kh_drabble | challenge [104] entry (Reply)

Challenge: [104] Wonderland
Title: Finding Wonderland
Word Count: 551
Notes: Very close to my heart--maybe a little too close. I promise to stop giving Sora colossal existential crises in which he questions his very existence. ...No, that's a total lie. XD Originally written for challenge [097] Danger, but I couldn't get it done in time, so here it is now for your reading pleasure. Thanks to

invisibledancer and

crimsoncookie for the once over ♥

Indolence is the adventurer’s poison.

Riku knows this, just not in such elegant words. For him, it’s the ache that forms in his chest whenever he thinks of the future. It’s the empty time that seems to stretch.

He stands on the beach and looks through the horizon.

Kairi often wakes up breathless. It’s a strange little catch in her chest, the sudden awareness of nothing that stretches for years. By then, her dreams (of mirrorpaths and rabbit holes) have slipped away like air.

She traces faceless pictures in the sand and finds herself asking for what?.

Sora feels it when he looks at the stars. He can’t put it to words, but it’s an awful lot like sinking, like coming off a roller coaster and suddenly walking on ground. No more heart-pounding drops or up-soaring loops or rickety cars racing faster than light.

He goes to school and does his homework and doesn’t think about it so much.

There’s a moment, though:

They’re sitting on the dock near sunset, barefoot, legs spilling over the sides. A cool breeze sighs on their skin, the perfect temperature, and the sky is all blooming hibiscus and plum.

Then Riku says it, like an afterthought: “What’s the point, without…”

He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to. They all do silently, with more words than any could possibly say.

--

Not long after, they disappear.

Riku’s first. They feel him go, quietly – in the middle of the night like a candle snuffing out.

Then it’s Kairi, at sunset with a smile.

She leaves a note.

It’s waiting for him near the paopu tree, folded into a bottle and nestled in the sand. Sora nearly tears the little embroidered edges as he opens it, heart racing:

Maybe the journey was never meant to end. I’ll be waiting for you. – Kairi

All he can do is smile.

--

It’s nearly dawn when Sora leaves.

With nothing in his hands and nothing on his back he starts going east, just starts walking towards the sun – when Selphie intercepts him.

She’s standing at the edge of the path, clutching a finger-worn sheet of paper. “So…” she breathes, her face half-shadowed in the dark. “You’re leaving, too.”

Somewhere, a bird begins to whistle. “Yeah.”

She makes a little sound in the back of her throat that Sora doesn’t quite recognize. “I see…” She steps forward hesitantly, and in the new light he realizes she looks so sad… “I don’t, um… I don’t know what happened to the three of you out there in…wherever you were. But I just… In Kairi’s note, she said that she wasn’t really happy anymore and that there was a journey she had to go on…that wasn’t finished? I just…” A deep breath. “Why are you leaving again?”

Sora stands silent in the middle of the path for a moment, his eyes a cloud.

And slowly, he smiles.

“I gotta find Riku and Kairi.”

The sky is bursting a bright summer blue as he takes off running down the path. Selphie watches him with a bewildered smile, and halfway gone he turns with a grin, tossing his arms in the air. “We’ll come back! We’ll come back and visit soon! I promise!”

And even though she doesn’t understand – somehow, it’s enough.