Another side, another story... it's kind of a side-story-prequel to another fic of mine called Princess Story but since it's a prequel you don't have to read it - this story leads into it a little. It also ties in with the plot of Tidus' Adventures in Traverse Town very non-discrete, so know the basic concept of that one helps.

I don't really have much else to say about this. The plot, themes and style (which I'm experimenting with here) should all become apparent as you read, so...

Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, I am only borrowing the associated characters and locations for a piece of not-for-profit, recreational, fictional work. Disney and Square Enix take all of the credit for the characters and worlds they created.

Sora and the Blue Box

It was an odd sensation – standing in front of his house again. Sora cocked his head to the side, wondering if the house had always looked so small. From the front it looked more like a little, wooden blue box with a dark grey roof but he knew that at the back there was a veranda and a balcony over that. It was still just a big blue rectangle, though. As he approached the front door he was overcome with the feeling that it was far too quiet. There was a niggling in the back of his mind, nagging him to remember something special about this house. Or was it something special about whoever lived inside the house? As his fingers curled around the black wrought iron door handle he paused. Who lived in this house again? Aside from himself, of course. He remembered living in this big (or was it little?) blue box but he couldn't live here by himself. He let go of the door handle and stood back on his heels, pondering for a moment. He should remember who lived there; he hadn't been gone that long. Sora shut his eyes and grabbed his chin, trying to think about who he lived with. He had parents, he was pretty sure but that was a given unless he was an orphan. Although he couldn't imagine a child living in this house by themselves. But there was still something missing, something familiar that he felt he should remember but somehow didn't.

Eventually he decided that he had to stop thinking about it. The more he thought the more confused he became and he wasn't finding any answers by just standing in front of the box. He grabbed the handle again and opened the door. It was unlocked. Sora blinked at the slightly ajar white, wooden door and suddenly felt a rush of epiphany as if he'd found a correct piece in a jigsaw puzzle and all of a sudden a whole bunch of other random pieces that didn't seem to make any sense all fit together. Yes, the door was unlocked and that was normal. In fact, everyone's door was unlocked. He could go up to any house anywhere on the island probably and let himself in if he really wanted to but at the moment the only house he wanted to let himself into was this blue box.

Sora pushed the door open further and stepped inside. There was no hall or welcoming front room of sorts. The house in nearly all of its entirely was immediately laid out before him in that first step. A tidal wave of blurry memories that seemed so trivial and irrelevant sped through his heart and mind as his eyes panned the house in front of him. There was just a big room. Two low-hanging ceiling fans spun slowly, one of them clicked incessantly in a way that irritated Sora. To his right there was a small two-person sofa in front of a TV and the space between them was filled with a mess of paper, crayons, building blocks and toy animals. Behind the sofa was an opaque sliding door that Sora remembered led into the bathroom and laundry room. The staircase beside it went upstairs and beside that was the kitchen, enclosed by its benches rather than by walls. The back wall and door was all glass louvers and flyscreen and Sora could see right through it to the sand dunes and down to the sea crashing onto the beach. Upstairs wasn't so much of a second storey than a loft space with a little balcony overlooking the rest of the house and doors leading into three different rooms. To Sora's left was a very messy area dominated by shelves that were half full of books and sewing magazines and half full of rolls of cloth and spools of string and wool. There were racks for clothes and a disorganised desk in front of a large window with needles and pin cushions and chalk and scissors and measuring tape. A chair was tucked in under the desk in front of a pedal-operated sewing machine.

Suddenly Sora realised exactly what he'd been missing; the thing that he should have remembered but didn't. That sewing machine. It was normally running most of the day. From morning to evening with only small breaks in between there was the constant rhythmic hum of the machine whirring steadily with the guidance of a well-practised seamstress. It should be running but it wasn't and that probably meant that whoever was supposed to be running it wasn't around.

Sora closed the door behind him and walked further into the house, looking up at the balcony. One of those rooms was his. He jogged up the stairs and looked down the little balcony hall. There were two doors in the wall and one at the end. Memories that he didn't know he had forgotten were returning with each step he took (or maybe he hadn't really forgotten, he just never thought about them and suddenly it felt strange to start thinking about them again). His room was the middle door. He turned the handle and threw the door open fully.

Everything was the same as he remembered and a little bit different. He still had the same bed, the same shelves, the same desk, the same toys and the same wallpaper. Everything was the same colour as he remembered it being. What was different though, was the state of things. He remembered leaving his room a year ago in a disorganised state. There were clothes and toys on the floor, shelves with nothing shelved in any particular order or with any attention to detail or neatness and there was a rather distinctive odour that he quite liked. He couldn't quite describe that odour; the only word that would even come close to a description of it was 'him'. Sora's room smelt like him. Although, memories resurfacing from the back of his mind showed him the face of an upset older woman looking down at him a bit crossly and telling him that his room smelled 'offensive'. Now it smelt clean. Brand new. There was no trace of any scent that would mark this room as a place that anyone had ever lived in. Between the order of the toys and the desk, the bed with its neatly folded sheets and the general cleanliness of everything, the room just seemed to be a display – a mere remnant or snapshot of something that was once there.

The familiar squeak of the front door being opened quickly and the sound of shuffling reached his ears. He turned around and looked over the rail of the balcony. A woman carrying two paper grocery bags in one arm was holding the door open for a small, red-headed girl in pigtails who was also carrying two bags, one in each arm. The woman let the door swing shut noisily and adjusted the bags so that she was carrying one in each arm. Sora thought that they were strangers to him but felt that he should know them well. Too many memories were playing in his head to make sense of any of them and he wasn't able to think before he blurted out something that somehow felt completely natural:

"Mom!"

The woman looked up and froze. Her eyes locked on Sora's and her arms suddenly went limp, dropping the brown paper bags she was holding.

"S-Sora?" she stuttered, blinking her eyes tightly and thinking that she was probably hallucinating.

Her voice was met in Sora's mind with an echo from a long time ago – the same voice saying the same thing to him. Sounds and images were whizzing past each other at incomprehensible speeds in his head so his only option was to trust his instinct and blurt out another poorly thought out sentence that also felt like a natural thing to say:

"You were gone all this time and you left the fans on?" Sora exclaimed incredulously.

The woman reached to her chest with both hands and clutched her heart. Sora's eyes widened when he saw her face distort in anguish and tears flow freely from her eyes. "Oh my gosh… Sora."

You're my best friend if you get the not-so-subtle pop-culture reference.

Now, normally I don't say this, but please leave a review -^_^-

It's usually my policy to just let readers be and if they think the story is deserving of a review they'll leave one but I think now I should start encouraging people to review because I've found that getting reviews is a mega-motivator and that people are more likely to review when prompted. I'll only ask this for the first chapter so that I can gauge if this story is worth continuing simultaneously with Princess Story and Tidus' Adventures in Traverse Town or if I should just delete it and wait until I finish one or the other before bringing it back.