For silverstrings of KHYaoi community; prompt was "candles."
Riku Replica/Naminé. No likey het, no read.
Riku Replica's story is sad. :x

CANDLES
spirallin/reveneirz

I.
The first time he wakes, he wakes in darkness. He doesn't know and doesn't remember anything, except that a man he knows only as IV shows him the pathway out--for a price. The price is the death of a boy who is him but isn't. He doesn't understand, but he thinks he likes the surge of power in his hands when the keyblade buzzes to life, a flash of light that sings through the darkness and leaves a curious ringing noise in his head.

He decides he'll do it. He doesn't know who he is, but what he has is good enough for now; what he doesn't know is that this will be the first and the last time he is only himself, whatever that is.

It is a cruel kind of irony, that he doesn't know, as he leaves to hunt down the boy with his face.

II.
The second time he wakes, he wakes from dreams of white beaches and blazing suns, palm trees and beautiful water. He remembers that his name is Riku, that he's searching for one of his best friends, Naminé--the other one is only a blank in his mind, but the cloaked people lurking in this white, white castle tell him he'll get answers, if only he destroys a boy known as Sora. He closes his eyes and thinks of Naminé, a pretty blonde girl with blue, blue eyes, waving at him from the beach, drenched in salt water and sunshine, and swears he'll do it.

III.
When Naminé is working her magic, she works with her eyes closed. Her pencils fly over the sketchbook's page, messy and harried and occasionally blotted with tears, but the images they produce are precise. Breathtaking, but she'll never know--she doesn't like looking at the lives she's destroying. The final stroke, and there's the sound of screeching metal in her mind, as she breaks memories, reconnects them, welds new ones and destroys others.

When the Replica is almost dying, when he comes far too close to Sora, Naminé does what she's never done before--she picks up the sketchbook, and she tears the Replica's pages out. She rips them in halves, in quarters, and in eighths. She lets the pieces drop the ground and tries not to think of what she's doing. She still doesn't open her eyes, though, and maybe that's where the process went wrong.

In Riku's mind, he sees a flash of light before it all goes dark, and thinks he's sinking into another dream--he sees the tilt of Naminé's shoulders, the curl of her soft blonde hair, before he doesn't remember what her name is or anything about her, except that she's important to him. Before the lights go out, he thinks of nightfall on Destiny Islands, a distant memory where the children who have been playing outside too late are guided home by candles their guardians place in open windows.

It's a strange process, how hearts are destroyed: breaking a chain takes only one fracture, but completely erasing it is a slow burn, ripping away one link at a time. The images fall away, but Riku believes that he's looking at a window, that there's a candle there and Naminé besides it, waiting for him. He breaks into a run up the dirt road to home.

IV.
The last time the Replica awakens, there's a nothingness in his mind, a disturbing lack of content minus the keyblade's humming rhythm, and a blurry image of a blue-eyed girl. He thinks he's more than this. more than the coil of darkness in his spirit and the weapon in his hand. Naminé is his only link, and he takes it.

When Sora moves on to the last door of the Castle, he stays behind with the girl, who is watching him. Her eyes are tinged with sorrow, and though he knows that the kind of sadness to create that dull gleam is never good, he thinks she's the most beautiful--the only--girl he's ever met.

"...You," he says, turning around to face her; she picks at the folds of her dress with one hand, sketchbook clutched in the other.

"Hello," Naminé says quietly.

Riku Replica closes his eyes. "You're... not real, are you?"

"No. ...Not to you."

"I..." He pauses, at a loss for words; now, he knows now he walks the fine lines of reality and fate. "...I still want to remember you." His eyes narrow, still and determined; one hand curls tighter around the keyblade's hilt. "I'll protect you--fight for you. Can you help me?"

Naminé, hesitant, and so very, very softly: "...I'm sorry."

In his mind's eye, he is almost there--only ten paces from the Door, and the candle shines from the window, a tiny star resting on wood and glass. Through the window, Naminé's saying something, but all he can capture is the shape of her lips: where do dreams end and reality begin? He opens his mouth to reply, but before sound escapes, the tropical breeze that is brushing his shoulder suddenly slams into him, a gale force, and as he's tipping towards the earth, the flickering candle-light goes out.