Title: Funeral Pyre
Rating: G/K
Character: Riku
Summary: You have to cast away your dreams to face the Dark.
Notes: Heavily influenced by the song "This Place is a Prison" by The Postal Service. It is an excellent character song for Riku, and I listen to it when I angst about him, as sad as that might sound.


For some reason, he didn't want to tear his eyes away.

The flames licked up at his ankles, danced their red and orange and yellow ballet over the sands and closer to the dirtied old shoes that he wore. He didn't step back. He wasn't concerned about burning an old pair of tennis shoes, anyway.

A blackbird fluttered out from the fire, falling between his legs, and he tore his eyes away from the pile just for a moment to look down at the crumbled paper.

A burning castle. A princess standing next to a pool of fire and the knight, burned pure black with his hands missing to the fire demon skating over the glossy paper and his eyes turned to shriveling black holes from the heat.

He kicked it away, back into the fire, watched it burn into nothing.

Books, movies, posters, cards, drawings, all of it, all the fantasies, all the dreams, all the hopes and ideas and wants and desires he had ever had or felt.

He watched them all burn with a simple apathy in his eyes, a chiseled mask on his face.

And he turned away to walk toward that darkness over the horizon.