It's amazingly different for being the same thing as always.
Lea sits on a clock tower with a young man (said jokingly, but he was the same as Sora when he was seventeen and alive), licking at a sea-blue ice-cream bar. It's the twilight hour, and he's been through all the speeches by now, and all have been declared hokey already despite the agreement.
But the thing is, and this should have been obvious really, they don't even look alike. Sora isn't Roxas, isn't… whoever it is he's thinking about. Not Isa, most definitely- Isa managed to make sea-salt ice-cream a genuinely serious business rather than a matter of life and death by boredom. And it's not like Lea's tried to make one into the other.
It's just that it grinds him down, slowly, seeing the details that are stubborn and the ones that went away with the boy.
They sit different, Sora taking up as much space as possible, dragging everyone into his orbit with smiles; Roxas more compactly, accustomed to utility more than comfort. And also, Sora is usually the one who starts the prodding and poking games- Lea misses having the element of surprise on his side, sometimes, and sometimes he just laughs and tags along with Sora to poke Kairi or Riku or Donald or Goofy into submission. Sora spends ages looking down, rarely getting dizzy and claiming constant gummi travel has made him immune to such things. Lea looks always to the sky, scratching the reddened heavens for stars and constellations to show them- he can navigate an interstellar ship better than everyone else combined because of that, even if Sora is the faster driver.
Sora never picks the same thing twice in a row- so far, he's been through half of all the available flavors already- despite proclaiming that out of all the popsicles, sea-salt's the best. Lea claims the credit on that, even if he dodges around why. He never sits in the same place either, and he's the main reason the group had gotten around to exploring Twilight Town fully.
That one time they took the train, it was literally weeks before they managed to return to town and they had to slum it in parks and once, in a house luckily owned by Olette's cousin who took to Sora immediately. That's stayed the same, from Roxas plus someone to Sora, or the disregard for their 'return to home base' mission to help around.
Lea thinks he has told someone about Roxas managing to sweet-talk a little fairy girl, of all things, into giving them enough pixie dust to fly. Or how he'd obtained extra by simply opening his pockets at the right time, and good thing he did because he never got the hang of talking to her.
Lea also thinks he did tell someone about being physically unable- let alone willing- to really restrain his little siblings. He still can't really say Roxas plus someone too often and anyways 'plus someone' is unbelievably crappy towards whoever it is. He couldn't stop that person from outright vanishing like mist; he couldn't stop Roxas from simply tearing his way out of Never Was a daredevil and a traitor.
And sometimes, seeing Sora be willing to leave any place so long as someone benefits from it sounds like a motivated version of Roxas moving forwards.
Maybe that's the thing.
Lea is still surprised that he sees so much of another young man (because Roxas would like to be called that too, he supposes, he's had his life-changing choices already) so often, and while it isn't killing him yet…
Okay, it is, just at a slow enough pace for Lea to shrug it off and pass off the moments spacing out as "taking a breather from your constant hero antics, So-"
"You're getting into them too Lea!"
Kid- oops, though not really- got you there.
A.N. – yeah, I dunno either, mini introspective piece? LOLWTH?
Hope you liked!