The Drabble Diaries
by Tomoyo-chan
Disclaimer: I do not own KH. Is anyone else excited they finally announced KHIII?
Home - August 11, 2012
It took four days after they returned to learn that they weren't sleeping. Not properly anyway. Riku stayed up most of the night watching everything, and Sora couldn't sleep more than an hour without jerking awake expecting there to be heartless crawling through the window. It took Riku falling out of a tree (nothing worse than bruises thankfully) for her to realize that both of them had this exhausted look in their eyes.
"It's nothing. I'm just getting used to not having to be on alert all the time. We used to have to sleep in shifts. It'll be better soon." Sora told her when she confronted him.
"It's strange being back. I keep expecting it to be a dream," was all Riku said when she asked why he wandered the islands all night instead of sleeping.
She was beginning to loose sleep too, watching for Riku's nightly passing past her window, worrying if Sora was awake staring at his ceiling too. Neither were willing to talk to her about it. (Her ceiling was very boring.)
Sora had used to have this toy boat attached to his ceiling above his bed, some toy he had once won at a fair. She noticed it no longer hung there one afternoon. He only fidgeted when she asked. Riku told her Sora had attacked it one night, thinking it was a heartless. The pieces were hidden in his parent's shed.
No one talked to her. What was the point of being their best friend (who was a girl - they were each others) if they couldn't tell her anything. Stupid boys and their refusal to admit to anything was wrong.
So the next night when Riku made his nightly track past her window on the way to the docks, she grabbed him by his ear (his elbow really) and dragged him off to Sora's house. She knew the brunet really wasn't asleep, so she wasn't sorry when she fell on him climbing in the window (why was his bed under the window anyway?)
Pushing two sleep deprived boys before her, she took them to the highest point on the island. From the town hall's roof you could see almost all of the island, even if it was the middle of the night (okay she stole the key too - but she needed it).
"Okay both of you are going to look and see that the islands are perfectly safe. You're home now. And even if I have to drag both of you back up here every night to beat some sense into you, you are going to stop lying to me when I ask if you're alright."
Both boys only looked guilty, so she pulled them to sit against the ledge with her. And softly began to tell them all her worries, how she couldn't sleep for worrying about them, how she started every time she saw her neighbor's black cat thinking it was a heartless, how she sometimes had nightmares of Namine and Axel and Saix and the worlds breaking. She pulled them as close as possible under the blanket they had took from Sora's room and when she finally stopped talking she could feel their fingers entwining with hers. They weren't quite ready to say anything back yet (boys were so slow sometimes) but the three of them sat in companionable silence, huddled against the midnight chill, until both of them were asleep against her shoulders. As she closed her own eyes, Kairi hoped she had driven off enough of the shadows to convince them they were home.