kh_drabble | (no subject)

Challenge: None
Title: Sunset
Word Count: 309
Characters: Riku, Maleficent
Notes: For the themes 'sea,' 'sunshine,' and 'missing' at

key_blade.
Spoilers: None

It’s the ocean that he misses the most. He doesn’t miss his family, and he certainly doesn’t miss the constraining, suffocating prison that was the islands. He misses Selphie and Tidus and Wakka, just a little bit, but he knows they probably don’t miss him as much as he misses them, so he doesn’t waste his energy trying to miss them. It’s not worth it.

But the ocean still haunts him in his sleep. The waves colliding with the side of his house, the boat he used to sneak into at night and drift along in, alone, lying on his back and thinking to himself (God, I want to get out of here) and how much he just wants to run away - those are the things he misses the most. The ocean comforted and soothed him - it was everything that his parents couldn’t be and it understood him more than his friends ever could.

He kneels at the top of the Rising Falls, hands flat on the cold stone and face moist with the spray of the waterfall that’s flowing impossibly below him. The water isn’t salty and the wind isn’t warm, but it’s as close as he can get to the ocean.

He misses the sunlight reflecting off of the water (why is this place always so cold and dead and dark?). The sunset had been his reprieve from the tension and the irritation that had started to crawl into his brain and eat away at him.

Maleficent calls for him, and he turns back to face her swiftly, hiding away the emotion that had leaked into his eyes, his back to the faux-ocean he had created for himself.

There is no sunset here, he realizes, and that realization makes him freeze over from the inside-out as he walks to her outstretched hand and takes it in his.