Author's note: This is really just a waffly little ficlet I thought up while running through KH2. The scene that takes place after this ficlet, in the game, literally made me wail. The fic jumps around a little in terms of timing and whatnot, but it does follow a roughly sequential order. It's shounen-ai, it's deep friendship; take the fic whatever way you want to.
Disclaimer: The KH characters don't belong to me, yadda yadda yadda. Oh, and there are spoilers for KH2. Duh.
Very few things in life remain constant. Sora learns, very quickly, of how unfounded all his childhood fears have been: there had never been any monsters in the closet or under the bed or in the shadows, because the shadows were the monsters and they certainly made no attempt at hiding. Sora learns that being taken in by darkness is not just a figure of speech, and that the old cliché about pigs flying isn't really that farfetched, all things considered.
Sora learns that Santa not only exists, but also resides not in the North Pole, but in a cozy little home attached to a giant toy factory through a tree-shaped door in a world of ghosts and skeletons with grandiose dreams of being the next Sandy Claws. In Santa's factory, shooting gifts out of a makeshift gun into boxes soon to be wrapped with brightly-colored paper, Sora makes a mental note to tell this to Riku when he finds him. Sora also makes the mental note to add that Santa is not the jolly man that their parents led them to believe; rather, Santa is somewhat of a vindictive man, prone to crankiness and holding grudges towards non-believers for seven years, and if Riku doesn't want to find coal in his stocking he should find some way to apologize. Sora imagines that Riku would scoff and stand by his claim that Santa doesn't exist, but slip a small apology note into his stocking come Christmastime, just in case.
Very few things in life remain constant. Riku is one of them.
In Hollow Bastion, fighting off the MCP in Ansem's computer (another thing learned: computers can be a lot like humans after all), Sora remembers the silver-haired teen and wishes, not for the first time, that Riku was right by his side. Despite their competitiveness, despite their fighting and Riku's momentary turn to the darkness, Riku is still Riku and, when he had smiled at Sora before pulling shut the door to Kingdom Hearts, Sora had been reminded of better days, when he had brought Riku a hand-wrapped batch of his mother's freshly-baked brownies and Riku had turned around and given him the exact same smile. Riku never changes in Sora's memory; it never matters to the brunet whether Riku is the small, quiet boy timidly exploring the secrets of Destiny Islands with Sora or the taller, teasing boy Sora is more recently familiar with, because tall or short, quiet or teasing, there is always something about Riku that makes him intrinsically Riku.
Sora is, while walking through the mansion in Twilight Town, in fact quite willing to bet that despite not having seen each other for over a year Riku will barely have changed. Sora imagines that Riku is still taller than him – it's not in Sora's genes to be tall, despite doing various stretching exercises when young in a desperate attempt to lose the name of "Midget", a nickname Riku had devised for him one lazy day after measuring up beside one another and jokingly kept for over half a year – it doesn't seem right for Riku to be anything otherwise. Riku has always been taller, and better built, and although Sora has never voiced his opinion on the matter he is secretly glad about it, because simply walking by Riku's side makes him feel just that little bit safer.
A smile tugs at the corners of Sora's mouth as he goes for the finishing blow to Xigbar. The brunet's body aches and is peppered with more scars than any ordinary boy his age should have, but it barely matters to him as he watches Xigbar cease to exist in a swirling mass of black. Sora is willing to bet that Riku, when Sora finds him, will be wearing yellow and blue. Those are Riku's colors, and Sora knows that Riku will never change that because they, the colors, anchor him to his past, to better days sitting on a sandy beach with sapphire waves lapping at their toes.
Hope tugs at someplace entirely different. Sora is far from the world that he loves; to him, Riku is like a little shard of home, and Sora has gone to the ends of the universe to find him. Sora makes quick work of a group of Dusks, slashing at their lithe bodies and zippered mouths. Here, in an expansive white castle in the World that Never Was, in the realm of darkness, Sora knows that he is just a step away from regaining that piece of home, from finding security in his best friend, the one who never changes.
He turns and runs up the stairs to face Kairi and Xehanort's Heartless.