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I'm not dead, just in grad school. dramallama

This is not a new piece. It's been up on my fanfiction.net account for a while, but I really like how it came out, so I wanted to post it here.

Meager Treasures

She watches him through eyes that aren’t quite her own, and he’s different mostly, and she’s glad. It’s the ways that he’s the same that worry her.

She revels in being whole enough to worry. She had told him once that she loved him, and he had smiled, sad and broken, but honest all the same. He had kissed her cheek and told her that she couldn’t love him. Love requires more than a will; it requires a heart, and that she had been sadly lacking.

She had wanted to love him though, and she liked to think that that was worth something. He had not believed even that much possible, and so the king had utterly baffled him. These days it’s Sora and Kairi who baffle him, although slowly his confusion is lessening.

Too slowly, she thinks, because even his endurance has limits, and he came near reaching them before the end. She doesn’t know how much he has left to endure the peace that followed the war. Not much, she suspects, and he will break before he understands enough to bend.

“You talk to him,” Kairi tells the pale shadow under her reflection in the mirror. “I don’t know what to say anymore. He keeps drifting farther from us.”

“He has to throw you a line,” she replies. “He doesn’t know how to catch any of yours.”

“You talk to him,” Kairi repeats, hand pressed flat against the glass.

Pale skin presses to summer tan, and she says she will.

He isn’t hard to find, bare feet curled in still warm sand and moonlight in his hair. She sits beside him, taking time to marvel at a world she can enjoy now that she has a heart that belongs fully to her and fully to another, all at once. The sand is warm and the breeze is salty, and she loves all of it, and she loves the boy beside her.

“This is better than Sora’s memories,” she says.

He smiles at her, sad and broken still. “It’s different then I remember. Easier to breath, but it doesn’t feel like home.”

“So maybe it’s not,” she says, and he flinches. “Maybe it isn’t sand and wind and sea that make up home.”

“If it’s more than that, then I can’t have it,” he turns away.

“You might be the only one who thinks so,” she suggests.

“They just want to forget. That’s not the same,” he digs his fingers into the sand.

“They don’t want to forget if it means losing you,” she covers his hand with hers.

“Then maybe they should just let go,” his hand slips gently from under hers, and he wraps his arms around his knees.

“No,” he’s startled by the fierceness she wasn’t capable of before. “Their home isn’t made of sand and wind and sea either.”

The gaze he turns to her is helpless, lost without the hope of being found. “I don’t have anything else to give them.”

“Give them yourself,” she shifts to face him, leaning on his knees.

He starts to protest, but she leans forward, stealing the kiss she had wanted so long ago, but hadn’t been able to truly desire until now. His lips are chapped from the wind, and he draws his breath in sharply, surprised at being touched.

“It doesn’t matter if you think it’s good for them,” she rests her forehead against his. “It’s what they want.”

The next day the sun is warm, and she rest just under Kairi’s skin, basking in the light. Grit under Kairi’s nails, and laughter on her lips, as she and Sora build a kingdom of sand. She is content.

The kiss she stole will probably be the only kiss she ever has from him, because Kairi loves him, but it’s not the same type of love. It was enough though. She can only hope it was enough for him.

His hands are full of shells when he comes, and his short shadow falls away from them.

“I’m sorry,” he says, offering them his meager treasure.

Sora grins, and her laugh is tangled with Kairi’s, and they reach for him together, pulling him down beside them in the warm sand to help them build their kingdom.