kh_drabble | Challenge [170]: Insomnia (Reply)

Challenge: [170] Insomnia
Title: Flower Scent
Word Count: 238
Spoilers: You should probably have played all three games.
Notes: Um... :waves: Hey guys. It's been almost a year since I've posted for a challenge here--well, since I've written almost anything. But it seems my creative juices are flowing again. Thank you to

i_got_spunk for the once over, and

crimsoncookie for her inspiration, unending patience, and shrewd beta. I love you.

Naminé doesn’t know how to sleep.

She curls up in doorframes, in chairs, among discarded doodles and chewed up crayons. She crawls under tables, hides beneath stairs, presses herself into corners so hard her shoulders bruise. She tears up sketchbook pages and scatters the pieces over her. It’s not the same.

She squeezes herself underneath Riku’s bed one night: a toe-eating witch-monster under the bed. He finds her near morning, coming in from patrol. “I don’t know how to sleep,” she tells him.

“Neither do I,” he says.

They lie together in the dark, arms shyly wrapping around shivering frames. She closes her eyes and breathes in his scent. He smells of darkness. She’d hoped, just a little, that he’d smell of island flowers.

Once, caught in vines that pierced her skin, blanketed in a suffocating layer of pink petals, pressed to a man who whispered sweet poison in her ear, she’d slept—out of fear, but she’d slept, enveloped in his flower scent. Then, she’d wished for the smell of the ocean, of open blue sky and summer air. Of freedom.

Now she lies in Riku’s arms, listening his heart beating foreign against her chest, breathing in his stale darkness—and she remembers silence sweetened by the scent of flowerbeds, a powerful possessive grip, and a promise in the dark that she would never be alone.

And she knows that now, without him, she will never sleep again.