THE OTHER SIDES, THE OTHER STORIES
two drabbles for a loved one
Disclaimers: Kingdom Hearts © Square Enix/Disney. Everything else © their rightful owners.
A/N: For ShinraiFaith and her mother, 4/22/11.
The Color of the Heart
Death is a many dreadful thing.
It is final. It is sorrow. It is loss. It is betrayal, abandonment, fear. It is cold. It is empty. It is relief, but it's also the unknown. It is irreversible, irremediable, and in the end, it is inevitable.
It is a very somber thing felt in very somber shades of numb inhospitable gray.
The sky over Destiny Islands that night had been gray, and the sky over Destiny Islands was gray again.
It looked like a bruise to Sora, the rolling silvery clouds and their dark reflection in the water. It was the rainy season. There were NO SWIMMING signs posted on all the beaches in case of sudden ocean surges or flooding, but nobody listened to them because this was a world of island people and island people knew the water better than general safety rules did.
The bruised gray sky lent to the world half-saturated hues, draining the vitality out of everything and leaving it all pale and fragile-looking.
Riku looked beautiful under that lighting.
Pale hair, pale eyes, pale skin, cutting eyes and mouth in a thin line.
"What's wrong with you?" he demanded, and Sora felt the smile falter on his face, slowly breaking away as if glass shattering into shards.
"What do you mean?"
Thunder rolled, somewhere overhead. The echo of waves crashing on the beach of the mainland was white noise outside the school, where it was the break for lunch and even though the rainy season breeze spoke of storms and tugged and yanked at skirts and ties and coats, there was laughter and talk and the normal chaos of teenagers and young adults letting their minds rest after hours of study, relaxing with friends over midday meal. Crowds had separated into their usual cliques on the quad, the wind tried to pull at sentences, too, and Riku had dragged Sora away from where he was struggling to finish his math homework with Kairi before the bell rang and it was off to class again.
D. I. Prep the little patch on Riku's tie said, dancing along the front of his shirt because he hadn't worn his sweater today. Sora stared at it just to avoid Riku's patient piercing eyes, but it was to no avail.
They were in their favorite nook between storage facility and school, a little deeper into oblivion, further from where the bad kids were loitering the safe spot, some just goofing around, others eating lunch, a tiny clustered group smoking whatever new fad smelled like dried paopu leaves on the wind. And what would kids like that say if they knew that standing just a few yards away, distressed and fragile, was the boy who had saved their world, returned them to normalcy whether they remembered it or not?
The seclusion here gave Sora no comfort. In fact, it gave him no choice.
"I just keep thinking about her lately, okay?" he cried, and he hadn't meant to sound so vicious – he really hadn't – but it was okay because Riku didn't even flinch. He blinked, twice, then shoved his hands in his pockets and kept giving Sora chills with that piercing icy stare of his.
The impatience welled up in him. He couldn't stand to look at Riku anymore. He pushed him away and paced for a moment, then turned around only to find Riku slumped against the wall, still gawking at him.
"What?" Sora demanded, shoulders rigid and hands clenching into fists. He felt the emotion twist his face but he couldn't stop it. "What? What do you want from me, Riku? I don't want to talk about it right now!"
"What do you keep thinking about, about her?"
"I just keep thinking, why did they take her from me! Why is everyone else back home safe, but my mother isn't!"
There it was.
Given life by the spoken voice.
He couldn't hide it anymore, this grief, this pain, this tempest of devastation in his soul as gray as the tumultuous sky.
A cold black anger surfaced. It choked him up. Sora couldn't talk. He stood there shaking in something akin to sick weakened fury, glaring at Riku, and the cold black anger threatened to take him over. It was like a wave, crashing, the undertow dragging him under and sending him in somersaults, disorienting him, drowning him.
The sky over Destiny Islands had been like it was today that fateful night three years ago, when the zenith of the bruised sky had opened up and unleashed a power far greater than anything Sora had ever imagined. He'd touched a sliver of it, maybe, when his fingers brushed the door in the Secret Place, but that had all been childhood games.
Not that night. Nothing about that night had been simple or innocent, just dark.
Darkness, everywhere.
"I'm tired of being happy all the time," Sora edged out between clenched teeth, and he hated Riku for how impassively he regarded him. "I'm tired of nobody ever thinking about how I feel, how I felt, what I've gone through. Can't I be selfish for just one second, one second after all of it, just to be sad?"
A shadow fell through Riku's eyes. His face tightened. He crossed his arms and he looked uncomfortably tense like he always did when he was beginning to understand something, and Sora had to scoff. He just had to. Because Riku didn't understand. Riku had his mother and father back, just like Kairi had her mother and father back, but Sora's father had been gone to the waves long before and his mother was gone now to the voracious darkness.
"Look." Sora pointed up at the sky. A few drops of rain were beginning to fall, a cold pizzicato. He laughed, and he laughed because it was a reaction to the tears he felt burning behind his lashes. And still Riku stared at him, seemingly emptily. "Look at the sky, Riku. That's the color that it was the night all our lives were ripped to shreds. And you know, I'm so sorry that I just start thinking about her sometimes, or how unfair it is that all of you got your happy families back, and I'm alone."
The bell rang. It didn't make a difference. The kids sharing the nook hidden from the school were long gone already, startled by the way the boy further behind the building was yelling. The rain began to pick up, and still Riku just stared and stared.
The emotion buckled. The tears started coming like the rain, and Sora's shoulders heaved as he stood there, trying to regain composure. It was useless. He hiccupped on a breath. He covered his face with crossed arms and crouched down to his haunches, feeling the sobs rattle through him.
"I can't be strong for everyone all the time!" he howled, voice cracking insistently.
He heard the wet gravel crunch. He sensed Riku coming closer. He shook him away when his hands touched his elbows and he felt bad, but he also felt out of control so he didn't trust himself.
"Look at the sky," he demanded again, meeting Riku's eyes from under his arms with a clash of blue and icy green.
Riku stood over him, grim as ever. But, slowly, he tipped his head to look up. "I see it," he husked.
"That's what color my heart feels," Sora urged, vehemently. He choked on a breath. "That's what color my heart feels, sometimes, and I don't know what to do about it. I'm mad, and I'm sad, and I'm jealous, and I'm afraid – "
Riku's fingers dug into his shoulders, a forcefulness in his gestures that was frightening and Sora's eyes widened. There was a brief scuffle between them, like there had been so many times before, two boys and their reckless emotions, and it knocked the wind out of Sora and hurt the back of his head when Riku shoved him against the brick wall of the school only to duck down against him and seal their mouths together in a rough kiss. It was wet from the rain, hard enough to bruise, and Sora couldn't cry anymore, just tremble and gasp and glare at Riku because kissing wasn't what it was about. There was time for that later.
Riku grabbed him by the chin. He forced eye contact. Sora bristled, the taste and feel of Riku's biting kiss still lingering on his lips.
"It's a test, don't you know that?"
Sora's brow knotted. He started to shake his head, not understanding, but Riku's fingers tightened on his face, holding him still. There was something possessive about his strength, something dark and covetous. Sora's eyes widened again. The rain was falling in torrents now, but they'd backed up under a little overhanging of roof.
"It's a test." Riku's fingers were cold on his skin, like his eyes were cold with intensity under those thick dark lashes. "That night, when the sky was like this, I failed it. My heart's never been strong enough. It might sound pointless or cruel, but your heart is so strong that the whole system of everything – of life, of the world, you know – it tests you. There's a light in you that is so powerful, Sora, that every bit of the darkness wants to test it to see if you'll break and give in."
Sora grimaced. Like a little boy being lectured, he dissolved into tears again, quivering below Riku's hands. "That's what I'm afraid of! Don't you see? And I am strong, I know I'm strong, but she was my mom... I just want my mom back..."
Tears.
The cold, empty sound of grieving, of a strong heart breaking and sewing itself back together again only to break once more, over and over. And Sora didn't mean to cry so hard; he didn't mean to shake like that; he didn't even mean to be vulnerable, but he couldn't stop it. The tears came in hasty waves like the rain, and the way it felt to crumple down against Riku's shoulder, arms winding tight around him, was too much comfort to give up at the moment.
Images flashed through his mind. Riku, making fun of him for crying when they were younger and Sora had stepped on a nail in some pile of boards they were digging through to make a tree house. Riku, making fun of him when he cried because Riku had splashed salt water in his eyes. Riku, hugging him like this when the cat had eaten the baby chocobo they'd found. Riku, hugging him like this back when Kairi wasn't their friend yet because somebody kept starting rumors about Sora and he found out years later that it was actually Riku's doing, anyway.
And his mom, hugging him like this after his dad left, after a particularly jarring nightmare or a bad day at school, and if he thought about it hard enough, Sora could remember the way she smelled, the way she sounded when he was in trouble and the way she sounded when they were laughing together over something silly.
"You know what color my heart is?"
Sora coughed on a breath, pulling away from Riku. He was embarrassed to be crying. He was embarrassed to be distraught. He tried to wipe at his eyes but Riku pushed his hands away and used the sleeve of his coat, pulled down under his fingers, to clean the rain and the tears and the snot off Sora's face. Sora let him. He felt like a child throwing a fit, not a seventeen-year-old hero.
"What color?" Sora mumbled miserably.
"Blue."
Sora cut his eyes up, curiosity piqued. He cleared his throat and wiped at his nose one last time, taking a few deep breaths to try and keep composure. It felt like a weight had been taken from him, sure, but it was always hovering there, waiting to fall on him again.
"Blue?" he echoed.
Riku nodded. "Like the sky is on a bright day, or a good clear night. Like the ocean is when you can see through it. It's a constant. I mean, blue is a lot of different things, but to me it's mostly the color of your eyes."
A shiver rattled through him. Sora gawked at Riku in something next to disbelief for a moment – not angrily, but just letting the reality of those words sink in.
"But maybe..." Riku shrugged idly, glancing away. Sora was sure that even in the cold rainy season air, there was the tint of a blush flooding Riku's pale heart-shaped face. "Maybe the thing about having a strong heart is that your heart can be any color it wants, and never break."
Sora didn't mean to be impulsive. He didn't mean to seem emasculating, either. He just couldn't help it. He threw his arms around Riku's shoulders and buried his face there between shoulder and neck, holding on tight as if Riku was his last tether to the stable world.
Riku seemed startled at first. He stood there stiffly for a moment, then slowly wound his arms about Sora's waist, pulling him closer. There was a silence that didn't need words, simple and raw.
And it wasn't the fix-all, but Sora wouldn't deny that he felt the color of his heart begin to change again.
End.