kh_drabble | (no subject)

Challenge: In Darkness
Title: Footsteps
Word Count: 306
Warnings: Present tense ambiguity. Gotta love it.

Though the snow is an untainted white, like satin sheets and daisy petals and pearly teeth, everything else is a dimensionless black. Faint dim light reflects off the ground from an invisible source and casts their trudging limbs in eerie sky-blues and ocean-greens. Sora leads. Behind them, their footprints shallow and disappear, their traces vanishing into nothing. It is always lonely here.

The winding road ahead is deceptively unmarred, but nevertheless Sora imagines putting his feet in the same places Riku had stepped in many seconds, days, years ago. It is difficult, because Riku never stumbles or trips on his own limbs, but Sora watches the ground with somber determination and places his feet in carefully selected spots, touching heel then toe to the not-quite earth with decided firmness.

The Door looms in the shadowy dark distance, great and cold and unyielding. His feet slowly freeze and his nose has already started running, but he continues grimly so that when Riku shakes his older, weary, almost-stranger-like face at him and says, “No, you haven’t been through it. You don’t understand, Sora,” the keyblade bearer will be able to push those scared hands away and say, “Yes, I have; yes, I do.”

“We’re almost there,” Goofy murmurs quietly, breaking the fragile silence, gripping his scratched and dented shield with often-broken bandaged fingers. Donald soundlessly nods, readjusting his ripped hat and pulling at the frayed edges of his blue coat. They are dirty and tired, too, veterans of numerous battles they would have rather not fought, too.

Sora lifts his head and his child-like adult’s eyes, staring ahead. Momentarily, he pauses and forgets the bitter, biting cold. “We’re almost there,” he repeats softly, barely a whisper, as if just on the other side of Kingdom Hearts, with his awaiting ear pressed to the painted wood, Riku can hear.