kh_drabble | [non-challenge fic]

Title: Goodnight, Goodbye
Rating: PG
Pairings: RikuSora
Words: 541
Summary: Before there were meanings, there were gestures and touches, and exchanges between children that meant nothing or the world.
A/N: Many thanks to the wonderful and talented

finem for betaing.

(cross-posted)

Disclaimer: KH owns me, not the other way around.

Before there were meanings, there were gestures and touches, and exchanges between children that meant nothing or the world.

Before there was Kairi, there had been Sora and Riku, and miles and miles of sky and sand.

When Sora would fall asleep on a rainbow-coloured-blanket spread over the sand with a smile on his face and toes curled under the sun, Riku would sit lazily beside him and trace with his eyes the motions of the vast, frightening, beautiful sea.

Sometimes, Riku would have to leave earlier as indicated by his mother rising to her feet while Sora’s would be laughing, scraping charcoal against sketch-paper, and gazing affectionately at the boys and at the ocean behind them.

On these days, before leaving Sora, Riku would bend his head towards his sleeping friend and smack small lips against a tan forehead regardless of chocolate-coloured bangs obstructing his way.

It was the goodnight kiss his mother gave him, the one he could not sleep without.

Things changed very little when Kairi came, or perhaps because Kairi came, but it was hard to say for certain. The larger force in all of it, in everything, was time.

With time, Sora got too old to take naps in the sun and Riku got too old to kiss him goodnight, good-day, goodbye, or whatever it was. And at one point, Riku got too old to accept the gesture from his mother as well.

Before there was Kingdom Hearts, there had been wholeness and innocence, and everything they thought to be forever untouchable.

They learned the hard way, or perhaps, the only way.

Only after having fought each other the way they had, putting everything at stake, could two people value something as sacred as friendship to the extent that they did.

Even now, they both love Kairi to pieces. If anything, they love her more than ever before because they will never forget what they had given in order to keep her.

Sora had once held a firm belief that he was in love with her in addition to simply having loved her. He had held on to this belief right up until that point in The Castle That Never Was where he had come crashing down to his knees by the bursting of a dam somewhere within the mess of his heart.

As it were, in that earth-shattering moment, other truths had revealed themselves.

Before there was darkness, there had been substance and friendship, and there had been dreams.

They have grown far too much for little rainbow-coloured blankets now and too old to listen to superstitious mothers calling out to gather them indoors before the onset of dusk, further feeding the childhood fears of darkness.

Now, when they doze off, it is usually while resting against the crooked tree trunks, half of which have fallen, the other half of which curve and remain suspended midway by the persistence of the island gales, defying gravity. When they awake, it is to the sinking sun and darkening sky, an artfully smeared palette of midnight and fire.

Now, when Sora falls asleep, Riku brushes lips against that unchanged hair-strewn forehead, kissing him goodnight, then good morning later, but never goodbye.

end