Chapter Text
Thinking of you, wherever you are.
We pray for our sorrows to end, and hope that our hearts will blend. Now I will step forward to realize this wish. And who knows? Starting a new journey may not be so hard, or maybe it’s already begun.
There are many worlds, but they share the same sky.
One sky, one destiny.
It almost felt the same.
With his eyes closed; with the sand cool and gritty under his fingers; with the low rumble of the tide and the shimmer of a thousand pebbles pulled and clambering under it; with his shoulder pressed against Riku’s side…
It almost felt like home.
Sora opened his eyes. The sky over the ocean was hazy, thinning moonlight filtering through the blanket of mist. Or...at least he thought it was moonlight. He couldn’t see anything distinct through the haze at all. No clouds, no dusting of distant stars, no moon…nothing. Did this place even have stars? Was it even the same universe?
Donald, Goofy, the King, Kairi…were they still under the same sky?
Riku’s sharp inhale pulled Sora back from the lip of that particular void, and he felt dizzy just from a second’s glimpse.
Riku was here.
Riku needed him.
Sora dragged himself to his knees and sat forward. Riku’s hand was clamped tight over the side Xemnas’ blade had struck him, the singed gap in his vest peeking from beneath his fingers. Sora placed a tentative hand over them. They were pale, but hot; the wound must have been burning.
That…didn’t seem like a good sign.
“Let me see,” Sora said.
“It’s not that bad,” Riku said. “It cauterized.”
That really didn’t seem like a good sign. Sora squeezed gently, until Riku relented and let him peel away his stiff fingers.
Sora swallowed. Breathed. Swallowed again.
“Okay,” Riku admitted, “it’s bad.” He winced, his expression hedging into vain hope. “What’ve you got?”
“Nothing,” Sora said with a frown. “I left my bag in the World that Never Was, and I used up all I had in that fight…” Sora drew back the cloth over Riku’s wound, and he sucked in a sharp breath, his muscles going stiff and tight.
Sora’s frown deepened. He felt heavy, empty, and he knew it would be hours and probably a hard night of sleep before he had the wherewithal for a cure spell.
Riku’s hand returned, this time falling over Sora’s knuckles. “It’ll heal,” he said. “It just needs time.”
Sora took another breath. He nodded.
Riku leaned into his side. “It’s funny,” Riku said, “being here with you, after all that time trying to spare you this. I knew I might end up here, but—”
“Hey,” Sora interjected, and he surprised both of them with the vigor in his voice.
Riku stared at him like he’d sprouted a second head, and Sora straightened up, his energy returning in a mounting rush. So they were trapped. So they didn’t have supplies, or food, or shelter. So they didn’t know what had happened to their friends or to their home—
“You didn’t think adventuring would always be easy, did you?” Sora said, and he cracked a grin, suddenly wild under the weight of the circumstances. “You promised me the horizon. There it is!” He gestured out towards the strange indigo haze, over the foaming water.
Riku choked back what might have been a giggle, or might have been a sob. Either way, it made his eyes water. “Sora, never change.”
For a second, he heard another voice: a placid moment that seemed impossibly far away.
Sora...don't ever change.
He forced down the prickle threatening to deflate him. “Don’t plan to,” he said. He squinted down the distant beach, trying to spot anything in the alien-looking rock formations that might keep them hidden and dry long enough to sleep for a few hours. “We should get you someplace safe for the night.”
Riku sobered. “I…don’t think I’m ready for that yet.”
Sora considered that for a moment, then unzipped his jacket and shrugged it off. Riku watched curiously as he spread it out on the packed sand behind them and laid back, folding his hands lazily under his head.
“We’ll wait, then,” Sora said.
He kept one eye cracked open as Riku eased painstakingly down beside him, just in case he lost his strength; but he settled stiffly, his hands folded over his stomach like it was just another day blowing off their responsibilities in some secret place where no one could come looking.
Riku let out a heavy sigh. His eyes drifted shut.
He extended a hand, and Sora threaded his fingers into Riku’s rough, calloused ones, grounding himself through the familiar flutter of Riku’s pulse.
What could this place possibly throw at them they hadn’t already survived? Their friends were safe. The King would set the worlds in order again; Donald and Goofy would travel the universe; Kairi would go back to the islands; maybe she could even have a real life, her own life, with no more malicious figures or existential threats hanging over every day.
And Sora had Riku. They weren’t alone; they weren’t in isolation. They were together. They’d keep each other safe. They’d keep each other sane. And if they couldn’t, then they’d be lost together. Live together, die together. Now, as far as Sora knew, that was all they had left.
All they’d ever have left.
Sora’s wild optimism buckled. Something found purchase in the fissures of his heartbreak and pried it open, and Sora turned and buried his face in Riku’s chest.
Riku’s functional arm circled his shoulder without a second’s hesitation, and his grip was tight enough that Sora could feel him shaking.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m here.”
The cold, alien night leeched in around them, but between them were ten laced fingers and the rhythmic beat of two steady, stubborn hearts.
Kairi didn’t know what she was looking for when she unmoored the scuffed rowboat from the docks and pointed it towards this speck on the horizon.
Donald and Goofy were only a few hours away, and it wouldn’t be long before she left the Islands behind again. Her bags were already packed, perched on the front porch of her childhood home in a tidy stack, and Kairi would have traded it all and the play-island besides to have Sora and Riku waiting on the docks when she returned.
She kicked off her shoes and started walking, the sun-warmed sand burning from more than just hours on hours of captured daylight. It reminded her that her feet used to be bare more often than they weren’t, that she refused to wear anything but slip-ons so she could leave them behind at a moment’s notice. For most of her life, this island was the only thing she took for truth, the only certainty. Now it felt far away, a film-reel of razor-sharp moments projected over every palm and stone.
Here was where Riku hefted her onto his back when she broke her ankle, and he didn’t say a word when she hid her tear-streaked face in his curtain of hair, even though her nose was running and her hands were wet. Here was where she had skipped a stone so far out into the surf that Sora had gone barreling into the waves, shouting the count at the top of his lungs for every new impact that sent it streaking instead of sinking. Here was where she found Riku pulling the legs off a grasshopper, and it was the first time he had seen her angry, and it was the first time she had seen him scared.
Here was where the undertow on a stormy day had dragged her under; where her eyes and nose and mouth stung with salt, and she remembered someone telling her to set the beach at your shoulder and swim straight and hard, but she was so lost in the rolling ocean that the beach was as distant as the memory, and she was struck with a powerlessness so profound that she could feel its weight even now.
Here was where her head broke the surface, and beneath each of her arms was a grip hard enough to bruise, and at her shoulders wasn’t beach but boys, their clothes soaked through and their hair plastered down as they tore her from the grip of the ocean and back towards the shore.
Here was where she lay, staring up at the boiling sky, as Sora and Riku clung to her until she struggled to breathe, and she had to push them away to kneel in the grass and press her forehead into the earth.
Here was where she grew up; where she remembered how to smile and how to laugh, even if the rest never came back to her. Here was everything she knew. Here was everyone she loved.
Kairi closed her eyes, her fingers tracing the keychain at her hip: biting points and cool, smooth glass. She took a breath in through her nose, the smell of fresh salt on the stirring wind pulling her between present and past.
Sora…Riku…are we still under the same sky?
When she opened her eyes, the sinking sun glinted off a small, bright shape, swept onto the beach by the gentle surf. Kairi swallowed her breath, and before she even had time to hope she was scrambling towards it, the sand shifting and slipping beneath her.
The salt crystals ringing the lip of the bottle crumbled to dust in her palm as she twisted the cork. The note inside was faded, but intact--
Thinking of you, wherever you are.
We pray for our sorrows to end, and hope that our hearts will blend. Now I will step forward to realize this wish…
Then the words blurred together, lost to a fresh burn.
She dropped the bottle and hung her head in her hands. For the first time since she watched the door close behind them, she cried.
