![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
letterbladeFIC. Not for a challenge or anything, just fic for the sake of fic. :D
This was an idea I started a while back, and as I was derping around, I realized I could probably finish it pretty quickly. Not painlessly; the bunny was inherently fucking angsty. This is part raw draft and part somewhat-edited bits from earlier. (Since I haven't posted non-challenge fic in forever, and never posted fic in this journal, I kind of feel like reiterating my general process: as soon as I finish a viable draft, I generally post it to journal, then let it sit for a bit, do a final editing polish, and upload it to archive[s].)
Title: Spring Cleaning
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: Um, G? PG? Gen for once. (!) Just depressing gen.
Summary: So for a fair chunk of the year that he was missing from home, all but a few people forgot that Sora even existed. Which is just a little weird and embarrassing if you're somebody who he met for a day on another world, but what if you're a lot closer to him than that?
Spring Cleaning
It's a perfectly normal day.
Early morning sun comes through the gauze curtains, along with the cool breezes that blow in from the ocean before the heat of the day sets in. The alarm clock rings in her ears; her husband stirs and grumbles beside her, rolls over, and smacks it. She stares up at the ceiling for a long moment, thinks about going back to sleep.
"You said you'd make me pancakes," he says, as he stretches.
"Huh?"
"Last night. You said you'd get up with me and make pancakes. Didn't you?" He wraps himself in a robe--always got so cold, not like her at all--and shuffles towards the bathroom.
"Oh. Sure, hon. I must've forgotten."
Downstairs, she puts the kettle on and makes pancakes for two.
She's on sabbatical at her job. Eight months off--well, five now, three have gone by so quickly already. She's been reveling in it. Time for herself. Time to work up on the garden, practice her flute, volunteer at the library. All those things she never gets to do.
The house seems so empty sometimes.
She and her husband took vacation together, three months ago, but he had to go back sooner than her. It's strange, when she thinks of it--they kept planning trips and grand adventures for vacation time, but all she remembers is puttering around the house being inexplicably depressed, both of them. Waste of a vacation.
She's the sort of person to be productive in her leisure. She rambles about the house, and as she dusts the shelves in the living room, moving about knick-knacks, she wonders why she has somebody else's baby pictures. She'd never had children. Wants to, as she stares down at a round face and scruffy brown hair.
She finds a whole photo album of the same boy. Notes in her own hand, or her husband's, or a childish scrawl she doesn't recognize. Little stories. A childhood full of adventures, a short tan bundle of knees and elbows who climbed anything in reach and fell asleep in ridiculous sprawls on the couch.
She lays it out on the dining room table, and doesn't realize she's crying until something wet lands on her hand and she smacks it like a bug. Her hands shake. What is this? She never had a child.
A few hours later, photo album forgotten next to a mug of soothing tea, she remembers that she has to do some paperwork upstairs.
When she goes to pay her insurance bill, it lists a dependent. Son, age fourteen, in good health.
There's a stack of posters next to her printer. Missing. Have you seen this boy? Round face and scruffy brown hair.
"What," she whispers, running her fingers over them. "What on earth..."
She gathers them up. Riffles through her filing cabinet, and there's one piece of evidence after another. A whole section of school papers, and she frowns instinctively at a row of C's staring back at her from a report card. Flips to the back, and there are teacher's notes from kindergarten, outgoing boy, highly sociable, delightful child, occasional inability to concentrate. Childish drawings with rust stains from fridge magnets.
"Oh, god," she whispers, and goes looking for her diary, because she doesn't know what else to do.
...I don't even know if I can write this. If I write it, does that make it real? There was a terrible storm last night, that seemed to last forever, so bad that whole buildings blew down, and those stupid children they took their boats out in it and--
Kairi's safe, she was on the beach on the play island, but--
They haven't found Sora and Riku yet. Everybody's looking. Please, god, let them be safe. Let Sora be safe. He's only a boy, he's too young to oh, god, Sora, my baby, my hedgehog baby, be all right, be all right and come home so I can ground you forever...
Her husband comes home from work late, cranky, hungry. He scuffles at the front door, asks after dinner, comes around the corner into the dining room, and stops in his tracks.
She's pulled up a chair to the dining room table. She's got stacks of papers around her. The diaries, the photos, the schoolwork, the posters; one of the last is crumpled in her shaking hand. Face wet with tears.
"...honey?" He trails off, worry in his voice.
She looks up at him and can't speak for a long moment.
"We had a son," she says. "His name was Sora."
In her dreams, the dreams she can't remember, Kairi is blonde and washed out, like somebody dipped her in bleach. Her smile is thin and worn, like the bleach hurt. She holds one end of a broken chain. The links are made of glass.
I'm sorry, she says. I'm so sorry. It'll get better soon. And they're alive. I promise. But--
She wakes up sweating in the middle of the night. Hot flashes already? Surely she's not that old, she thinks. Surely she hasn't lived through to menopause without bearing a child. She'd always wanted children. Brown hair and laughter in the corner of her eye.
Her husband snores beside her. She curls up against him, close and clinging, like they'd slept together when they were horny twenty-somethings. He brings an arm around her without waking up. She stares into the darkness.
I'm so sorry. Until I can repair this chain for good, any link that forms will just fall apart again. And there's so much...
Had she born a child? She can't remember. Shouldn't she be able to remember something like that?
The next day, she goes to clean off the dining room table--fine to pile stuff up there if she's going through boxes, but if you let things like that build up, you'll never have a dining room table again--and her hand stops on the stack of wanted posters.
It's all there. A missing boy's life, in photos and report cards and scrawly school drawings. A boy who'd been her son, who disappeared in a storm, who couldn't draw, but there are photos of him grinning like a monkey in the tops of trees.
Why is this all here? There's her insurance papers. They live upstairs in her filing cabinet. Did she pull all this out already? But why doesn't she remember pulling it out?
Eventually, she starts writing herself notes. She leaves a pad on the bedside table; she reads it together with her husband every morning, after they rub the grit out of their eyes and he gets his glasses on. She takes down the important stuff. You have a son that you don't remember, and you don't know why. His name is Sora. He's short, with brown hair that always sticks up. His face takes after yours, and he has his father's eyes. He disappeared three months ago...
She makes herself use the present tense. The storm would've broken the children's boats to kindling, drowned anything that couldn't breathe water, but she makes herself use the present tense.
She adds to it, as the days go by.
You keep forgetting that you remember him. That's why this note is here. It's your handwriting, you can see. You left it for yourself.
You might get deja-vu a lot.
You didn't forget him when he first disappeared. Just a few weeks ago.
Nobody else remembers him either. Riku, the missing boy, was his best friend, but Riku's family doesn't remember him at all. Kairi, the girl who lives with the mayor, was a good friend too, but even she doesn't remember him. Nor do his other friends.
They probably think you're crazy, but you're not. Everything's in the writing desk downstairs. You're his mother, of course you have his photos and paperwork and everything. His room is across the hall from yours.
It's going to be okay.
She and her husband get a locksmith to open the room. They can't find the key to it. And Sora had left his door locked. She keeps praying it was just some teenaged boy thing. Teenaged boys keep their doors locked, right? Her husband says so. It's the weekend, so he's off work, but dressed like he isn't. Button-down shirt for seeing the room of his missing son.
It's an ungodly mess and smells of dirty socks. She turns and starts laughing and tearing up at the same time into his shoulder. He strokes her hair.
"Well," she says after a moment. "He was fourteen."
"Probably locked the door so you wouldn't make him clean it."
She goes in there, sometimes, to sit. There's a photo of him with his two best friends, and one of those faces has been staring at her from lamp-posts and tree-trunks for three months. Missing. Have you seen this boy? Fifteen years old and full up with arrogance and bad-boy cool, with his sullen eyes and that long hair which he never gets properly trimmed. She knows him; she remembers him sitting in her kitchen and grumbling about his parents, rare flashes of tenderness under his facade. A good-hearted boy, really, and the most devoted friend that--her son, she had a son, damn it--could ask for.
Then her mind slips and she finds herself wondering why she has such a vivid memory of eight-year-old Riku teetering on top of a step-stool about to drop her dishes. He isn't hers, he's the son of that wealthy lawyer couple three streets over, and, well, in the depths of her childless heart she'd think sometimes--if only I could have a son, a lovely little boy like that...
Had she been babysitting? They were always so busy at work, that couple. Maybe that was why.
She manages to catch Riku's father on a weekend afternoon. He's making the rounds, replacing the posters that have gotten too tattered to read, and his shoulders are slumped. She's done the same thing, she thinks. Only every time she puts one up, it disappears. Torn down by something.
Tentative, afraid of how strange it might sound, she asks if Riku had any close friends, growing up. He shakes his head mournfully. "No. There were some younger kids he'd play with sometimes, and he and Kairi were friends, after she turned up, but...he never a close male friend. We always hoped he would. Didn't seem healthy." He pauses, and looks down at her. "This is going to seem like a horrible thing to say, but--did he spend a lot of time at your place for some reason?"
"He'd come over for snacks after school," she says, because she doesn't remember why else he'd be there. "You know how it is with growing boys--once you feed them..."
"...they never go away." He laughs, but it fades quickly, and he shakes his head, looking at the roll of posters in his hand.
"I'm not hiding a runaway in my attic," she says.
"I've checked with everyone he knew. Anywhere he might've gone. Honestly, with how he could be sometimes, I expected him to run off at some point, but. But...it's been three months. I can't imagine he...we couldn't have been that bad for him, could we? He's fifteen, everything's the end of the world, but we love him, we did our best..."
Nothing could survive that storm.
"I'm sorry," she whispers. She can't imagine what it would be like, to lose a child. Can't imagine--
Two boys disappeared that night. Stack of posters on her dining room table. Sobbing uncontrollably when the island police told her the search was going nowhere, refusing to accept--
Her heart aches in her chest. She has the oddest feeling that she hears something, a scratch of pencil on paper, somewhere behind her.
Riku stares intently out of the crumpled paper.
The local clinic has birth records.
She stands by the potted palm as the nurse runs off a copy, feeling like some sort of impostor. He was in their files, he was listed as her son, and they'd checked her ID before letting her see the records. Family members only, without special request.
The nurse, a gray-haired veteran, chuckles and shakes her head as she collates. "Look at the feet on him. Clown feet. Especially on a little one like him. Must be having one hell of a growth spurt now. He was your first?"
"Yes."
The nurse slips the papers into an envelope and hands them over with a smile. "Must be getting fuzzy in my old age. I usually remember first labors. Was it an easy one?"
"Yes. I was lucky." It feels like a lie when she doesn't know for sure. "You've been working here that long?"
"Twenty-five years and counting. And I always see the babies. Want a mint?"
She adds the birth records to the box when she gets home, and spends a long while running her thumb over the wrinkly infant footprint. Big feet for a baby. Big shoes in his room. The same boy, leaving footprints through the world, on everything except her.
Not just her, she reminds herself. Nobody remembers him. Not his father, not his obstetrical nurse, not the girl who'd been one of his closest friends. She'd found a note in her diary from when the mayor's wife had her over for tea. They'd told kid stories and laughed and joked, all but laid bets on when Sora and Kairi would start dating. Puppy love. Pushed back a year, in their estimates, because even at fourteen Sora never talked about girls. Still a kid. Hadn't grown into his feet yet.
I still can't fix it. I have to keep cutting links, every time they form, because if there's a chain of memories around him now, a proper one, all conscious and tied in, I'm not sure if I could ever wake him up. I'm sorry. You can't remember him yet.
Bleached-out Kairi in her little white dress, in her dreams, again. She's at a table, hunched over a sketchbook, drawing. Kairi was never much of an artist.
There's something wrong and I can't find it. There's--somebody I'm working with, trying to help him, has a theory. It might work. It would be...cruel.
Night after night, she's there.
I don't know why I'm doing this. Not really. Talking to you, I mean. I love Sora, I think, and I have to fix what I did to him. That's why I'm doing all of this. But you...won't even remember what I say, not really.
Sometimes she's drawing. Most of the time, actually. Sometimes she stands in a window, or walks a hallway that's scattered with dust and spiderwebs.
I know his memories. Everything he's ever done, or experienced, or...so much. I. He loves you, a lot. I just think you should know that, because he's fourteen and a boy, and wouldn't think to tell you even if he was there and awake and could. This isn't happening because he doesn't love you. It isn't your fault, or his. It's my fault, and then there are some dead people, but...really, it's my fault.
Just once, she's standing in a round room, gleaming white, and there's a great flower of glass and white steel before her, and a boy floats in it, asleep. Sora.
He's going to sleep through his fifteenth birthday. I'll...throw him a party, I guess. I'll sing. I don't know if I can sing well, and I only know the song because of his memories. But I'll do something for his birthday. And he'll come home one day, him and Riku both. Somehow. They should, at any rate. They're alive and everything. They just have to find the right path.
She wakes up to find another note tucked into the book on her nightstand. She remembers the book; she reaches for it every morning. She remembers, always, that every morning she finds a book that she wrote about a son she doesn't know, but she never knows what she'll read in the book. A construct built around a hole.
It's his birthday today, the note reads.
Kairi comes over. On a whim, she said. It just seemed like the thing to do. She couldn't really explain it.
She shows her the box.
Kairi goes through it, slowly, and smiles, thin and bright and brave, and then asks if she's dreamt of a girl who looks like her.
"I...don't know."
"Me neither. It's like it's at the very edge of my memories, over the horizon. I can't think of it straight on. But I keep thinking, in an absent-minded sort of way, that there's a girl who looks like me, and that I keep dreaming of her. And I need to meet her. If she's real, we need to find each other."
"It's the same for me. Except for the needing to meet her, I think. You know, I don't like to sound like one of those people who praises by condescension, but you are very articulate for a fourteen-year-old."
Kairi sticks out her tongue. "I'm fifteen." She pauses. "I think. Well, I've kind of counted the day I came to Destiny Islands as my birthday, so by that, I'm fifteen."
"So's Sora. Today."
"Who? Oh. Yes."
They sing. Halfway through, they both forget his name.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: May. 18th, 2011 04:26 pm (UTC)Thank you for sharing it!
no subject
Date: May. 19th, 2011 07:53 pm (UTC)(And, wow, you just put your finger on the feel of that bit of the plot. I shall now describe it as the Tom-Huck-and-Becky island. :D It's something they did again in KHII, with different characters on a different world: Tom-Huck-and-Becky fluff, and then wham-shit-just-got-real after a bit.)
Thanks for reading!
no subject
Date: May. 19th, 2011 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 20th, 2011 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 18th, 2011 04:46 pm (UTC)Also, funnily enough, one of my former fandom friends who has become a published author *just* published a short story where there's a curse on the heroine to fade from memories!
no subject
Date: May. 19th, 2011 07:49 pm (UTC)Sora does eventually come home (along with
his boyfriendRiku), probably a few months after the girl in white finally sorts out the crazy memory foo and people remember him again. And from what I can gather from various other characters' comments, yeah, people both remember him and remember forgetting him. So everything works out okay in the end, but they still remember all the crazy foo.And then, according to fanon, his mom grounds him forever. Which is only reasonable.
It seems to be sort of a general narrative choice with KH that the protagonist's families and daily lives (outside of their hanging out with their friends) are never addressed. And kind of an understandable one, given the target audience and so forth. But with the crazy shit they pulled with everybody-forgets-Sora-for-almost-a-year, yeah, there was a fic in that.
It's a damn compelling curse to work with. Sort of the ultimate tragic undermining of a hero, the inverse of the bittersweet "it's okay if I die because I'll be remembered" trope.
no subject
Date: May. 24th, 2011 01:32 am (UTC)I mean. Wonderfully written, but ow. Fuuuck.
no subject
Date: May. 24th, 2011 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 24th, 2011 02:56 am (UTC)And yeaaaah, I could see how it would. *hugs*
no subject
Date: May. 18th, 2011 04:50 pm (UTC)Well done.
no subject
Date: May. 19th, 2011 07:41 pm (UTC)(As a note, in the 293842983 things we're trying to show each other department, Chain of Memories (a.k.a. Naminé messes with everybody's heads magically because her own is being messed with by a pink-haired manipulative bastard) has a cutscene theater feature, so that we could just pop in the disc and play right through the story. (Thank fuck; the gameplay's annoying.) If you ever wanna.)
no subject
Date: May. 19th, 2011 10:35 pm (UTC)