kh_drabble | Part of Your World

Title: Part of Your World
Rating: G
Word Count: 526
Notes: Lately I've felt like writing mermaids.
Some meandering KH2 drabbling. First person, Sora POV.

don't be afraid of the impossible

Water in my lungs tastes like salt and sand, briny and sunlight, but it's dark down here like we're all floating in a blue stone with the sun flickering through. I blow bubbles like the kids who blow air into drinks through their plastic straws, and Donald shoots me one of his looks and tells me to grow up. I'd spit water at him, but the water is all around us and I guess the gesture would be useless and childish.

Childish. I feel like the kid I've always been.

I kick the water. Mermaids move through the water by undulating their spines. Fish move side to side, cartilage or bone sliding. I'm watching the fish glitter past us, and then Flounder is a huge yellow and blue-striped blur speeding past me, shouting.

"Sora Sora! Oh my gosh...is that you?!!"

Ariel turned seventeen two weeks ago, she's beaming, red-hair afloat.

"Sora!" she cries, and she dives in for a hug. "Wow, oh wow! I can't believe you came back!"

"Of course I came back," I grin. "How could I resist it when you guys love me so much?"

Donald hits my lightly on the head with his staff. "Don't be stupid," he says. I roll my eyes at him.

He's a floating duck-octopus, and he should be the one to talk. Goofy sinks down, doofy-smiling. Sebastian the worrywart has swum down and is nandering again about how Ariel is wondering out everywhere and anywhere and when would she ever settle down like a proper mermaid? Ariel piffles at him, like she always used to do. "Sebastian, stop being such a nanny." I laugh.

It's so beautiful and blue down here, gray rocks soaring up into shelves and caverns covered in coral, seaweed, and barnacles. Sometimes I find it amazing that Ariel doesn't want to stay down here. But I guess I should be the one to talk. I've been to a dozen worlds and back and I guess--

Some people would call me crazy for having wanted to leave Destiny Islands. White sand and blue skies over blue seas. Jack Sparrow's world reminded me of home.

I want to go home.

But I'm here now, and Ariel's grabbed my hand, she's excited as anything--

and then she's stopped.

A shadows is covering the ocean bottom, massive like a whale, except there's no whale above us. Just something huge on the water's surface.

Ariel stares up, entranced. "Now what do you suppose...?"

"Ariel!" Sebastian wails.

She swims up fast, exciting, hauling my along and I swim hard to keep up. And we both swim up, up and up---before finally breaking the surface. There's a ship with white sails, all lit up by the moon and by the brilliantly colored fireworks shooting up into the air.

China had fireworks, spitting like shooting stars above the emperor's palace. But of course Ariel has never seen fireworks, and her eyes are wide. She's never seen a ship either, and of course she'd want to swim in closer for a look.

Sebastian the babysitter looks like The End Has Come

"Good luck Sebastian," I whisper to the crab. Sebastian moans.