom of the screen and their faces flicker into view. Ven’s eyes are indeed closed, and Aqua’s eyes are bright above the dark circles that are only just starting to lighten. She laughs as she points to his reflected face, at this twisted brow and uncertain set of his mouth. “You should’ve said ‘cheese,’ Ven.”
“I’m not good in pictures,” he mutters. “And I don’t see why we even need these anyway.”
“It’s so we can save the memories most important to us!” Ven says, and lifts himself slightly off the bed. Aqua’s cheek presses into Terra’s bare shoulder as they look up at him. “So we can look back and say, you know, this actually happened! We were here! And we can look back on them when we’re older.”
“Proof that time passes,” Aqua says softly. She nods. “Show me how to do that again.”
Ven all but rips the Gummiphone out of Terra’s hands; he lets him, content to watch his two best friends talk about something that has nothing to do with darkness of the Worlds. A week of rest has only just started to sand down the sharpest edges of their anxieties; the dark rings under Terra and Aqua’s eyes have lightened only by a shade, and Ven has only just started flinching at shadows instead of outright summoning his Keyblade. Healing would come in time, Yen Sid had said, and even though he’s right it doesn’t make Terra any less impatient.
“Looks like Terra’s about to fall asleep,” Ven teases.
“M’not,” he mutters, sinking deeper into the pillow. The arm underneath Aqua’s shoulders had fallen asleep long ago; not even her slight adjustments could wake it up. She shifts her head slightly against his bicep, her face flush against his skin as her fingers absentmindedly drum against his chest. It’s rhythmic, like a second heartbeat, and absolutely maddening. He’s pretty sure she knows it, if the tiniest teasing tilt of her smile is anything to go by. He turns to Ven, who’s sitting back up with his fingers flying across the screen. “What’re you doing now?”
“It’s our first selfie, we have to immortalize it!”
“We can’t just keep it to ourselves?”
“That’s not the point of social media, Terra, geez. Get with it.”
He’s still learning how to “get” his body. He almost says it, feels the bitterness of it on his tongue, but stops at the last minute; Ven’s grin is too infectious and Aqua is giggling at his side and he’s just happy to have the three of them together again. Instead he mutters a soft, “I’ll leave it to the expert,” takes a deep breath, and closes his eyes.
Sleep doesn’t come naturally to him anymore; it catches him by surprise, when it wants to, and he’s powerless to beckon it on his own terms. It’s why, when he opens his eyes hours later, that he clutches the sheets in surprise. Either Aqua or Ven must have switched the overhead lights off in favor of the nightlight they’d shamelessly installed in each of their bedrooms; the slowly spinning shapes stare back at him, so at odds with his pounding heart.
Had he dreamed? There’s a sickly sweet layer of film on his tongue that no amount of swallowing can clear away, and he can feel his bangs glued to his forehead. He breathes, turning to his right. Ven is curled in a ball away from him, twitching softly. One foot jabs out unexpectedly, hitting him right in the calf; Terra winces and scoots away before remembering—
Wait. He reaches out, expecting a warm body, but finds only empty shadows.
“She’s at the memorial,” a high thin voice says. Terra looks up to see Chirithy staring at him from the foot of the bed, its tiny paws fiddling with the light pink pouch hanging from its belly. He’s still not sure exactly what the creature is , only that Ven had been adamant about keeping her with them. “But she’s usually back by now.”
He blinks. Aqua’s always in bed with them when he wakes up in the morning; maybe a little cold to the touch, yes, but he’d attributed that to so many years in the Realm of Darkness. There’s a similar chill in his chest after so many years split into three distinct pieces. Her sneaking out for some alone time is equal parts relieving and distressing.
He tosses on a jacket and slips into warmer pants and his slippers. Chirithy jumps past him to steal his spot, curling up into Ven’s side with a soft smile on her face. Terra watches them for just a moment, then sighs and walks out the door.
The golden hallways of the Land of Departure gleam even in the night—they’re practically carved from his memory, with no signs of trauma in their walls. He could have been nineteen again, preparing for the Mark of Mastery exam, waking up from a bad dream. He half expects Master Eraqus to come around the corner and invite him for a midnight cup of calming tea, even though Terra knows he’s gone, know everything has changed even if it looks like nothing has.
(That’s almost enough to make him stop walking, to make him want to turn around and bury himself under piles of heavy blankets and stop thinking for a while. He doesn’t. But it makes him think about his insistence to rearrange their living room, about Aqua’s demands for a new garden in the back, about Ven tying balloons to every vertical surface. If things look different, it means they are, right?)
She’s kneeling at the bottom of the grand staircase that tumbles into the courtyard, just as Chirithy had said. Dawn has only just started to break, a thin line on the horizon and peeking out behind the green mountains; it’s catching the edges of her profile, the trails of her pale bathrobe, the tips of the wayfinders they’d rested on Master Defender’s hilt. He could have grabbed the phone, could have snapped a picture. Maybe. But there’s something almost too intimate about Aqua with her head bowed and her hands clasped in prayer, her shoulders—
Shaking?
He must do something—gasp, maybe, the tickle at the back of his throat is great to pin suspicions on—because Aqua immediately flinches toward him, one hand extended and sparking with electricity. Her eyes go wide as she recognizes him. “Terra?”
“I’m so sorry—”
“I didn’t wake you, did I?” Aqua asks, already starting to get up.
“No, I just—you weren’t there when I woke up, I got worried. But I can leave—”
“No, it’s okay—”
“Are you okay?” Dumb question. She’s not okay; none of them are okay. “I mean—”
“It’s… fine. Caught me by surprise is all.”
They stare at each other. And then, as the moment falls down before them, they laugh. Her smile is shy as she pats down the space to her left, settling back down into the grass. He follows her lead, leaving only an inch between them as he carefully lowers himself before Master’s Defender. He probably should have brought a blanket with him.
She’s the first to break the silence. “I have to see the sunrise every morning,” Aqua says quietly, her head bowed again. “I took it for granted, before. I just… get restless, thinking about it. Missing it.”
“It grounds you,” Terra says. Aqua nods.
Pinks have started to bloom between the gold-breaking day and the last moments of night, casting the mountains in a rosy glow. After years of darkness and nothingness, he’s fine staring out and saying nothing.
Aqua takes a deep, long breath before saying, “I’m sorry if I worried you.”
“It's okay,” he says, now turning fully toward her. Aqua refuses to meet his eyes, tilting her chin up the way she always does when she’s trying not to cry. He doesn’t know he’s reached for her hand until the very tips of his fingers are touching the very tips of hers, and even then he doesn’t know until she’s snaked his pinky around his. His voice feels unsteady. “It's harder than I thought it'd be.”
"Coming back?" she asks quietly.
He nods. He doesn't want to spend his life waiting for the other shoe to drop; he especially doesn't want to do it now, when the mountains are gleaming in the sunrise and Aqua's almost holding his hand. "It's like this is the dream."
They chuckle darkly, shy smiles saying more than words could. “I’d rather be here than anywhere else, though. And... I don’t want to go back to the way things were before.”
“Really?”
She nods, taking a shuddering breath. “I’m just… scared.”
“About anything specific?” he asks, the joke falling flat immediately after he says it.
Suddenly she isn’t just grabbing his pinky but his whole hand, entwining their fingers together. He squeezes on instinct, the way he used to when they were just kids hiding from thunderstorms. “Just... change. Which is silly,” she says, “that’s what we’re supposed to do. But…”
“What if we can’t,” he finishes.
“No, it’s…” Aqua turns to him with glassy eyes. “I don’t know. It’s hard to put it into words. But that’s why I come out here to watch the sunrise, because it’s like… things change, and it’s natural. It’s good. I’ve been having trouble remembering that.”
Terra stares straight ahead, at the wayfinders glinting against flowers and metal, but snatches glimpses of her from the corners of his eyes. “Hopefully all we need is more time. To… process everything.”
“Have you been? Processing?”
He’s combed over the entire castle grounds, looking for any improvements; he had been the one to suggest Eraqus’s memorial, to prepare the earth and strike the blade into the ground. “I don't think so. Not giving myself enough time to do it. Too much I want to do to… to make up for everything.”
She doesn’t say anything empty like, don’t be silly Terra, you don’t have anything to make up for. It’s all the others can say and no matter how hard he protests, they keep saying it, and he keeps knowing they’re wrong. He knows Aqua thinks it, the same way he knows she thinks that she’s the one at fault. Instead she closes the distance and presses her cheek against his shoulder. It’s different here with the two of them alone, versus them in a bed with Ventus. Something about the way the pinks and golds have begun to dominate the horizon, and the heat of her skin against his shoulder, and her hand in his hand, and it’s hard to know if he’s just missed physical contact or if he’s missed her, and maybe the two aren’t entirely mutually exclusive.
“I want to make things right, too,” Aqua says softly. “Maybe we’ve already started, just by making it here.”
He breathes shakily, and nods into her. They stay curled into each other until the sun has met the tips of the mountains, and when they finally stand their legs are shaky from sleep. Aqua doesn’t release their hands but stares at them, brushing her thumb against his knuckles thoughtfully as she shakes feeling back into her toes. “What’re you thinking about?” Terra asks.
She takes a moment to study their hands together. “Spring,” she says, and looks up at him.
“You think it's going to rain?” There isn't a cloud in the sky, which is strange for this time of year.
"How out of the cold and darkness of winter, things... change. For the better." She tilts her head and smiles, squeezing their hands again.
There’s a line they haven’t crossed in decades and it’s right there in the dirt between them—their hands are straddling it, tugging it into irrelevance. His heart thrums in his chest, a different beat than what he’d woken up with. His free hand rises, trembling slightly, to pull a wayward lock of hair from her face behind her ear.
He lifts his brow. She nods and leans forward. He meets her halfway.
It’s nothing more and nothing less than a press of their lips together, timid and searching. Their noses are cold from the dawn and the days they’d lost to darkness, he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He deepens the kiss by accident, breathing softly into her. She trembles against him, pushing her chest against his, but when he goes to pull away she keeps him there, one hand pulling against the small of his back.
Does a kiss end when they breathe? If so, he loses track of the exploring kisses they give each other. He only knows he’s seeing stars when she finally pulls away, just enough to touch foreheads. His mouth is dry and his palms are sweating and his limbs are shaking—
“Where are you?” she whispers.
“Here,” he answers immediately, breathing slowly. It’s his hands in hers, his heart thrumming against his chest, no dark thoughts in his mind. Just the two of them right now. “Here, always.”
“Because we don’t—”
“I don’t want to go back to where we were before,” he echoes, and blinks down at her.
She's blooming right before him, her eyes glassy and shining. “Yeah?” she asks.
“Yeah.” He presses a light kiss against the bridge of her nose. “Even if I don’t know what I’m doing.”
She smiles, nuzzling into him. “Worry about that later. I’m tired.”
“Back to bed then?”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep,” she says. “Maybe a quiet breakfast. And… a nap later?”
“Sounds good.”
“Yeah?”
He smiles. “And… maybe I can kiss you a little more?”
“While I’m making breakfast?”
“Or… um.”
They’re so close together that he feels her smiling before he ever sees it. “Now works too.”
“Or maybe—”
"Just kiss her already! ”
They both flinch up to see Ven staring down at them from the bedroom window, with what looks suspiciously like the Gummiphone in his hand. Chirithy straddles the guard rail beside him, its paws held up to its mouth. “Or do I have to come down there and chaperone?”
“Come help with breakfast if you’re feeling so sassy,” Terra calls back.
“For someone who hates sugar, you’re acting pretty sweet!”
Aqua cackles, squeezing his hand. “He has a point.”
Even the flood of heat to his cheeks isn’t enough to deter his smile. “No syrup for you then!”
“I won’t need it if you two are down there!”
He turns to Aqua. “Tag-team him?”
“I'll get Chirithy,” she says, and pulls him up the stairs.