kh_drabble | (no subject)

Challenge: 225 (Warmth)
Title: Summer and Sand
Word Count: 291
Rating: PG
Spoilers/Warnings: Some spoilers for Days.
Notes: Xion-centric, and my first drabble for this comm.

It's the first thing she notices, even before she knows the words to give it a name; yet after mastering the tangled syllables of "cold," Xion almost wishes that it could be that simple.
Cold is a drafty corridor. Cold is rain and sleet and put-on-your-hood. Cold is an enemy she can charge head-on and pin to the ground- a hard battle, but a battle she'll win nevertheless.
What Xion feels isn't cold.
It's a long marble hallway empty except for her own echoing footsteps. It's huddling under the only tempest-tossed tree on the hillside as lightning flickers across the clouds, covering her ears against the thunder and wishing that the branches were shelter enough from the drenching deluge. She's fighting someone who won't play fair, who's ready to block her attacks before she even makes them, who leaves her sprawled on the ground like an abandoned puppet, breathless with agony and rage and disbelief.
Cold, she thinks, would be easier.
Sometimes Xion starts shivering and can't stop. Someday, she thinks, the not-quite-cold will get the better of her. It'll seep into the place where her heart used to be, freezing her from the inside out- and then she'll be like the Nobodies who vanished from Castle Oblivion, the ones who were- well, up until they weren't.
Xion thinks she knows exactly how they felt. So she pulls her coat a little tighter around her trembling body and wraps her arms around herself, trying to cage the fleeting memory of a long-ago embrace.
But, I was wrong, she thinks as the world fades to whiteness. Xion yearned for sunlight and summer, fire and sand; she never expected that the moments before her death would feel like all of this and more.