(no subject)

[keysora.livejournal.com]

My first day off in a week and a half - I wanted to write write write write!

Challenge: [230 - Whisper]
Title: Consequences After the Credits Roll
Word Count: 402

 

Happy endings don’t exist. Not really. After the music swells and the credits roll, there are still going to be consequences come due. Mistakes from the past that you can never escape. Even though the villain is dead and the evil is vanquished, the heroes are still paying the price of everything that happened. Kairi used to believe in happy endings, when she was little. She wasn’t so innocent anymore.

They were home, the three of them. Had been for years. Kairi’s hair had grown long, the red fading ever so slightly. Her graduate degree started in the fall. Sora was doing his placement in a grade two class on the mainland, fresh out of teacher’s college. Riku worked, when he could, a bookstore job that didn’t suit him but that paid. None of them had seen a keyblade in so long, had touched the controls of a gummi ship, had seen the King’s cursive script. But they were still fighting. It was just a different kind of battle.

The thing about the Darkness is that it wears your body down if you’re not equipped to handle it. It’s just too much. The RNs at Destiny Island Memorial know the three of them by name. They tease Riku about missing them so much that he always just wants to come back. The truth is that Riku’s body keeps failing him. In ways that no potion can fix. The consequence after the credits rolled.

Sora is asleep in the chair by the window, his head in his hand. Riku is asleep on the bed, looking like he’s already passed half way into that next life, his hair and skin so pale that maybe you need to blink twice just to see him.

Kairi sets the tray of food she bought for herself and Sora on to the floor. She kneels down beside Riku’s bed, pushes up his shirt, looks at the bandage covering the scar. Wanting some kind of proof that the new kidney is going to work. Wanting to believe that maybe this is the last time Riku will ever end up here. Wanting to believe in happy endings again.

She leans up and puts her lips against his ear, her palms pushing against the mattress on either side of him. “Come back to us, Riku,” she whispers, a whisper that had never sounded so much like begging. “Make me believe again.”



 

Comments

[kaos-sparrow.livejournal.com]

Heartbreaking.

♥

[dreamer1789.livejournal.com]

Very intense, with just the right amount of 'drama'. I ♥ the style.

[synchroshatter.livejournal.com]

As tragic as this is, I really like the idea that not everything was entirely perfect after they found their way back to the island- too much seems to have happened for that to be possible, you know? So I really enjoyed this. It was so short and heartbreaking, and the line:

They tease Riku about missing them so much that he always just wants to come back. The truth is that Riku’s body keeps failing him. In ways that no potion can fix. The consequence after the credits rolled.

seems to me to be very close to how people really do often react to these situations. Great work, and now I'm going to go and feel bad for Riku...

[iki-teru.livejournal.com]

I've always been shamelessly enamored with the idea of something like this happening, and you carried out out beautifully in such a heart-wrenching way.