@flamesilocks
In the cool of the night, piled all in Lea’s bed with Lea and the twins, Isa held his own hand up, opening and closing it to watch it flex. He turned it over to look at the back and flexed his fingers again. It was just like he remembered, down to a small scar on the back from a childhood brawl with Terra. Muscle and sinew moved smoothly beneath his skin, and the fingers were warm when they touched his palm.
It was incredible.
It may have been over a year and a half for Lea, but for Isa, it was like he’d died yesterday. He remembered the dreams he’d had while he was asleep in Lea’s heart, but only in the way of remembering any dreams. The whole year and change could have gone by in those dreams, and it still would have felt like a single night to him. More real was the very recent memory of a sword sliding through his heart, the distant coldness of his body rising off the marble plinth he’d been left on, and the stiff, cold sensation of bluish fingers on the hilt of the Keyblade. Even Lea’s warmth in those few hours had been deadened by that cold.
Isa had thought, when he left Lea in the forest, that he would never see him again in this lifetime. He’d had so many regrets that he’d thought would have to go unfulfilled. He would never kiss Lea properly, or hold him in the night. He would never again have coffee with him, pleasant evening conversation in hushed whispers after the children were asleep. He would never see the twins grow up, never know if they became Keybearers or what kind of man and woman they grew into. All he’d been able to do was to end Xemnas’s threat, and trust in Lea to do the rest.
And yet here he was. This new body was indistinguishable to him from the old one, except for the scar on his face, and the scar he would have expected him to have on his chest. They’d tried to explain a bit to him how it worked, that this body was based on Isa’s perceptions of himself, but that was hard to wrap his mind around. It seemed so solid, so immutable. But ultimately, he didn’t care where it came from, only that it let him come home.
“I still can’t believe it,” he murmured to Lea over the twins’ sleeping heads. “That I’ve really got another chance.”
