Aneko: Hello.
Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts. I also don't own the book of poetry, I Wrote This For You, which the excerpt at the bottom is from.
Nobody's Hero
The first time he realizes that a few things have changed, he and Riku are heading down to the beach to meet up with Kairi and row over to the island. They pass a boy messing around on a practice ramp with a skateboard. The surface is too smooth, too free of scuffs, to be more than a day old, and the awkward way he holds himself on it, like a calf on new legs, shows that he doesn't really know what he's doing. He tries to kick off, and the skateboard bucks out from under him, rolling to a stop when it hits Sora's feet.
Like there is nothing more natural to him, Sora steps down on the back of the board so that the front flies up for him to grab. The kid is looking at him like he makes the sun shine, so he can't resist riding the board over to the boy, throwing in a trick or two along the way.
When he jogs back over to Riku, his friend has one eyebrow raised. The arrogance and pride that he carried as they grew up had been bled out of him after all their trials and battles, but there is still a hint of the old Riku, there in that arch of one silver brow. "I didn't know you could ride a skateboard," he says, a slight smirk about his lips.
Sora has to think about that. "Well, there was one in Radiant Gardens that Donald's uncle owned," he decides on.
Now the other silver brow goes up also. The arrogance is gone, replaced by that look that shows up when he finds out things about Sora that have changed while they were apart. "You must have practiced a lot."
"Uh, yeah," Sora says. He looks off towards the sea.
What he doesn't say is that really, he didn't practice much. There hadn't been much time, what with trying to save the worlds and all. And he recalled Donald laughing at him the few times he did try.
He just grins and they keep walking.
This is how it starts.
Sometimes when he looks at Kairi, he thinks that her hair is too long, and he wonders when she dyed it red (because really it should be black, right?)
Sparks skitter off his blade as he blocks Riku's attack, then leaps away towards the edge of their little self-made arena, a few arcing lines scratched into the sand.
He dashes forward for another attack, but as he brings his blade up, the shifting sand beneath him betrays his weight. He falters, just a small misstep, but Riku has seen it, and his parry nearly twists the keyblade out of Sora's hands. Sora catches it at the last minute, his grip awkward, and he pulls away to readjust. He's about to jump back in, but Riku breaks out of a crouch and looks at him.
"Trying out a new stance?" He asks.
Sora stays in position, glancing at the keyblade, now point up, behind him. "I guess so," he says, but he swings the keyblade in a circle behind him. It feels unpracticed but familiar.
Riku shrugs. "It seems impractical, but okay."
Sora laughs, just to keep himself from saying yeah, they thought so too.
Because he has no idea who "they" are.
Kairi stares at him for almost a whole minute, her head tilted to the side so that her autumn-red hair falls and curls against her neck. Then her brow clears as she realizes. Her giggle is soft and short, but gentle.
"Sora," she says. He never tires of her voice. He was only away from it for a year, but that was a year too long. "I think you mean the Secret Place, right?"
"Well, yeah." Sora runs a hand through the spikes on his head. "What did I say?"
"You said 'The Usual Spot.'"
Two days ago, he looked in the mirror, and thought that suddenly, his eyes looked almost yellow, and his hair dark enough to be black.
But he blinked, and it was gone, like the last shadows with the dawn.
He is in the middle of cleaning his room ("I don't care how busy you are!" His mother says. "You were gone for over a year and you will clean your room."), digging through piles of old, vaguely shaped children's drawings and early plans for adventure, planned out on construction paper. Sometimes it makes him cringe, sometimes it makes him laugh, but each thing he finds pulls him further back into his memory.
He's going through a box in his closet that he can't remember ever having, and some of the things inside it are toys he hasn't seen since he was six or seven. Under finger paintings and old race cars missing wheels, he pulls out something that at first he doesn't recognize. It looks kind of like a stuffed animal, but too flat and kind of lumpy.
As soon as the word puppet crosses his mind, he realizes he has thrown the thing across the room, and bewilderingly strong feelings of hurt and anger swallow him.
The feelings pass, but he still throws out the puppet as soon as he can bear to touch it.
"Your ice cream—it's melting," Riku says, and Sora hears I with three different pairs of ears. This also keeps happening, and he hasn't yet worked out how to shed the overpowering déjà vu that always come with it.
Sora takes a taste of cold, sweet and salty ice cream. Riku hadn't seemed surprised when Sora declared that they should get it because they used to always get ice cream, and Sora was really craving sea salt flavor. And Riku didn't question when Sora wanted to eat the ice cream at the highest point of the island so that they could watch the sun setting red over the rippling sea. Sora is starting to think that Riku knows, that maybe Riku had known since Sora had ridden a skateboard like it was second nature to him.
He looks over at his silver-haired best friend now, staring off into the horizon with eyes that reflect the water. He asks before he can think better of it.
"What was it like?" A art of him wants to take it back, but another part of him needs to know, so he forges ahead when ocean eyes turn towards him. "Y'know, when you and Xehanort were, um…" he scratches his face awkwardly. What does he even call it?
But this is one of the things about best friends; they fill some of the gaps you leave, as Riku does now. He looks down at his lap, turning his ice cream stick over in his hands. "It was…hard… confusing, like sometimes I was thinking and remembering things I didn't know. I t was a downward spiral, more and more things that I couldn't control. It felt like I was fighting to be 'me' every day." But even as Sora begins to think that Maybe I'm also—, Riku turns to him. "But I don't think it's the same with you."
Sora has his fingers pressed together so hard they have turned white. "How do you know?" It's the first time he's voiced it, but not the first time he's thought it, because he asks himself every day, How do you know? And he really, really wants someone to answer it.
Riku is silent, and Sora waits. It takes a while, and most people would believe Riku has nothing to say and move on. Not Sora. Riku has different silences, and Sora knows them all. This is the one where Riku wants to say something, but is working out how to phrase it.
"Does look through your eyes ever feel..wrong?" He finally chooses to say.
"Well, yeah." Sora shrugs. "We were just talking about it."
Riku is shaking his head, though. "It's different." Sora frowns, feels hurt, opens his mouth to argue, but Riku continues. "Ddi it ever feel like someone was trying to steal everything about your very being, like they were doing their best to tear you apart from the inside? To rip you out and take your place?" And Sora looks away, because Riku's eyes are burning—not at him, but they are burning and it hurts to see. He thinks that maybe Riku won't really want to hang out after digging into old, not-yet-closed wounds, but he just turns back to the ocean, a sigh like sea breeze passing through his lips.
"When we are older," he says. "Maybe we will understand more." He snaps his ice cream stick in half, right after the spot hat says WINNER.
.
.
He keeps the blue orb that he found in the handmade munny pouch. Holding it up to the sunlight makes his heart ache so fiercely he almost can't breathe.
.
.
In his dreams he is on a clock tower—in a tournament—watching a meteor shower—collecting seashells—training on an island where stars float almost in reach—doing recon—I belong with So—NO! My heart belongs to—You're both my best friends.—We're…best friends, right?—My friends are my power…and I'm theirs!—Is it that I'm not supposed to exist?—I'll…disappear?—I'm asking you as a friend, just…put an end to—
Most mornings, he wakes up with salt on his face and fragments of a name he can't remember on his lips.
.
.
.
("Your heart, memories, your data, and your dreams. The bits and bytes that have made up your life so far - can you say for sure they are not just copies of someone else's?")
.
.
.
He asks Kairi if he ever gathered a collection of seashells and left them by her bed. Even Kairi, sweet as she is, looks at him oddly before telling him no, that never happened.
He is left trying to puzzle out why in his mind he sees rows of shells on white sheets. There is a body under the sheet that he cannot see. All he knows is wake up, please wake up you've been sleeping for so long.
He never does tell Riku that sometimes when he sees him, he gets so angry he practically can't see straight. Gets so angry he nearly summons his Keyblade and attacks him. The voice that snarls for this, the only one he knows, wants to scream, to yell, It's your fault! I hate you I hate you I hate you!
He swallows it back like bile.
He has always been an only child, so why does he feel like he's got an older brother somewhere out there in the world?
Not brother, something whispers. We would be the weirdest brothers.
Sometimes, he is struck with the idea that there's someone he needs to chase after into the darkness of worlds, even though Riku leans on the tree beside him and Kairi's hand is warm in his. He wants to press a hand to his shoulder, take off into the stars.
He has no armor.
.
.
(He never did).
He is skipping rocks in the pool net to the secret place when she finds him.
"Riku's worried," she says. "He said you've been acting strange lately. Are you okay, Sora?"
"I don't really know." He hurls another stone. It sinks instead of skips.
"I think…you will be, someday." She says after a little while. "But right now, they need you. They're still looking."
His breath catches. "They? How did you know, Kai—" He leans back to look up at her, and bites his tongue, because in the light, her hair looks pale, looks blonde, and there is a not-Kairi set to her body and smile on her face. "Wha—Nami—"
But she shakes her head, putting a finger to her lips. Sora doesn't care—seeing her brings him a crippling sense of tranquility that he is hard-pressed to explain. 'Please—what's happening to me?" He has and he hasn't asked this question before.
She takes a moment to breathe, like she needs to ground herself. "A while back, some things happened, and I—I took things apart that aren't supposed to be taken apart." She pauses to read his expression. "Do you remember?"
"No. Yes. I don't know." He runs a hand through his hair. It sounds like indecision, but it is really all the answers at once. But she nods, and he's glad someone seems to get it, because partial madness is a lot lonelier than he expected, and—
"You will someday," she says again. "After I took things apart, I put them back together. But to make you you, you needed something else. Something I had no control over."
"What?"
She smiles, but instead of an answer, she says, "I can see you. You didn't disappear."
Half of his heart feels like it's being squeezed very tightly. And it's like she was looking in him or through or between him, because now she looks back at Him. "And you aren't going to disappear either. He saved you, so now, please save him. Them."
"Them?" He asks, but no, that's right, he'll save all three of them. He blinks, frowns uncertainly at Namine.
Her smile is almost a grin, and it's the closest to Kairi she's ever looked. "You have a big heart, Sora. Please don't ever change."
"So you're feeling okay?" Riku asks.
Sora flaps his hand in the silverette's direction, rolling his eyes. He doesn't get up from where he had flopped after today's impromptu spar. "Fine, just like I was the first two times you asked."
"What changed?" Riku asks, sitting cross-legged beside him.
Sora shrugs, pillowing his arms under his head. "Nothing, really. I guess I just realized a few things."
"Like what?"
"Well, to be honest, I still don't get all of it," he responds sheepishly, scratching his cheek. "But someone helped me realize that I may have found you and Kairi, but there are still people who need help. I'm not sure how yet, but I've got to help them."
"Don't worry." Riku leans back on his hands. "I think you'll be fine."
Sora nods, his hands curling into fists. "Yeah. Everybody's going to be okay." He closes his eyes. "Everyone'll be home soon."
(You are nobody's hero.
And nobody needs you.
Desperately.)