kh_drabble | Challenge [300]: All We Can Do

Challenge: [300] The End Of The World...Or Not
Title: All We Can Do
Word Count: 619
Notes: I thought that the end of the world for any of the Kingdom Hearts characters would be losing their friends, so I came up with this.

All We Can Do

Riku and Kairi face the possibility of losing Sora forever.

Aerith’s house is tucked away in a quiet corner of the city. Normally such a peaceful place would calm Kairi’s beating heart, but not today. She knocks on the door with a trembling hand and waits impatiently for someone to come and answer, and when she doesn’t hear anything right away she knocks again. Finally she hears delicate footsteps approaching the door, and Aerith opens it with a grim smile on her face.

“I’m glad you could come,” she says, and Kairi can hear the worry in her voice. Aerith takes her gently by the hand and leads her to a flight of stairs at the back of the house. “Take the last door to your left.”

Kairi thanks her quickly and climbs the stairs to find the room that Aerith was talking about. It’s farthest towards the back, the quietest room in the house.

She enters without even knocking, and the sight of her friend laying stiffly in the hospital bed causes her to gasp. Sora looks pretty banged up, with bandages wrapped around his head and a tube stuck down his throat. It’s almost enough to send her into a fit of hysterical tears, but she holds it in when she sees how distraught Riku looks.

He acknowledges her with a soft nod as she sits in the chair beside him and lays a gentle hand on his shoulder. “What happened, Riku?” she asks quietly, and for a long time he doesn’t say anything.

Finally, in a very quiet voice, he says, “We were taking care of some heartless out on the plains. One of them did this to him.”

To anyone else Riku might seem oddly calm and detached, but Kairi knows him well enough to see through the façade. He might as well be a nervous wreck.

“I…I tried to stop it,” Riku continues, and when he looks at her some of the pain shines through in his eyes. “But I wasn’t fast enough.” He hangs his head and clenches his fists in his lap. “Now he can’t even breathe on his own.”

“I’m sure it’s not your fault.”

“You weren’t there,” he says miserably. “I froze for a second, Kairi. That’s all I would have needed to get there in time.”

They stay silent for a long while, until Kairi suddenly stands and moves to the chair on the other side of the bed. She reaches under the blankets and takes Sora’s hand in her own.

“Even if worse comes to worst, we’ll be here with him,” she says, and she gives Riku a determined look. “That’s all we can do.”

“…Yeah,” Riku says after a long moment, and he follows suit and squeezes Sora’s other hand.

They stay with him until long after nightfall, until long after they’ve fallen asleep. Until long after Aerith comes in and checks his vitals and gives a hopeful smile.

----------

Sora wakes to the sound of his own choking, and he clenches his hands only to find something warm in each of them. He hears Riku mutter his name and is vaguely aware of someone reaching up and pulling something from his mouth. And suddenly he can breathe. He gasps and coughs, and before he can even think to wonder where he is or how he got there, his friends pull him into the warmest hug of his life.

“Wh…What–”

“We thought you would never wake up,” Riku says, and when his voice cracks in the end Sora realizes that something very serious must have happened.

“I’m...I’m sorry,” he says quickly, and his friends laugh at this. They won’t ruin this moment by explaining to Sora how his world almost ended, and really, theirs almost did too.

The End