Alas Poor Yorick

By Rhino7

Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This little ditty is mine. So, I recently wrote a oneshot purely for the sake of violence. This was written purely for the sake of sadness. I wanted to write something sad and depressing, because I'm an oddball like that. Anyway, this started out as one thing, mutated into another, and then it had a baby with something entirely different, and this is that lovechild. I think I started rambling about halfway through it, but I still think it turned out okay.

This oneshot takes place about five years after Kingdom Hearts II, and doesn't deviate the storyline other than after the fall of Organization XIII, there was a really big Heartless War in which Sora and Riku and all them fought in. That's about all you need to know to enjoy. Constructive feedback is always appreciated!

..:--X--:..

"It's been a year since you died."

It wasn't much of a greeting, but it was all Riku had been thinking about all day.

"One year ago today actually." Riku felt that burning sensation across the bridge of his nose, a feeling all too familiar lately. "Dude, this sucks." He chuckled ruefully, lifting his eyes to the grave marker.

The grass had long since started to grow over the upturned dirt. Destiny Islands was still treading on the fresh earth of spring, so the cemetery was constantly wet and vibrant, lively. Riku frowned at the word choice.

"Sorry I haven't, uh, come around more often." He lifted a hand to the back of his head, "But, with you…with you gone, I had to take on, a lot of responsibility." Already his vision was blurring, and didn't that just make him lose face.

"Kairi…She's doing better. Sh-She can't quite…walk all on her own yet, but she's getting there. We don't talk very much anymore." He followed the outline of the dark stone headstone with his eyes. "I think she still feels guilty, I mean I would…I do actually…but that's not the point. It's not her fault and I—" He choked and swallowed hard, "I can't comfort her like you do—did—Geez, Sora, help me out here."

Riku ran one hand through his hair and dropped his eyes to the dewy grass growing against the headstone. He used to shake his head at the idea of talking to a dead person. It wasn't logical and it didn't make sense. The person was dead. Their heart, their soul, it was no longer residing in the person's body. They couldn't hear you.

Then his best friend had died. Suddenly talking out loud, by himself, to a grave marker didn't seem so absurd.

It wasn't even the war that killed Sora. If you really boiled it down, it was a smoke break. Sora, the Keyblade's Chosen One, the savior of the worlds, the leader of the Resistance, had been killed by a fucking smoke break.

His name had been Robert. Robert Pada…Pada-something. He had been an aeronautical engineer working with Cid's Gummi crew in the main hangar on Radiant Garden. He had been a chain smoker who could hardly go an hour without lighting up, Cid's kind of guy. His break time had rolled around by 3:30, but Robert had caved into his addiction and taken off ten minutes early, at 3:20.

"I guess you don't really care about time anymore, huh?" Riku attempted humor, if only for his own sake. "Well, this—technically you've been legal for three months." He chuckled dryly, reading the epitaph on the stone without really reading it. "I remember, heh, you used to get so mad because no one would let you drink. They let you fight in a damn war, but alcohol was out of the question."

Kairi had rarely gone to the hangar. It was just far enough out of town to warrant tired legs from the walk. She only made the trip when Riku or Sora or Tifa returned from a mission. She had started growing close to Tifa. The older woman had an older sister quality that drew Kairi in, having always been a single child and grown up with a bunch of boys and Selphie. The walk usually took half an hour for her, since she met and chatted with the citizens of the town on the way. She had left Merlin's house at 3:20, just as Robert Pada-something walked outside the hangar, pulling out a pack of menthols.

Riku let his gaze wander, drifting over to the gently swaying trees running around the edge of the manicured cemetery grounds. His eyes caught on the freshly lain flowers and porcelain pieces and tear stained cards left to accompany the other dark, granite headstones littering the cemetery in weaving rows.

"Sorry, I didn't bring you any flowers." A smirk tugged at the corner of his lips, "That's more of Kairi's thing." He sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets, "I only bring my woes and monologues."

He could almost see Sora rolling his eyes.

Sora, Donald, and Goofy had completed their latest mission to Halloween Town earlier than they'd expected and thus returned to Radiant Garden sooner than they'd hoped. Sora had called Kairi on the trip back and asked if she wanted to meet them there, so they could hang out before he was re-assigned. The mechanic on shift in the hangar jumped in his chair when he heard the sudden roar of the Gummi's engines as it taxied into the hangar and rolled toward the corner farthest from the ventilation grates, where Robert Pada-something was lighting his first cigarette.

The mechanic had been dozing, like all enthused personnel, and started so violently in surprise that his elbow had smashed into the computer panel to his left. While letting loose a string of curses and massaging his poor elbow, he had failed to notice the depressed yellow button that manually started to run the petroleum station on the hangar's main floor.

Riku looked at Sora's headstone for a quiet minute. "So," He started, "How depressing is it that you're surrounded by old geisers with bouquets, but we don't even bring a daisy?"

The headstone didn't laugh.

"Yeah, sorry, I'll try to work on that." Riku swallowed hard, feeling the emotion forming a ball in the pit of his stomach. "I mean, most guys don't want flowers, but you've always been a girl, so…" He bit his lip suddenly, very hard. "I'm really trying here, man."

Kairi had barely been walking for two minutes when Tifa pulled up beside her in her two-seater convertible. She had offered to give her a ride. It had been particularly hot that day, and no one was lingering outside to talk to, so Kairi had acquiesced and climbed into the passenger seat. Tifa had always had a lead foot, and no sooner had Kairi closed the door than Tifa was slamming on the accelerator, gunning the car down the dusty, busted concrete road.

No one noticed the petrol leaking out of the facet. Robert Pada-something was officially on break by then at 3:30, standing over the grated ventilation shafts that ran criss-cross under the control station of the hangar. The mechanic was watching the latest Gummi land, still cursing his elbow under his breath. Sora, Donald, and Goofy were climbing out of the Gummi, glad to be back in Radiant Garden and looking forward to a restful afternoon.

Riku was the only one in the cemetery. No sobbing widows or stiff fathers. No trembling sisters or elderly spouses. He was the only body in the cemetery that was breathing. The idea was chilling.

"It isn't fair." His voice had a cool tremor to it. "This—how many people are buried here? Fifty? Sixty?" He glanced around, "Why couldn't—They're all old. You deserve better company than a bunch of old people who—who lived their lives and…got married, had kids, lived the dream, you know?" He cursed softly and let the breeze swallow his words. "You got screwed over, dude."

Tifa had rolled up to the hangar at 3:30, and Kairi had gladly gotten out of the car, a little greener for the ride. Tifa had said a quick good-bye and peeled back towards town. On her way into the hangar, Kairi had waved at the man smoking outside the main entrance. Robert Pada-something had waved back, taking a long drag from the remaining half of his cigarette. Kairi's phone had gone off and she had picked it up. It had been a text from Riku. 'I'll meet u guys 2nite Merlin's'. Riku had been held up on a recon of The World That Never Was and wouldn't get back to Radiant Garden until later that evening.

Riku exhaled heavily and lowered himself into a squat, arms across his thighs, linking his fingers together, facing the headstone at eye level. Sora. Date of Birth: December 12, 1989. Date of Death: March 15, 2009. Riku barely read the fancy lettering on the granite before his vision blurred violently. He didn't make it to the epitaph.

Dropping his head, he pressed his thumb and index fingers against his eyes, dropping his hand to cover his mouth. "I am so sorry, Sora. God, I am so sorry."

The petrol had fanned out in a wide berth, creeping across the concrete floor, slowly bubbling out of the massive underground tank that held who knew how many liters of the stuff. Upon contact with the air, wisps and vapors had started rising from the gathering pools. It had rolled through the break room, up the stairs to the control room where the mechanic with the sore elbow was dozing, down through the air ducts that emptied from various grates around the western side of the hangar. No one noticed. No one saw it. No one smelled it. The hangar always smelled like gasoline. Sora was on the opposite side of the hangar. Kairi had just walked in, careful to close the door behind her.

"I call you a girl, but I'm the one losing my shit. This would be where you get to have the ironic last laugh." Riku said, remaining where he was, leaned forward like a catcher in a baseball game. Except catchers didn't normally cry. Riku didn't normally cry either for that matter. "Kairi doesn't laugh anymore. I mean, neither of us have any reason to really. She blames herself, but there's no point in doing that. Me? I blame you." His voice cracked and he cleared his throat. "You stupid bastard, I blame you. Why do you always have to be the hero?"

Robert Pada-something inhaled one last, deep pull from his cancer-stick. It was almost 3:40. He had been feeling guilty for skiving out early on his break, so he decided to go back in before his actually break time was over. Usually, he stomped out his cigarette, smashed the head of it against a wall, or dropped it in a pool of water to extinguish it. One year ago, however, he had been so preoccupied with breaking his promise to Mrs. Pada-something to quit smoking and taking his break early to accommodate his sick habit, that he had dismissed his normal means of putting out his cigarette and just dropped it down the ventilation grate. He had made it to the front door of the hangar.

Riku blinked repeatedly, working his jaw furiously to combat the trembling in his shoulders. "You were out, man. You did your job. You were safe, and you—you just—" He waved one arm in a wide gesture to cover up for his lack of available words. "Damn it, Sora, it isn't fair."

At a loss, he glanced around the cemetery. The population of Destiny Islands was small, so there were only so many bodies to bury. It was a small plot of open land, surrounded by thick bellied trees. There were no fences and no gates to lock. No one was around to watch you fall apart, except the ghosts. Riku didn't really believe in ghosts. After everything he'd seen and fought and witnessed, he still found it hard to believe that anyone would want to linger in a world that killed them.

The lit cigarette fell through the slits of the ventilation grates, turning slightly in the air, head first, toward the swirling mass of undulating petroleum vapors. Robert Pada-something turned the handle of the door. The mechanic on shift let his eyes drift closed. Kairi spotted Sora across the hangar just as Sora lifted a hand and waved at her. Kairi took two steps before the lit cigarette penetrated the vaporous haze fifty feet below her shoes.

Riku paused, reaching out and touching the corner of Sora's headstone, balancing on his toes and feeling the cold, solid, smooth surface of the rock. Sora's body lay just yards underneath him. Just his body, not Sora, not his heart, not his soul, not his sense of humor. Just his battered, cold, one-year-dead corpse. Nausea roiled through Riku's stomach and he swallowed again. He could still hear the coroner's report, monotone and forcibly toneless, relaying the cause of death.

He turned and retched on the bright green grass.

Tifa had just been pulling into the lot behind Merlin's house when it happened. Everyone had heard the explosion, like four freight trains meeting simultaneously at full speed at a crossroads. Never mind how impossible that scenario was. It had been loud. An umbrella of black smoke had unfolded out of the western side of the hangar, flames had swallowed the entire control area, licking at the now broken concrete walls and consuming the petroleum like water. Kairi had disappeared in the fire. Sora, Donald, and Goofy had been blown off their feet, slamming into the Gummi behind them under a shower of nails and flaming debris.

Riku found himself on his hands and knees, emptying his stomach on the manicured lawn of the cemetery just feet from Sora's gravestone. Hot tears scalded the back of his eyes and spilled over his cheeks. As soon as the sickness passed, he wiped his mouth and eased back on his haunches, trembling.

"Kairi turns legal in a few weeks." He rasped out after a moment. "That…It hasn't really stopped her from, you know. No one has really tried to stop her. Hell, I saw Leon buy her a scotch a few days ago. It's not too bad, the drinking, but—it's weird seeing her like that."

Riku ignored the side of the plot where he'd thrown up and instead decided to stare at the top right corner of the headstone, breathing in short, shallow pulls. "They want me to go see a therapist…Yeah, I know. I lasted this long without going emo on a shrink's couch; the damage is done now. No use opening up all that old stuff."

Sora had been running toward the flaming mass of the hangar before he'd been fully upright and on his feet. Kairi had been thrown several yards from the blast, smashing into the wall and being nearly crushed by a chunk of dented metal that had been part of a nearby parked Gummi ship. The concrete floor had buckled under the explosion, dipping and rising in small valleys and mountains, making traversing it treacherous. Nevertheless, Sora had reached her in record time, before Donald and Goofy had even sat up, dazed and confused.

Kairi had been unconscious, with good reason. The bone of her right thigh had shattered and broken the skin. Her pelvis had broken and her left knee cap had been severely dislocated, nearly bending her leg in the other direction. There was a gash oozing blood on her head and a chunk had been ripped so deeply from her arm that the bone was visible. All visible skin had been burned red and black. She had looked dead. She still had had the strength to scream when Sora hurriedly hoisted her up and carried her out of the inferno.

"Your parents are doing better." Riku started bluntly.

He usually got along with silence very well. He could remember a time when he'd gone off by himself for the sole purpose of seeking out silence. Lately, though, he found it less and less tolerable. Cemeteries were naturally quiet, and it was eerie.

Sora had never been quiet. He had never handled quiet well. He had managed to jostle Riku out of his dark and twisted reveries with either a joke, a random comment, or pushing him off the paopu tree abruptly. Sora had been all color, movement, and noise. He had been chaos. Riku couldn't get used to associating Sora with this quiet stillness in the cemetery. He never would.

"Your mom called me last week and asked if I'd clean your car out. Yeah, I trespassed on the sacred interior of that junk-bucket you called a vehicle. It's in nice condition. Your parents can't bring themselves to sell it, but they can't drive it when it—when it still feels like it's yours. So I cleaned it out." Riku attempted a short smile. "Man, you really ruined the interior of that thing. It took me three hours to discover the color of the upholstery."

He left out the bit about how he spent the first two hours just sitting in the car, staring at the fingerprints on the dash and alternately gripping the steering wheel and radio knobs.

Emergency crews had been astoundingly quick to respond to the explosion. By the time Sora had carried Kairi outside, blood, broken bones, burned skin and all, and glanced around to find Goofy and Donald staggering out of the smoke, an armada of ambulances, police, and fire trucks had come screeching to the hangar's wounded entrance, arcing around the southern wing, sirens blaring. Kairi had fallen unconscious again, and that had been a blessing as the paramedics maneuvered her broken and burned body onto a stretcher and made quick work of transporting her into the ambulance.

Sora had probably ached to go with her. He and the other two hadn't escaped the explosion untouched. The skin of Sora's face had been singed and attacked by shattered glass and burning debris. His left eye had been bloody and blinded by the fire, along with a laundry list of other bumps and bruises that weren't even taken into account later, during the autopsy.

Instead of recognizing any physical pain, Sora had turned back to the hell raging behind him in the remnants of the flaming hangar. At least two men had still been inside, particularly close to the blast. The concrete walls of the hangar would surely hold. So he had ducked into the fire, unquestioningly going to rescue Robert Pada-something and the dozing mechanic, who had both been instantaneously incinerated by the initial blast. He wouldn't come back out.

"I'm sure Kairi would come more often if she could," Riku excused. "But the hike, it's still difficult for her. She kinda threw herself into working after the funeral. Apparently being a Princess of Heart comes with a lot more than just wearing a dress and smiling all the time." He chuckled dryly. "But things could be worse."

He couldn't really think of a worse situation at the moment, but he was sure that somewhere a scenario existed. He cleared his throat and exhaled, managing back onto his feet and looking around. He was still alone. He was alone and he was talking to a rock. A rock that was supposed to represent the best man he'd ever known and would ever know. His best friend…reduced to being symbolized by a carved chunk of granite.

"They wanted to inter you in the Radiant Garden cemetery. Some sort of hero's rite or whatever, but no one from Destiny Islands would have that. We wanted you home. We wanted you alive even more, but…beggars can't be choosers. Leon and the rest of the leaders insisted on the big ceremony though."

It had been the first time, unfortunately, that Riku had truly seen what an impact Sora had had on the other worlds. People had shown up from all over, some he knew and some he had never seen before. The ceremony had included the shooting of the rifles, the flag over the casket, and the appreciative words from all the leaders. Riku had refused to speak.

He didn't say anything at the funeral back home either. A few people tried to offer consoling words, and he nodded his acknowledgement, but it was out of his capacity to smile or make it past a few sloppy syllables before nearly collapsing. Kairi hadn't been able to go to either ceremony. The doctors had amputated her left leg just above the knee, gangrene. She had been staring down the barrel of three extensive surgeries to her right leg, and reconstructive surgery to her hips and pelvis. She had received skin transplants and had been in a constant state of sedation for a week.

It was enough to make anyone want to drink until they passed out.

Unfortunately, not everyone can afford that luxury.

Riku inhaled and shoved his hands into his pockets, "Anyway…some visit, huh? Mission accomplished, I've managed to depress myself and probably even you by now." He sniffed and let his eyes follow the shapes of the letters of Sora's name, carved into the stone.

"I, uh, I won't be able to make it out again for a while," He lifted his shoulders apologetically, "They're sending me out to Olympus to oversee the re-reconstruction of the Coliseum…Yeah, the Heartless attacked it again. I don't know, it's got a target on it or something."

Riku squinted against the burning in his eyes. Was this how it was going to be now? Visiting his dead friend's grave for venting sessions? Exhaling, he locked his knees and glanced around the cemetery in mock casualness, seeing no one else around.

"Anyway, I'll—I missed your birthday, but I guess it doesn't really matter anymore. Once you're dead you stop keeping track, right?" He chuckled darkly but suddenly swallowed, pursing his lips furiously. "I'll bring Kairi next time…whether she wants to talk to your ugly headstone or not." He attempted humor, for no one's sake but himself.

Nudging a dirt clod with the toe of his boot, Riku pulled a now-warm can of beer from his pocket.

"I told you, I don't do flowers." He said, kneeling forward and propping the sealed can at the base of the grave marker. "So…Happy belated Birthday, man."

Riku pressed his knuckles against the smooth granite, trailing his fingers across the surface to trace the outline of the short epitaph. He finally let himself read the inscription, the words falling like stones on his shoulders. He coughed back a very unmanly sob and straightened quickly.

"I miss you, man." His voice quivered, "Damn it, we all miss you, you idiot."

A gentle breeze hissed through the trees, brushing the dewy grass against the shiny aluminum sides of the beer.

"And I promise I'll—I'll definitely—I won't—" Riku sputtered, shook his head, and backed up a few steps, "I'll slaughter some Heartless for you, dude."

With no other parting words but those, Riku turned and walked out of the cemetery. Alone, just as he had been when he walked in, just as he would be when he got on the Gummi to go back to Radiant Garden.

God help him if he met any smokers along the way.