Work Text:
Sora's mother didn't believe him when he told her where he'd been, his tales of adventure too close to a fairytale to a woman who had lived her whole life in one town.
He didn't mention how he'd been fractured, the splitting of his heart he still didn't understand.
She didn't tell him, in return, how close she'd come to forgetting him irreparably in the near two years he'd been away, how her memory tugged away from her as if by some invisible mudslide, how she stood in the doorway of his bedroom and failed to recall the face of the son that was meant to be there. Now that she could touch him again, gather him up and feel how tall he'd grown, the loss was already fading like a bad dream over breakfast.
He found Roxas in the mirror when he had a moment alone, and showed him his biggest brave-face smile.
"That's your mom, too," he said. "Did you know her?"
"I do now," Roxas seemed to say, and seemed to pass along the message– that's our mom–, and seemed content enough just to have one at all.
His bedroom, now their bedroom, had opened like a time capsule: the ceiling was still patched, the toys were still posed, the window was left open like she'd been waiting for him to climb back in through it.
The little boy who once played here wasn't all dead yet; he turned on the night light to watch the ceiling glow, and tried not to dwell on all the clothes that wouldn't fit him anymore. "Home" was only another world now anyway, a brief respite before whatever happened next, before he had to go and be the hero instead– at least he could make it a happy one.
(He didn't mention this either, too softhearted to tell her now of all moments that he may never really be hers again.)
She cooked fish and taro root for dinner like she always used to, like he hadn't eaten in far too long, and broke out bowls for mango and coconut milk as dessert.
"I wish I'd known you were coming," she said, "I would have made something more, I would have bought that cake you like."
"Maybe tomorrow?"
Tomorrow he'd have to go on tour; everyone would want to know where he'd been. He'd make the trek to see his father, all the way on the far side of their little island, and find out if he'd started to look like him yet. He didn't really need the cake to boot, but his mother grinned for tomorrow more than anything else.
"And tomorrow we can find you some new clothes," she replied, "I didn't see a suitcase. And maybe the doctor? When's the last time you saw one?"
"Don't worry about it, I'm fine!"
She didn't respond, her eyebrows suddenly furrowing.
"We'll need to register you for school, too; you have so much to catch up on."
She didn't know– couldn't know– the talk he and Riku had already had, before they worked up their courage to row back to town, of school and family and what they were now: not children anymore, even if not quite adults.
"What if it's too late for that?" He asked in lieu of explaining it all.
"Too late for school?"
"Too late to catch up, to be normal." He traced patterns on the kitchen table. "I was never that good at it anyway."
She spooned a large chunk of mango into her mouth and chewed slowly.
"But what will you do all day?" She asked. "What about– what about your future?"
"You finished school and you're still fishing. I'll go on the fishing boats with you, and I'll catch lots of fish. And I'll run errands for people. And I'll bring Kairi ice cream at school when she goes on lunch, and I'll study with Riku so I won't stop learning."
She smiled kind of sadly. "You'll never grow up."
"I've already grown up."
One way or another she would have to understand eventually, that there was just too much she couldn't understand.
She sent him for a bath when the food was all gone, and he puzzled himself deciding where to fit his overgrown limbs in the tub. He buttoned into starry pajamas that fell too short. He found clean sheets on his bed when he returned, and wished for a future where he really could stay forever, where he could be his mother's little boy without dooming her and everyone else.
He reached into his heart hoping Roxas would understand and pulled out only spiteful silence, and a wave of burning nausea.
He rolled from his bed in a frustrated huff and wandered to the front door to put on his shoes, and with his mother still in the bathroom, there was no one to worry at the suddenness of his departure.
The air outside was cool and salty, and the insects buzzed about the street lamps.
This house that had raised him creaked beneath his feet; it sat above the ground on short stilts to guard from floods, and straddled the border between grass and beach.
There was something stinging, something sick. The back half of his mind didn't recognize the place as home at all. His chest ached like an open wound, or a mass that couldn't fit inside, or something he knew he'd forgotten, but still couldn't wrap his fingers around no matter how hard he reached– some tugging emotion he couldn't really name, that probably hadn't been his to begin with.
He let it pull him over the sand dunes and up the shore, chasing the last of the melting red sun as it sunk, finally, into the sea.
Its echo pulsed in the sky for several moments on.
The sight of a familiar silhouette up the shore broke the spell in an instant, and he was Sora again.
And Riku was looking back at him, sitting on the sand in his jeans and sneakers, under the little cliff, where no one would find him– like some image from a forgotten childhood. Like he used to, a lifetime ago, fleeing home like a hobby.
Even sulking alone in the dark he looked cool.
Sora met him at once.
"Hey, I missed you!" He cried, tumbling in next to him, noticing the redness under his eyes. "Are you alright?"
"You missed me?" Riku replied instead, plastering a fresh, smug look upon himself. "It's barely been a few hours."
Sora's cheeks puffed up. "So there's a wait period on loving my friends?"
Riku rested his face against his knees.
The nighttime water waved black, not the comfort Sora had come for but the dark realm all over again, the two of them against looming void.
Riku had once been alone there, too. And he'd been alone for a lot of things before it, alone on the islands, keeping everything to himself until the day he died. Sora knew more now, and still couldn't really get into his head.
"Have you been home yet?" He asked instead of needing to.
"Yeah," Riku said with a defeated sigh. "It's just how I left it."
Somewhere in space sailed a child's wooden raft, lost in a storm and no use to anyone.
"Did you think it would feel different, coming home?"
"I guess I thought it would be better this time."
Sora cocked his head. "You seemed happy today, on the play island with us."
"With you," Riku said, meeting his eyes with a strange shyness. "Not in that house."
Riku's house had always been six doors down from Sora's, with the half-fixed boat permanently propped up outside. The walls were white. Riku's father lived there.
Riku's eyes were softer than his old, silent father's.
Sora could feel the ground again, too, now that they were together.
"Then why don't you come sleep at my house instead?"
Riku looked up at him like he couldn't tell if it was a joke. "Your mom has never let me sleep over."
"That was before you brought me back from the end of the world," Sora said, grinning. "She'd adopt you if I asked."
"She wouldn't."
"She's already taken back two of me just fine; what's one more?"
Riku narrowed his eyes, searching Sora's face, and Sora ignored it. He climbed to his feet and reached out a hand.
"C'mon."
Riku took it.
They brushed off the sand at the door and left their shoes behind as they crept into the creaky old house, blue and glowing with the moonlight through the windows. Sora paused at the base of the stairs to decide if he still needed to vomit, and didn't.
"Mom?" He called at the top, and she hummed back from her bedroom. "It's okay if Riku sleeps over here tonight, right?"
She opened the door to peer at them both: Sora in his old pajamas, Riku shrinking bashfully into the hall. She sighed.
"Let me fetch him something to sleep in."
She found a large t-shirt in her closet, and a spare pillow of mysterious origin, and she laid them out on Sora's bed and hugged him goodnight at the doorway– Sweet dreams, voices down, no funny business.
"What's that mean?" Sora mumbled at his closed bedroom door. "Does she think I'll disappear again?"
Riku threw his vest at Sora's back, forcing him to turn with a start.
"Hey!"
"I thought she just said it because I'm a boy," Riku replied, pulling the t-shirt down over his head.
"I'm a boy, too."
"Has she ever said that when Kairi stayed over?"
Sora shut his mouth.
Maybe it was just because they were older now, and not some plug in her brain that still knew her Sora as only a muddy little girl. She couldn't have known any other reason to say a thing like that, when he'd barely even been home long enough for her to get used to his new voice.
He tossed the spare pillow towards the head of the bed. "You have to take the wall side so you can't sneak away."
The window hung open, welcoming the songs of bugs and lizards, but he'd hear it if Riku tried to climb out. And it would look stupid, strong and brooding as he acted now.
"Why would I sneak away?" Riku asked.
"I don't know, why would you?"
Riku rolled his eyes. "The bed's too small anyway. And I haven't bathed at all since I've been back; I still smell like darkness." He reached for the pillow only for Sora to bat his hand away.
"Don't care."
"I really don't mind the floor."
"But what kind of friend would I be then?" Sora argued, needing to win just as much as to get what he wanted. "And anyway, how are you going to make sure I wake up in the morning from all the way down there?"
It was mostly meant as a joke.
"Are you afraid of sleeping?"
Sora hummed. "No."
"Move over," Riku said, punching his shoulder. "I'll take the wall side." He slid quickly out of his jeans and crawled across the bed, sitting himself cross-legged in the corner at the headboard.
"Oh, so you'll only do it to baby me," Sora shot back. "I see how it is"
"Do you want me here or not?"
He did. His want was so massive, even he couldn't tell the shape of it. He wanted to fall asleep and wake up to Riku's breathing beside him, proof they had both survived the apocalypse, that it hadn't been for nothing, that he wasn't alone.
If Riku hadn't come, he would have risen instead, halfway through the night, to crawl into his mother's bed like a toddler. And the loneliness would still burn in his stomach until morning.
Lacking the skill to express all this, he picked up his pillow and thwacked his best friend right over the head.
"Payback for throwing your clothes at me," he said, and stuck his tongue out.
Riku grinned– finally. "You're lucky I have no energy."
"Is that it?"
Sora switched off the lamp, and switched on the night light, and shivered with embarrassment for a hot, terrible moment that he still had one at all.
What a silly thing to worry about, when his old crayon drawings already decorated every wall. Sillier still, with a kid he'd watched lose teeth.
Nonetheless, even in that oversized shirt, it was apparent how broad Riku's shoulders had grown, leaving too much room for a heart that should have still belonged to a boy.
What if they grew up like islanders did, with jobs and families, and someday only spoke on Sundays?
What if they grew up like warriors did, and scarcely got to know peace at all?
What if it was already over the moment they'd left? What if they really couldn't both fit in the bed?
Voices whispered a little in his ear, and he didn't recognize their sounds at all.
"Are you okay?" Riku asked, watching a face that must have turned green.
Sora scrambled into his side of the bed, shoving a knee out of the way so that he could squeeze in, and pulled the blanket up and over them both.
Just enough room, just barely.
He stretched out his arms expectantly, and let Riku slide down beside him to accept the embrace, burying his face into that white cascade of overgrown hair, and feeling his body squeezed in return.
He didn't smell like darkness at all, just sweat, and sea air, and sweetly himself. No matter how he changed, it was always him, the same rabbit-heart thumping in his chest.
His hands pressed in heavy against Sora's back, and his careful, shaking breath caught a hint of his voice.
What, too, if Sora– for everyone in the universe he loved– could never love anyone else as immensely as this?
"Remember that one time," he whispered, smirking, "when we were in here after school, and you dared me to jump out the window?"
Riku laughed, shaking both their bodies. "I didn't think you really would, idiot."
"Well, why not?" Always the stuntman, always with something to prove. "Remember when we were fighting, and l kicked a hole the wall over there?"
"We were terrible," Riku said. "Why are boys always fighting anyway?"
"It was funny! I liked making you my punching bag."
"Like you were the one winning."
"What about when I gave you a concussion on the play island, remember that?"
"Obviously not." Riku was smiling against his shoulder, a warm glow in the dark. "But I remember how scared you got; you rowed me back sobbing. And I had to wait on the shore while you ran for help."
The fear had hidden away from him sometime in all the fuzzy years since, but now Sora's whole body ached like it was only just today that he'd finally slowed down.
"I'm sorry," he said, suddenly serious, trying to fit in everything else. The rest pressed out from behind his breastbone, formless and cold and only partly his own. "I'll never leave you behind again, okay?" Maybe then they'd finally stop destroying each other.
"Sure, you will," Riku replied. "And I'll come find you."
"And you won't hide from me again?"
"Never. Promise."
"Even if we have different faces?"
He hesitated, and let out a breath. "Even if we have different faces."