Chapter Text
As most children do after seeing black sails on the horizon, Sora and Riku grew up thinking about pirates. They fought with wooden swords on the sandy beaches for hours and hours until their parents called them home for dinner.
Childhood had a funny way of making dangerous things the most enticing. They learned as they grew up that those ships were to be feared. Especially by a port town whose main form of income was fishing, being out at sea.
As they grow older, Sora and Riku stuck together like glue. By the time they turn fifteen, they still do just about everything together. Sora's father starts commenting on how he's becoming such a fine young man. That 'he needs to finally start working the fishing boats, because that's what the men of this house do.'
Naturally, Riku joins him.
They start working on fishing vessels going out to sea a few days a week then selling in the market the other few days.
They never go out to sea without the other. It's their normal. So when Riku's dad, a drill instructor in the Royal Navy, begins to insinuate Riku should start courting a young lady so he can become a competent society man, it strikes Riku that he's never been interested in trying.
"One's reputation is all he has," is what his dad would say. He considered himself lucky to marry a young debutante with money when he hadn't even inherited the family estate yet. Some considered his mother an unlucky, quiet woman. A beauty, and nothing but a trophy to her husband. Riku comes to realize he wants none of that. And becoming Society man, that wasn't for him either. He brings up these frustrations to Sora, who looks a little shocked, if not the smallest bit pleased.
Sora tells him that he wasn't really planning on settling down either. High seas adventure with Riku was more fun than anything else life could offer.
Riku rolls his eyes and tells him that they could hardly call fishing for grouper "adventurous."
Then, Riku gets sick. Nothing awful, but a flu that keeps him down for a week. There's another fishing boat going out that week, but he can't be on it. It's the only time Sora goes without him. Riku doesn't see him on the day they're due to arrive back. Or the next week. Or the next month. Word eventually arrives from a neighboring island that their ship had been taken by pirates, very few men were able to escape. They were holed up on the other island.
Riku being seventeen and barely having a cent to his own name, could not afford to travel and find out if Sora survived. His father refused to allow him to squander family money on something so trivial. It's killing him inside not knowing, so he tries to find some way, any way. He sees a flier for the Naval Guard recruitment, the station in need is on that other island! Riku immediately signs up and passes their fitness tests and boom, he's part of the naval guard! He's shipped off to the other island and spends all his free time searching.