kh_drabble | (no subject)

Challenge [276]: Breaking Barriers
Title: Sleep to Dream
Word Count: 564
Notes: I keep forgetting to write lately! Have some angst to make up for it.

The first time the nightmares come, Sora opens his eyes to the soft blackness of his room, breathing hard for a few seconds before rolling over and falling back asleep, phantom fears drifting from him in wisps—swirling, intangible.

The second time Riku has him by the shoulders, grip firm, eyes pale in the blue glow of the television. Sora squirms once and finds that he's shivering. "Um," he intones wisely.

"You were." Riku lets go of him quickly and turns his face to the ground. "Screaming."

"Oh," says Sora, blinking, and he nearly sprints to the bathroom.

"Roxas," he says to the mirror, bracing his hands against the sink. "What's going on?"

I'm dreaming, Roxas tells him in his small, solemn voice.

"Well, cut it out," Sora says, and grimaces at his own reflection.

-

it's not my fault, Roxas grits out while Sora retches into the toilet. Sora groans and rests his cheek against the seat. Gross, by the way.

"I know it's not," Sora gripes.

well, do me a favor and stop blaming me in your head, will you?

"I can't help it, Roxas, I can't just—" dream like remembering, look out over worlds he knows, now burning and bleeding, breathing evenly and calm in the knowledge that he did this. "They aren't my memories. I don't want them."

neither do I.

-

After he wakes up one morning with his pillow ripped to shreds, he logically decides, after nearly punching a hole in his bedroom wall, that it would be easier to just stop sleeping.

(this isn't gonna work, Roxas snaps at him at 4 in the morning.

"Just shut up," Sora growls, pours another cup of coffee.)

-

He knows that Roxas is right when he comes to in the middle of the boardwalk, flat on his ass with his keyblade in hand. Kairi stares down at him, brow furrowed in confusion.

"Sora," she says evenly. "You pulled the keyblade on me. You—you tried to hit me." She kneels down beside him and grabs his hand. "What's going on?"

"That's what I wanna know," he grumbles. "Nice kick, by the way."

"Thanks, I—where are you going?"

"To talk to the voices in my head," Sora calls over his shoulder, running for home.

-

"I can't do this anymore," Sora says heatedly to his empty room. He paces a little more. "Roxas, I am talking to—"

I hear you, Sora, Roxas shouts. I don't know what you expect me to do about it.

"You need to figure something out." Sora thumps on his wall, feels the echo all the way in the pit of his gut. "All those things you did, I don't want to see them, I don't want to know about them—"

we did them, sora. I'm part of you. For all that Roxas is snide and bitter Sora has never heard him angry before.

"Shut up," he yells. "Shut up shut up shut—"

-

Kairi bounds up the stairs, stairs she has known all her life and could draw from memory, gives an obligatory knock before barging in. "Sora? You weren't in school today, are you—" She stops dead in her tracks.

Roxas glances up at her from the bed with a look she can't place, before continuing to stare at his very solid, shaking hands.

Beside him, Sora sleeps.