Not Good Enough, a kingdom hearts fanfic

Title: Not Good Enough

Summary: For some people "he'll be like a good friend who's gone away for a year." just isn't good enough.

Status: One-shot, complete

Pairings: none

Warnings: none

Beta: Youkai-Koinu

Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts.

A/N: Wow, it's been a long time since I've written any fanfiction; hopefully I'm not too out of practice. This will be my first Kingdom Hearts fanfic and it was pretty fun to write, so I'd love any feed back, positive or otherwise, you could give. By the way, Amara isn't an original character, she's in the game but as far as I know, doesn't have a name.

One day Amara wakes up and she realizes she isn't sad anymore. Which, when she pauses to think about it, is strange since she can't think of any reason for her to have been sad. No other reason than it feels, somewhere in the back of her mind, deep in her heart, as if she really should be. As if she should feel like her heart's been ripped out, like her world's come crashing down. Though, try as hard as she might, she can't remember why she feels like she should be mourning something, someone. As disturbing as this feeling of should-be-sadness is, when she's really honest with herself, she's just relieved she's not feeling that horrible ache any longer. So she stops trying to question why and accepts that she's just not.

Days, weeks, a few months later and she still hasn't uncovered the reason for this feeling. In fact, she's almost totally forgotten that half-remember sadness. At least she has in her waking state, though subconsciously, in her dreams at night, is a different story entirely. She'll wake in the middle of the night and in the few seconds before wakefulness fully returns the sadness is back and crushing the very breath from her. Then, in a few seconds, minutes, years it's over and the feeling is gone again leaving her sitting wide-eyed in bed trying to shove that feeling even further away. So now, even in the bright light of day, she refuses to try to unlock the mystery of this horrible sadness, tries not to even think about it. Secretly, she's just terrified that if she does it will bring that terrible feeling of loss crashing back to drown her in pain again. She'll do anything to avoid that, up to and including pretending that those moments of crushing half-remembered sadness don't even exist, no matter how much they terrify her.

Sometimes Amara notices little things that just seem off. Things like how sometimes she catches herself setting the table for two instead of for just herself or things like how she can't seem to think of why she uses that corny "World's Greatest Mom" coffee mug every morning. She can't really explain them, but that's okay because they're little things and she can just shrug them off. They're no big deal.

Sometime's Amara notices bigger things that don't seem right, things that she has more trouble simply shrugging off. Things like that growth chart on the kitchen doorway, the pictures in her photo album where it looks like she should have her arm around someone but there's no one there and the ones that aren't of anyone, or things like why there's regular and children's cough syrup in the medicine cabinet. She can't just shrug these things off so she subconsciously comes up for reasons for them. She does this to avoid delving deeper and perhaps seeing those nasty little connections between these things and other things she's forgotten, like the reason behind the horrible sadness she's so relieved she no longer has. That growth chart must be from whoever lived here before her, ignoring the fact she's the only person who's ever lived here. Whoever took those pictures must have been a horrible photographer, but even that didn't explain the ones that looked as if someone had been taken out. The store must have been out of regular cough syrup the last time she had a cold, but then why hadn't she thrown out the children's kind once she had bought more of the regular cough medicine? No one ever said these explanations were good but as long as she didn't examine them too closely, which she'd become adept at doing, she could easily accept them as the truth.

Sometimes Amara notices really big things that she can't just shrug off or come up with an explanation for subconsciously or otherwise. Things like that scar across her lower abdomen, the boy's mountain bike next to her bike in the garage, and the trophies proudly displayed in the living room. She can't figure out why these things are there no matter how hard she tries and, as much as she hates to admit it, sometimes that really scares her. So she packed up the trophies in a box to store in the attic, moved the bike to the backyard shed that she never goes into, and she just avoids looking at that scar. She doesn't talk to anyone about it though and she avoids thinking about these things as much as possible. It's really not that difficult, she thinks to herself as she tries to forget about them entirely. She really wishes she had an explanation for these bizarre discrepancies in her life, but she doesn't and she's dealing with them the best way she knows how. Of course, the fact she's becoming an expert in denial and repression is just another thing she can't let herself think about. That list of things she won't allow herself to think about is ever growing and she's afraid that if she ever inspected any of them too closely, her carefully reconstructed world might come crashing down around her ears.

All the time though, Amara notices the biggest thing of all, the thing that she can't shrug off, explain away, repress or ignore. The room at the end of the hall. The room that as far as she knows should be a spare bedroom, but isn't. Amara had gone in there once when she was making her spring-cleaning rounds and she had dropped her cleaning products at her feet and stared in complete shock. The room was full of someone's stuff, a young boy's stuff upon closer inspection. There were toys scattered on the floor, unfinished homework on the desk, the closet was full of clothes, and the bed sheets were in disarray as if someone had just gotten up in a hurry. Amara doesn't know whose room that is and that scares her even more than the really big things, almost as much as when the sadness seizes her in the middle of the night. Amara avoids that room now, in fact, she avoids that part of the house all together.

Amara notices all these things, and sometimes, when she's up late at night and the doubts and fear set in, she worries she might be going insane.

One day Amara wakes up, gets up out of bed, and is halfway to her bedroom door when she suddenly sinks to the floor shaking, her eyes wide and welling with tears. Fourteen years of memories are rushing in and crowding her vision in a blurring, jumbled mess. She's remembering.

A flash of a terrible storm and she now remembers where that horrible, crushing sadness came from. She remembers the day she woke up to find he had vanished into thin air. A flash of pizza and macaroni every Thursday and she remembers why she sometimes sets the table for two; she was setting a place for him as she always had for nearly fourteen years. A flash of a clumsily wrapped present and she remembers why she loves that corny mug so much: he had given it to her. It had been on mother's day when he was seven. She remembers that now, how he had saved his allowance up and been so proud to be able to give his mother a gift that he'd gotten all by himself.

This time a series of scenes and she sees herself marking his height on the kitchen doorway throughout the years. She remembers teasing him that he'd better hurry and grow or else he'd never be taller than his mother. Along with this comes the memory of his retort, that it wasn't his fault she was so freakishly tall and the playful shove and noogie he'd received for the comment. Forgotten vacations and birthday parties come flooding back and she remembers who was supposed to be in those pictures of no one and whom she was posing with in the others. A glimpse of a little boy with the sniffles and she remembers who she had bought that cough medicine for.

The next memory takes a little longer. This time she's in a hospital after nine months of a difficult pregnancy and hours of labor and she remembers why she has that scar, it was from the c-section that the doctors had finally decided was required to bring her son into the world. After that, the next few come easier. That's his bike now hidden in the shed. Those were his trophies she'd packed off to the attic. Most of all she remembers whom that room at the end of the hall belongs to.

Amara remembers other things as well. She remembers teaching him to ride a bike, his first steps, his first words, oh so many firsts. The time he'd nearly burned the house down trying to make her breakfast in bed on her birthday. She begins to cry in earnest, how could she forget her son? She feels terrible that she had forgotten and, not only that, but in another shock, she realizes it took an entire year for her to her to even realize she had.

As more and more memories trickle in, progressively slower now, Amara doesn't move from her place on the floor. Finally, it seems as if she's remembered everything and while she's glad, no, overjoyed that she does, she can't help but think that her regained memories don't change that her son is still missing.

With that thought, the horrible, crushing sadness settles in once more and Amara continues her life much as she did before forgetting. She wakes up every morning and tries to retain some semblance of normalcy. She makes sure she sleeps and eats enough, she takes care of the house's needed upkeep, and she's polite and makes small talk with her neighbors when necessary. Her attempted schedule is irregularly interrupted by bouts of grief stricken sobbing fits. It seems as if everything's returned to how it was before she forgot.

A few weeks after regaining her memories, Amara's washing dishes as she does every morning after breakfast, trying to take her mind off things by concentrating on getting her dishes as sparkling clean as humanly possible. She almost bursts into tears when she gets to her "1 Mom" mug. Trying to blink them back and almost completely failing, she throws herself whole-heartedly into getting every last bit of coffee stain off that mug while the tears roll down her face.

So absorbed with her task, she doesn't look up at the sound of the front door opening or at the sound of someone's shoes slapping against the kitchen's tile floor, she's just concentrating so hard on not falling into a million little pieces. A choked out "Mom" finally gets her attention. She drops her mug into the soapy dishwater and spins around, gasping when she's enveloped in an almost bone crushing hug. After a second of stunned amazement, she hugs back just as tightly and now her tears are ones of happiness instead of grief because it's her son, she has her son back. Her baby's returned. Eventually she manages to get words out between her tears, "Thank goodness you're finally home, Sora."