Fandom - Kingdom Hearts
Characters - Riku and Sora
Situation - Just some real innocent kiddy love, before the game, anything, really. Just show me them as kids, before Kairi arrives on Destiny Islands. Show me them as close friends. Show me them starting their rivalry - I don't mind. Just give me some Riku and some Sora!

Author's note: Here be a challenge once again, but this time from another challenge site. This is about the two when they were wee children. It's a short ficlet, although everything I post on this site is pretty short so far, I don't usually do shorties like this, it's weird. But, I don't have time to spend that long on these. I like writing Kingdom Hearts ones, this is my first. Hope ya'll like it!

THE BEGINNING OF FRIENDS

"Rikuuuuu!" Sora looked up at the tree in despair. "Riku, give it baaack!" his eyes brimmed with threatening tears.

After doing a few more taunting swings over Sora's head with his prize, Riku began climbing back down the tree, stolen trinket in hand. He sing songed as he came down, "Cry baby, cry baby, Sor-a's a cry –baby!" the child wasn't completely mean, and was coming back down to give the silver chain back to his younger friend. "Don't cry abou-aah!" Air was his only holder now.

He'd slipped, foot coming out from under him and he tumbled the rest of the way down the tree. Riku landed hard and flat on his back, causing the pain to echo throughout his body, his head pounding the loudest. His chest heaved as he gave one long yell of pain as the tears began falling.

Sora took a step back in wonder and anger as well. "Don't cry about it!" He yelled in spite, then grabbed his necklace chain and took off running. Riku rolled over to cry further into the ground before someone came and picked him up with comforting words.

Sora looked up from behind the rock as someone else entered the secret place. It was dark and damp in there today, due to the cool clear waterfall that was just outside the door. Not many of the kids on Destiny Island knew about this place yet, so he assumed it was Riku, which it was. He was walking a bit pained and his face was still beat red from crying. He had a bag of ice in his hand, which was already covered in dirt from the tunnel walk to get to the cavern.

"Hey." Riku greeted in a quiet voice containing broken pride.

"Hi." Sora returned just as meekly.

Riku walked over, sitting down directly beside his friend and staring at the rock that was in front of him. There was a picture on the rock, scribbled in white by using another rock. He wasn't sure what it was anymore. He'd drawn it last year with Sora when they found the place, but it wasn't a very good drawing he decided. In fact it looked like multitude of scribbles strung together.

After thoroughly analyzing the scribbles in a failed attempt to discern the picture, he looked over at Sora's knee instead, which was scraped and bruised. Now that he thought of it, his knees had the same marks. It must have been from their boat ride. They had to sit on their knees in the seats do to the fact they were to short to paddle otherwise. "Knees hurt?" he asked in a low tone of voice, wondering if Sora would answer.

Sora only wondered why he would ask that, of course his knees didn't hurt. He wasn't the one that fell out of the tree. "No, yours?"

"No."

Silence for a little while longer as they just sat there, examining anything their eyes fell on. Sora had found a nice clump of dirt mixed with gum to look at, and Riku was staring at the hem of Sora's right shoe.

"Sorry." Riku mumbled meekly, still not looking up, but changing his eyes to stare into his lap, still covered in dirt from rolling around on the ground after his fall.

"S'okay." He answered back with a shrug. "Sorry I didn't help you when you fell."

"S'okay."

Another silence followed there mending apologies. They both didn't feel as meek though, and now boredom set in over them in place of embarrassment.

"Wanna draw on the rocks?"

"Sure. Here," Riku handed Sora a nice coloring rock as he picked up his own also. They both crawled forward to a rock and began scribbling a picture together, eating the ice out of Riku's head wound bag.

It was dark finally, and two could hardly see the rocks that they were playing with. Having given up on drawing, due to red, puffy, pained fingers, they instead starter stacking all the rocks they could find into one gigantic pile. With no light though, this was no easy task and the two decided to go back out and take a swim before their parents came hunting for them.

The water was clear and cool as always, the sand was till hot from the warm afternoon. Both pairs of eyes avoided the bridge connected island with the climbing tree on it where their little incident had happened earlier. They swam around the dock where they could have contests to see how many boats they could swim under before coming up for air. So far, Sora had excelled in this game. He had always been better at swimming than Riku.

"I'm hungry; let's grab a paupu fruit from the tree." Riku was tired of losing at the swimming races.

"Yeah, grab the big one right there!" Sora splashed out of the water, falling to his knees due to the current, but getting back up again quickly.

Riku sloshed in just as ungracefully and raced over to the tree, knowing that he was much more apt in climbing than his fishy friend was. He shimmied up the tree, eyes trained on the juicy paupu fruit just out of reach. Breaking off a small branch from beside his elbow, he beat at the stem of the fruit until it finally came loose, dropping free and straight into Sora's arms.

They both grinned victoriously at their team work and hurried over to the small shack on the beach beside the rushing water fall where it was quiet and they could eat without Wakka or Tidus seeing they had food. It also had a bench in there which would take the place of a table. They were used to the sand, but still unhappy about eating it.

Lanterns were easily lit since both were skilled with fire, having learned the hard way how to handle it. Each one lit two lanterns, hanging them up around the small area and the stair well.

They sat down in the still warm sand, putting the large star shaped fruit on the bench in front of them and beginning to tear it apart, shoving large chunks of it into their mouths. They looked across from each other, beaming at one another through the sticky juice covering their hands and mouths. Silence was better than speaking due to the fact that they were eating, and that words were not needed at this time. The quiet love of friendship was enough. And besides, if they stopped to speak, their counter part would get more fruit.