Work Text:
You grow up—you grow up golden, you grow up in a whirlwind of painted dusks and crystal seas, and on boats that carry you from shore to shore and in arms that carry you from shore to home and all the way up the stairs to bed, and you make believe—or perhaps just believe—that this childhood is special among childhoods, because this childhood will be infinite.
It is not.
There is something infinite, however, that yearns invisibly to close the space between you and your best friend. It is easy to outrun. It is more difficult to ignore. You grow up impatient, stomping your feet and scrunching your face up when things don’t go your way, and you cannot seem to comprehend what renders his body so still. You are motion in excess: a jump in midair, a triumphant shout, the blur of limbs clumsily colliding as you race on the edge of learning how your body works in motion, learning all that he was born understanding of his own. You are trying to catch up, in every way impossible, to someone who is not aware that you would rather he to wait around while you do so, and you continue not to tell him, because why would you tell him? So he keeps going—not because he sees himself as superior, but because it is what he knows how to do. And you keep running, pausing to untangle your shoelaces, your hair wild with sea salt, looking up, staring at his back, pushing yourself off the ground, running again.
He knows how to perform maturity in a room full of adults. He is passively likable—puts forth no conscious effort in order to come off that way, simply is. You see the way his eyes flicker toward the D—PLEASE SEE ME AFTER CLASS, drawn in heartbreaking red across the top of your paper, how he tries to cup his hand over his own grade only for you to tug it away because you have to see you have to see you have to know—and of course, he’s an A+ Job well done, complete with a smiley face that strikes itself against the whites of your bones with the reminder of how hard you studied; you just can’t pay attention when every fiber of your being has to shuffle and fidget and sporadically pinch his arm under the desk. It’s not fair; you know he didn’t study. You know he sat down fresh, danced the numbers out, then leaned back to read for the rest of the period. You know the numbers line up for him because what doesn’t? Don’t the stars, as well? This is not quite bitterness, but whatever it is scrapes the depths of what your tiny heart can feel.
You do not become that feeling, though. It is not in your nature to be consumed by something you can fight. So you fight, in the ways you know how. You may not be able to divide three digit equations or win the races or come up with the best names for the game where you, him, and that new girl pretend to be pirates, climbing trees and building forts and finding “treasure” buried in the sand, but you can smile. You can laugh. You are less serious than him, more of a goofball. You grab on to that, hold it tight. There has been another thing burning in your chest from the time when you were four. You give it kindling, let it jostle your marrows, shiver through your veins.
You find yourself wishing, just once, that he would have to try like you’ve had to try. Just once, about anything. Just once, to not effortlessly succeed at whatever task is set before him. Just once. Please, please. It’s not a real wish. It doesn't have the guts to be. Just once. You say it to the ocean: Just once.
Deep in the most secretest chambers of your hearts, none of you actually think the raft will make it. But it’s his idea, so you go along with it because it does not even occur to you to say no, and why would you? You’re not sure when, but somewhere along the line you stopped being bright to secure your place beside him and started shining for your own sake, and sometimes—though you’d never admit it—for hers. When she laughs you think she is louder than the sun and more graceful, too, but every time you look at her there is sadness there, an ache that does not belong to you but which you selfishly wish to share, yet don’t at the same time. You look at her and imagine losing your home, your island, what that would be like. Without a place to return to, how can she smile so wide? How can she laugh louder than sunshine? Everything she loved in that elsewhere place is gone. Her family, gone. Her belongings, gone. It’s been ten years but their absence grows no less painful. You try not to ask about it but end up asking about it anyway, more often than any of you would like, but she says she doesn’t remember much at all, and that she has you two now—what more could she need? Still, you catch glimpses of the residual melancholy of her loss in the way her lips tremble slightly when she thinks you aren’t looking, in how her eyes grow hard and distant. You can’t reach her there. You can’t cover all that distance. She’s standing next to you before the brilliant blue of the endless ocean and all you can think about is how she’s farther than the horizon; you would reach for her hand, but you’re scared you won’t find it.
And you’re scared that, in reaching for one, you’d be losing another.
You know he thinks you don’t notice the ways in which he’s changed since you started getting closer to her. He thinks you don’t see the hurt circling his heart like a vulture. He thinks you don’t notice his bizarre insistence on getting you two to hurry up and share a paopu fruit. He thinks you don’t see him anymore. It feels good, for a moment, to have something that he does not have, to have something special to call your own. It feels good—until it doesn’t anymore, and you just want him back. Please, please. He stands next to you, teases you in all the old familiar ways, but the words bounce off each other, echo in a hollow chamber. He stands next to you, but he’s not there, hasn’t been for some time.
Let’s fight, he says, and this time you win. Let’s race, he says, and the result grants you the title of captain, and you name the raft Highwind. You got lucky, he says, but you know that’s not true.
At dusk, she tells you not to change. You are fourteen, and the well of childhood that you once thought infinite has begun to run dry. You wish you could tell her for certain that you will always stay the same, that your bonds will remain strong and hardy and of the same quality they were when you forged them. You can’t. The sun goes down red.
Tomorrow’s the day.
You have to sleep. You have to sleep or else you can’t hoist the sails, or do whatever else needs doing on the raft. You have to sleep but the world’s off-kilter; something’s happening without you. All your life you’ve wanted to be a part of something in the way that he’s a part of something, standing out by how well he fits in. You were not born for the things he was born for. Your destiny runs slightly behind. You take nothing with you when you head for the docks, only the wooden sword—as if that can keep the storm at bay.
On the island, the sky’s radiant abyss opens around you like the maw of some great beast. As you’ve done all your life, you search for him. You search and your nightmares take form beneath your feet and you can’t fend them off, not with this—
But there’s a voice. A familiar voice in your head telling you to wield what is already yours. Suddenly the shadows bend before you. You slice your way toward where the world is ending on this island you call home.
Come home, you want to tell him, when you do find him there, his eyes illuminated by the alien light of another world. Come home—but this is home, or this was home, and what you really mean is, Riku, don’t ever change—
Then it’s all dark—the sky is dark, the sea is dark, and his body is turning a color the body should not be—