Title: Throat
Characters: Riku, others mentioned
Rating: I wanna say high PG-13ish, but I'm not completely sure.
Summary: The urge to throw up.
A/N: Pretty dark, in more than one sense. While I don't personally think that certain events occurred in the "traditional" physical sense, the metaphor is definitely there for those who care to think about it.
Throat
This is what he should do, what he needs to do. The nausea will pass. His chest may ache for a very long while, his muscles spasm and clench, but his stomach will quiet in perfect time and symmetry with his thoughts.
There's a rising horror in his gut, and a distant panicking voice that sounds suspiciously like Sora saying no over and over again, but he forces himself to ignore it. Sora would not want this, he reasons, over the burning acridity of darkness in his nose and his throat, because then it would mean that Sora has lost. That he is more powerful than those new, so-called friends of Sora's that he joined up with the second they got separated from each other.
It will pass.
The notion, then, that there are things better than him in Sora's eyes stings and burns like a twisted knife. The idea that things like keyblades and talking animals are more important to Sora than the two people he has grown up with, more important than anything he has ever done to get Sora to just look at him, crawls through his veins and his lungs, leaving his insides stained and opaque. The thought that this last, desperate resort is the only thing that will draw Sora back to him, will make Sora realize just how wrong he's been, this is what makes him accept.
He will accept this, and he will do this, and he will shut out the warning trying to leap out from under his skin. For the moment, he will shut his mouth from gagging and his head from pounding, and he will not turn away. He is not afraid.
...
.
And then it happens, and he can't move, and he can't stop it. The moment he realizes exactly what is going on, it's already too late.
.
...
He would throw up, if he thought for a second that he had any control over his own throat muscles. He wants to claw his way out, rip and tear even if he destroys himself in the process, but he knows, with sinking realization and bile that will not rise, that it's impossible. He can't even shiver, then.
He is small and insignificant in the soupy blackness that surrounds him, the stench of the quicksand holding him down and eating away at his solidity. He wonders if Sora will come back to find him, and if Sora will even be able to see him when he can't even see himself in the stinking pitch.
Sora will come back. Sora has to come back, even if it's only to destroy him utterly and completely. There's a fear there, that Sora will go through with it, if he thinks he has to. There's the creeping knowledge that he is only just now beginning to learn something. There's the choking dread that he will never have learned enough.
So many things have gone so wrong, twisted and warped from what he'd intended, and he wants to shudder from the mere thought of it. It's almost painful to think about anything at all, with the walls closing in and sucking the stale air out of his lungs, pressing him flat and transparent, the smell of the oily and too-thick darkness surrounding and smothering. It makes him want to retch as it seeps into his bones, coats his skin, and sticks under his fingernails. It almost threatens to consume him completely, devour that last, defiant scrap of himself into its cold, but the hope that Sora might come back, will come back, gives him the strength to hold out for a lonely eternity.
He refuses to scream.