A/N: So I've come to realize that this fandom lets me channel out my love affair with the sea…or something. This is a strange one?
Disclaimer: I wish.
Statistically Significant
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To leave the tread of all time
and let it make a dark line
in hopes that I can still find
the way back to the moment.
-Enya, Anywhere Is
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Talking to him about it once, Sora had found that Riku's take on the past and the nature of memories was rather--well--interesting even if Sora didn't entirely agree.
He had once said something along the lines of how the older you got, the more the past mattered, until eventually, you remembered nothing but. And how after a time, you started to anticipate the loss and tragedy of simply being able to forget.
And although, sometimes, it is easier to want to forget, other times, I think, I would rather die.
Up to that point, Sora had been nodding at the insight.
Memories are not simply who you once were but who you are now, who you will forever be.
Riku believed in this almost religiously. Sora, on the other hand, begged to differ here and thought it explained why Riku was so stubborn about beating himself up for being clumsy and knocking over Sora's sea-salt ice-cream, trying on and breaking Sora's flip-flops, and other things Riku regretted that were not spoken of.
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Sometimes, memories are foreign things, and that is that.
Sora knows this better than anyone when he wakes after dreams that do not belong to him. The metal of the crown pendant burns hot against his chest in those summer nights, and in clutching it, a sense of balance is preserved.
Riku. Kairi. Remember those names. But it is difficult because in those moments of little consciousness, this other mind fills with other names. Often, there are more numbers than names swimming in his head in waves of tragic nostalgia, and flashes of light—of fire—and faces and colours he cannot shake off.
Red remains especially vivid.
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"Riku! Kairi!" In the mornings, he is himself, not at all feeling like the incomplete stories that play in his mind on the nights before.
"Sora," they smile in unison, real and real, and it is another day in paradise.
If he were to dwell upon it, which he does not, he would find himself sympathizing, heart going out to Roxas--and what a strange expression that one was--because these are things that half his heart will likely never feel again.
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Other nights, he finds himself revisiting his childhood like the playback of a reel of sepia-coloured film. It makes him marvel at how in their early years, no one had cared for identity, and how the gift of imagination had been more than enough.
When you could create other worlds and other names and every adventure all in your head, why would anyone have bothered with looking in the mirror and into the self and coming up with clever things to say? Wooden rafts and sandcastles had sufficed. It didn't matter who you once were or would forever be.
And then as the awkwardness of early adolescence had hit, they had found themselves stumbling and stuttering, not knowing what to say to each other sometimes, and not knowing what to say to the self, because everything had started to matter.
And as the whole fiasco with Kingdom Hearts had hit, no one knew what to say at all...
Looking back, he can't say how they got through it. Maybe not saying anything at all had worked just fine.
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When they had first started probability and statistics in math class, Kairi had once said that the probability of Riku being right was much greater than that of Riku being wrong and Sora would one day just have to accept it.
One would think after all that business with the heartless and the darkness and the Ansem-ness, Kairi would have changed her mind. Even Riku had voiced this with a wry smile, many years after her initial proclamation.
Alas, she was not one to take back her words. Though Sora had rolled his eyes, he was secretly proud of her gentle tenacity and how she could give their silver-haired friend a run for his money when it came down to it.
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He recalls long days spent sitting on tree trunks beside Riku or Kairi or both, fingers laced, always and always, breathing in the air of sea-salt and algae. And maybe, more so than the silence, it was that which had carried them through everything.
'Memories are not simply who you once were but who you are now, who you will forever be.'
A soft reverberation in his mind is the only indication that Roxas is laughing his bittersweet laugh at the thought.
He watches them now on that same tree trunk, the two friends he holds dearest to him in this world of worlds, and finds that he no longer doubts Kairi's mathematical skill or Riku's logic.
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