Follow the girl!
Up the stairs and over the bridge. She's sad and in pain. She needs to be comforted. Mend it. End her pain.
She's gone but her pain is still there. More pain. His pain too. And the man and the woman. And friends here and lost. So much pain. Too much.
Mend it.
Mend it.
End it.
Sora woke up with a start, barely holding in his screams at the pain. Another dream of the Exam. They were nothing new. But that didn't mean any of it numbed. If anything, he felt the pain more acutely than ever before.
His chest ached as he slid out of the bed he'd been given and into the warm leather of his coat. Maybe he should keep that on at all times. It seemed to be made of the comforting type of darkness he had been cocooned in before joining the Organization unlike the cold bareness that was the Castle that Never Was.
But even keeping his coat on didn't protect him from the Nightmares. Those found him no matter what he did to try an escape them.
He couldn't count the nights he'd woken up and been forced to walk around the Castle just for something to do until he could go on missions. But there was no way he was asking for night missions and admitting that something was wrong with him and that he couldn't sleep. None of the other vessels needed to know that he couldn't sleep.
He headed to the kitchen in the castle, wondering if maybe there was a cocoa mix he could make just to calm himself down. Most of the cabinets had food in them but nothing really sounded good as he rummaged. His mood sank lower, the pain in his chest not subsiding.
There wasn't any cocoa. The closest thing Sora found was coffee. That would have to do. At least it would keep him awake until morning. No more dreams for tonight.
He made the coffee and sat down with it, taking a sip of the dark liquid. It was... awful. But there was nothing he could do. Whoever stocked the kitchen had an awful sense of humor, getting nothing but extra dark roast coffee. Maybe putting sugar in it next time would make it better, but Sora would have to get that himself. Apparently no one here used that.
It was there that Sora spent the rest of the night, hood up to hide his face so that the other vessels wouldn't see the dark circles under his eyes as he had cup after cup of coffee. Maybe this would become a regular occurrence.
He just wished he had some company.