kh_drabble | (no subject)

Challenge (128) Dreams
Title: Cardboard Boxes
Word Count: 360
Notes: No spoilers, just a bit of in between game ficcage going on. <3 Thanks to

tabitha_dornoc for her help.

Hands pack away a small wooden ship, its two passengers still clinging limply to the insides. A boat like this isn’t needed to reach the far off places once dreamed of, but it still holds special memories and the movements are gentle as it joins a host of other childhood memories.

Wooden swords join the other toys of childhood. Whoever held this must have gone off and grown up, perhaps preferring a real sword to the fake. Going to battle...there were many dreams that led to that end. What wooden toy could match up to one that is real, why would one want to mock-battle after they experienced the real thing? This too, then, could hold special memories and not to be entirely discarded.

Perhaps long ago, a boy played on the shores with his friends with the sun on his face and sand filling his shoes.

Dreams that he must have once shared with his friends must have been realized and he has grown up past sandy beaches and splintered wood, of scrawled pictures on the walls of a cave. She once visited the hidden crevices as a child, but now there are unknown voices that echo off of rocky walls, voices that she can't put a face to, but echo in her dreams.

Her dreams were once in that most secret cavern, but those dreams that she drew with charcoal and paint are covered by scratches in the rock and erased by time.

She will make sure that these dreams aren't forever lost, but waiting for the next child to see them, so that they can stare into the horizon and dream of far-off lands and heroic battles.

She dreams of the boy that had all of this once, who must have held these precious memories and dreamed of distant shores. She dreams of a son that she never had, but she imagines is a great hero.

She wishes that her dreams could be realized, but as she packs away the last scrap of childhood dreams, and pushes it against the box of her own childhood, she realizes how easily dreams can be put away and forgotten.