Title: Drowning Victim
Characters/Pairing: Riku/???, implied Riku-Sora, implied ???/???
Summary: "...Do I know you?" Riku drowns.
A/N: PG-13ish, but only for implied stuff at the end. Crossover with Neon Genesis Evangelion. Wrote this while I was stuck with my epic crossover.
Drowning Victim
Riku stumbles through the dark portal, head pounding and muscles aching. After a particularly nasty battle in which he'd been extremely close to getting sliced in half and eaten by something blue and ugly, he dove into a corridor and picked the first random world he found that wasn't covered in Heartless. The smell and taste of the darkness is still thick around him, turning his stomach and burning in his nose. He has no idea where he is now, really, but unless the sensation of the ground sliding beneath his feet is due to his head, he's in a place with sand. And maybe, just maybe, that bit of blue nearby means he's on a beach.
A beach is something familiar, something that might be able to counteract the ever-increasing holes in his memory, so he tries to point himself towards the blue. He wades almost accidentally into the water, still staggering and tripping on the hem of his now-damaged coat. A few steps more, and he's found the end of the shallow water. One foot slips forward and the other slips back, until he's falling and becoming surrounded.
He barely has the breath to be surprised, much less react, and the leather of his coat and boots are starting to drag him down. His hair is drifting all around him, as the surface becomes farther away, but the strip of cloth covering his eyes doesn't budge.
Riku's lungs are screaming for oxygen, but his head feels disconnected, like he could just stay here forever and drift into the deep. It's not until a hand tugs weakly at his arm that he realizes he might actually die if he doesn't get air soon. The person attempting to help him is no expert, with the way they're trying to kick, but their effort and whatever is left of Riku's instincts from growing up on the Islands combine to bring them to the surface. They're both gasping in air at this point, but Riku's taken in some water, too, and the other person ends up dragging Riku towards the shore at a snail's pace. They're crawling by the end, but finally, finally, they can collapse, weak and shaking on the sand.
He's half in this stranger's lap, half laying on top of them, but can't find the strength to move. With his chest squeezed tight, Riku tries to aim the water he coughs up away from the other person, and mostly succeeds. Even then, as they're both trying to regain their breath, Riku just buries his head in a soaking white shirt, shivering and clinging tightly to the first human warmth in a very long time. The darkness is cold, so very cold, and he's tired of just surviving from one moment to the next, and so the time drags on.
Everything has been from one moment to the next, lately, snapshotted and strobed but never forming a complete chain of events. Whenever Riku tries to look beyond the snapshots, a pain springs up in his head and his chest. But slowly, agonizingly, Riku summons the up the courage at last to tilt his head up and look at the person who has saved him.
It's a boy, around his age, maybe just a little bit younger. His hair is damp and dark, clinging around wide blue eyes, and Riku almost wants to sob. Riku's hand moves before he's even aware of it, ripping one of his gloves off, and his fingers feel too calloused against the skin of the boy's cheek, brushing the bangs away to take in more of the blue. He knows someone with blue eyes like that, he's sure of it, but his head has become clouded, and it feels like things are slipping from him more and more each day.
He freezes, when Riku touches him, but doesn't turn his head and keeps his hands curled in the back of Riku's black coat.
"...Do I know you?" Riku asks, hoarsely. The boy only gasps softly in surprise, before biting his lip in a prevention that comes too late. His brows furrow easily, like the pain is familiar, and Riku wonders how much of that pain is his fault.
"How are you here?" the boy wants to know. He moves one of his hands to pull at the fabric covering Riku's eyes, but Riku stops him with his other, still gloved, hand. Riku really is leaning completely on the other boy now, but he doesn't want to stop touching that cheek. Relenting, though not completely, the boy threads his wayward hand through the silver of Riku's hair, almost spellbound. And, whispered, "Is it really you?"
"I can't remember a lot of things," Riku says, hating the disappointment he causes. His gloved hand fists in the white shirt, almost in an apology. "We... we met on a beach, didn't we?" The word he uses for 'beach' makes the other boy choke back a whimper. Sliding his hand across the boy's face, smearing the wetness, Riku moves it over his mouth, just as he's beginning to say a name. "No names...please."
The boy lets Riku pull himself up more with his gloved hand, half dragging him up himself, staying silent until Riku's looking level into his eyes. Riku thinks that the boy can tell the cloth doesn't prevent him from seeing. Only when they both stop moving altogether does Riku slide his hand back across the streaks on the boy's face, to cradle his cheek once more.
"Why?" the boy wants to know, voice struggling not to break. Riku can feel the boy's breath on his face, is still leaning against him, is still in his lap. He feels weak, and he can't look away.
"We will always be who we want to be," Riku says. The boy's fingers curl tighter in the black material. "Please." They're chest to chest, and their legs have gotten tangled together.
Slowly, achingly, Riku covers the boy's mouth with his own, leans until they're resting right there on the sand, and drowns.