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To his right, the fluttery snores of a duck sound asleep. Donald never seemed to have any trouble closing his eyes at night.
To his left, a wall—but faintly through the wall, the whistly tones produced in Goofy’s own repose, mixed with the gentle thrum of the ship’s engine. So far, the Heartless hadn’t given them any trouble while leaving the ship on autopilot overnight (especially not with all of Cid’s fancy defensive equipment intact), but it was never a bad idea for one of the crew to spend the night at the helm just in case.
Above him, the quiet tick of a cuckoo clock, which he was sure wouldn’t read much more than ten minutes past the last time he had sat up to check. Maybe he should talk to the others in the morning about moving that someplace else, where the turn of its cogs wouldn’t compel him to fret so much about it.
Sora squeezed his eyes shut again, and within him, a cruel and mocking laughter emanated out from his memory, and a darkness filled his throat—a suffocating fear that he had missed too much time already, that he couldn’t afford to rest anymore until he had finished his mission.
(The problem was, he couldn’t remember missing anything important yet. But the longer he spent traveling between worlds, the more apparent it became that he had missed a lot somehow—that he was already letting people down, and he didn’t even know why… only that he couldn’t let it happen again.)
Sora flicked his eyes back open and exhaled slowly through his mouth. Was this his new reality, then? Dragging himself through the days of fighting monsters while utterly exhausted, and lying up at night too anxious to sleep?
It wasn’t even just sleep that eluded him, really. He wasn’t sure when was the last time he had taken a day to simply relax, either. Nowadays, the islander Sora that had enjoyed afternoons of surfing, fishing, and beachside races with his friends felt more like fiction than a memory to him.
And friends… Sora wouldn’t trade the universe for Donald and Goofy, but he missed his other friends so much, too. This whole journey would be far easier on him if he could see them again, if only just once. At least he could be certain Kairi was safe back on the island with their families. But Riku…?
Sora shuddered and haggardly turned onto his other side, the woolen blanket doing little to soothe the chill on his skin.
Donald and Goofy slumbered on without him; the clock absolute in its constant clicks; the silent sound, every time he shut his eyes, of his own voice crying out his failures unfettered in his mind.
Why did it have to be me? he wondered to himself. Couldn’t this have been… some other way around?
A tick of the clock. Another… another…… another………
And then, warmth. Gradual and sudden all at once, it overcame him like a hug from a beloved friend. The sensation was so vivid that Sora lifted his head briefly to see if someone had actually embraced him. And yet, finding no one there, he released the tension in his muscles and nestled down into that feeling that seemed to say, It’s okay, I understand. You don’t have to fight so hard this time.
“It’s okay,” he echoed in a whisper aloud—to apparently nothing in particular—before he let himself slip into a deep, peaceful dream.
--
He opened his eyes blearily when he felt his arm gently shaken, and a friend in green calling his name.
“Ugh,” Sora groaned, mind slow to adjust to the room now filled with sunlight. “Goofy? What time is it?”
“Gawrsh, Sora, it’s been a real long while since you overslept this much. Usually you’re the first up of everyone, a-hyuck!” Goofy chuckled, then smiled kindly. “But I betcha musta needed it, huh?”
Sora took the moment to ponder the question, and the first truly restful evening he’d had since they’d set out from Twilight Town on this new leg of their journey. He couldn’t quite make sense of the feeling… but the new silence in the room with him was salty-sweet on his tongue.
“Yeah, I think I did,” Sora replied, offering a half-smile of his own in return. Then he swung his legs over the side of his bed. “So, what’s the plan for today?”
--
Not every night went well. He still, more often than not, would toss, and turn, and count down the seconds staring into the sleepless void, and try not to think about how Organization XIII was still out there wreaking havoc and he wasn’t doing anything to stop them.
But, when the worst of the nights hit, Sora came to rely on that mysterious warmth from within him to push it all out of his mind. He grew accustomed to the ways in which it enveloped him: one branch around both of his shoulders with a gentle squeeze; another branch hovering more delicately by his waist; the bulk of the force pressed evenly against his chest, or sometimes his back. It really was like an invisible bear hug to lull him to sleep, a comfort unlike any he’d experienced before.
He relied on this comfort even when, the more Sora learned about the situation that created it, the less he understood why it happened.
Roxas, they’d said his name was. Sora’s Nobody. Another keybearer who had acted while Sora was (apparently) comatose for memory restoration. Ultimately, Roxas had needed to relinquish himself to Sora’s heart before Sora could reawaken.
Nobodies were supposed to be a product of a human body being separated from its heart… but Sora had been in possession of both of those things all the while Roxas had been running around in his place.
Not just running around, even. Forming memories and building relationships.
Nobodies weren’t supposed to have hearts of their own to build relationships with. To make memories with. Nobodies weren’t… supposed to live, at all. They were inhuman, menaces to the balance of the universe. And yet…
“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” Sora said quietly one night, when it was his turn to take watch in the ship’s cockpit. “Everyone tries to tell me it had to be this way around—like I needed to live more than you did. But the time you had belonged to you, you know? Not me.”
He folded his arms over his chest and gazed out the windshield. All around him, uncountable stars turned through the deep purple sky, the sight evoking a ringing in his ears and a pit in his stomach like he was adrift at sea, unable to catch his bearings, catch his breath.
But shutting his eyes was no good, either, for then all he could imagine were ocean blue irises and honey brown locks on a face not quite his own, joyful in photographs of friends he had never known… and the despair in Sora’s throat would only grow from the knowledge that he had stolen all of that away.
“I don’t see how you don’t hate me for this,” Sora sighed, cradling a hand over his heart. “Because I think I hate me for this.”
Instantly, confusingly, he sensed the ghost of an embrace around him once more, a greater intensity to it than usual—and something else different about it, too. For only a moment, a small circle of warmth concentrated on Sora’s cheek, before it just as quickly faded away.
And Sora began to cry to himself, sorry the situation had ever reached this point, but still too selfish and weak not to need the other to stay with him.
--
“Wait, please! I don’t want to fight.”
Sora dismissed his weapon and threw his hands up in surrender, inching across the glass platform toward the figure in the black hood.
“I just want answers. I want to know you. Please,” Sora begged.
The figure paused in their battle stance, deliberating over Sora’s request. Then the figure dismissed their own weapons and slowly rose back to a casual standing position.
“You have an odd way of getting people’s attention, then,” the figure said. “What do you want to know?”
This first question proved rhetorical, as the figure lowered their hood while they spoke, revealing a foreign yet familiar face framed in an ardent shade of gold.
Sora swallowed hard. “So you’re… Roxas.”
“…I’m not sure who else you expected to find in here.” Roxas tipped his head to the side, both amusement and sincerity in his expression.
Sora remained frozen in place, blinking in awe that the other boy was actually standing before him. Any words he might have prepared in advance now remained caught behind his lips.
“You… said you have questions for me,” Roxas eventually restated, as if trying not to scare away the deer in his headlights. “What’s on your mind?”
But words continuing to fail him, Sora suddenly dashed across the floor and threw his arms around Roxas. With the force of the gesture nearly knocking them both off their feet, Roxas exhaled in surprise.
“Thank you,” Sora murmured, tears beginning to prick at his eyes.
“For... what?”
“For staying with me. For comforting me. For not hating me. For being… you, Roxas.”
Roxas hesitated. It was one thing for Sora to bring up factual truths, but fielding such a direct outpouring of admiration and gratitude wasn’t quite in his wheelhouse.
Then... gingerly... Roxas returned the embrace in exactly the manner they had both come to expect: arms hooked around Sora’s shoulders and waist, and the full weight of his body committed to holding Sora against him.
“I wanted to hate you, believe me,” he began softly. “Because you were right; it wasn’t fair. Why should you get to live, and not me?”
“What changed, then?”
“Well, I’m still you, aren’t I? So I could feel what you felt… and I realized you didn’t deserve to be hurting the way you were. Especially not because of me—a part of you that wasn’t meant to exist.”
“No,” Sora interrupted, shaking his head over Roxas’s shoulder, “no, you’re not me, you’re you. You’re Roxas, and you’re special all on your own, and I’m going to make things right for the both of us. I just… I just don’t know how yet.”
“How... to let us both live?”
Sora leaned back slightly out of the embrace to look Roxas in the eyes, expression somber. “How I’m supposed to let you go.”
As he processed what had been implied, Roxas offered a bittersweet smile. “You’ll find a way—I know you will. And I’ll be here while you do.”
He pulled Sora’s head back toward his body and touched his lips to the other boy’s cheek once more.
And when Sora’s consciousness receded from his heart and returned to the outside world, the ghostly warmth of the kiss lingered on. With his friends helping him back to his feet, Sora brushed a hand over his cheek in fondness.
“I’ll find a way,” he echoed in a whisper aloud—to apparently nothing in particular—before he turned to face the world, for the first time he could remember, with bravery and hope anew.