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“Sora, you’ve been messing with your sleeves this whole time.”
Donald says this, tugging at the boy’s arm. Sora snaps his attention to his friend as he lets his hand drop down to his side.
“Oh.” he rolls his shoulders. “It just feels really tight.”
“Well, you have gotten bigger so it makes sense that your clothes aren’t gonna fit the same,” Goofy comments with the same usual grin.
“Yeah…”
Sora wants to take off the jacket but that makes the outfit look weird. It already looked strange with the way the onesie ended above his knees and he’d rather not get any strange looks from anyone. How much time has passed? And why doesn’t he remember why they went to sleep?
The clear holes he senses in his memory bothers him.
But if he contemplates it too much, it’d eventually melt his brain.
Better to find out later, I guess.
He thinks this while squirming against his clothes.
It’s exciting to meet Leon and the others again. Their outfits are different but they’re not too different from when they last met. Sora brushes the unease that came with being told they were forgotten while they were sleeping away. There wasn’t any time to consider it. They were remembered in the end and as Aerith said: It doesn’t matter. This is great. Everyone’s together again!
Everything’s back to how it should be.
Sora assumes that the pounding in his heart is from the anticipation of getting back into the action again.
It’s when he sees Simba; gets tackled by the now-grown lion, that Sora feels like time has really passed for the first time since he started this journey. Sora was now the smaller one between them. His lion form was about the size Simba was a year ago.
But lions grow at a different pace than humans do.
Aladdin, Jasmine, Hercules, Meg, and all his other friends in the previous worlds hadn’t changed much. It must be the difference in species. Time was already a weird thing between worlds.
He’d also grown up within a year.
It didn’t feel that way yet, but his body was constantly reminding him.
Everything felt too fast. Just a bit too fast.
This is a secret that stays within himself.
When Pooh calls him “Somebody-I-Don’t-Know,” Sora feels an intense whiplash. How could Pooh forget him? It stings but he maintains his composure as he helps his friends in the acre wood. Leon’s words come back to him like a shadow rising from the ground to grab his ankle.
He’d been forgotten for a year.
Sora realizes what that means as Pooh smiles at him like he’s a stranger.
“Do you guys think it’s weird?”
Donald and Goofy peer over at Sora’s seat in the Gummi Ship.
“What’s weird?” Goofy asks.
“Yeah, you can’t just ask that without telling us what’s what,” Donald scolds.
Sora leans the back of his head onto his hands as he looks at the starry sky beyond the window in front of him.
“The fact that we slept for a whole year and were forgotten.”
Goofy scratches his cheek. “I suppose so, somethin’ like that doesn’t happen everyday.”
“Right.” Sora suddenly hops on the seat to look at the pair directly. “And don’t you guys feel weird about yourselves? Like do you feel different?”
“Not really,” the duck answers, shrugging. “It was weird but we’re fine, right Goofy?”
“Mhmm. Are you feeling okay, Sora?”
He wouldn’t say no, because he is okay. He was feeling fine overall so there’s nothing to write home about.
“I’m fine, it’s just strange having grown taller and all.”
Donald nods contemplatively before saying, “That’s natural. You probably need some more time to get used to it.”
Sora hums non-committedly, sitting back down properly on his seat. He should take his mind off it. No point in crying over irreversible changes.
Not that he had anything to cry over in the first place.
Sora’s tail wiggles in the water awkwardly.
The disconnect between his mind and his limbs is annoying and disconcerting. Ariel asks if he’d forgotten how to swim already, and the question is somewhat uncomfortable. It hadn’t felt too long from the last time they were in Atlantica but just the action of swimming with his tail was like rusted cogs being made to move again. Practice would fix it and they’d all be moving like no time had passed.
He doesn’t like the fact that he needs it at all.
Roxas. The Nobodies in the Organization have been calling him by that name for a while now. It’s like an inside joke he wasn’t in on and the more they stared at him as if they knew something he didn’t, the more his perplexion turned into annoyance which at some point, turned into a rage he wasn’t aware he had in him.
(But it feels familiar. Familiar in two different ways. Sora has an inkling that the answers lie in the space of time he didn’t remember. He doesn’t like the thought.)
The rage leads him to fight. The fights lead to him cutting down these Nobodies. They all had it coming.
(Something within him aches a bit.)
A boy confronts him.
“Tell me…Tell me why he picked you!”
(Sora doesn’t know why and something about that hurt.)
They clash, and Sora manages to swipe both of the other’s keyblades. The boy is strong still but Sora gets by, pulling through as the victor. His opponent accepts his defeat with resigned grace.
“You make a good other.”
When Sora is pulled back to reality, he isn’t fully sure as to what that meant.
All he knows is that something isn’t entirely right.
Riku—taller, older, a little unfamiliar, but what did that matter when Sora could finally see him again—tells him that Roxas is his Nobody. The reveal is ice cold water on his face. That explains things, a lot of things. Why did it take this long for him to be told? Everyone else knew more than him and yet, and yet…
(He meets Roxas and he’s smiling but he looks so sad. They’re whole again. This was a good thing.)
(Is this really okay?)
They don’t have time to linger on this.
Xemnas stands before them with that artificial Kingdom Hearts up above. Sora must fight for everyone and everything. The world, the people who got hurt, the people who will get hurt if they fail—for all their sakes. Things will go back to how they should be if they succeed. Everything will go back to normal.
Sora gently holds Riku through the nothingness and eventually the darkness. They talk about stuff, and it’s nice to come to terms with each other together. The past seems distant in Riku’s eyes, the way he speaks—and it is, but Sora isn’t sure if he feels the same. Not that the specifics are important so he brushes it away as they keep moving.
Things aren’t too bad when you aren’t alone, he could trick himself into thinking that there was nothing but absolute peace here. Riku tells him that he can stand on his own so he lets him be. It was rough supporting him with their height difference (how did Riku get so tall so fast?). Sora takes his time walking to the shoreline. Now that everything has settled, the exhaustion starts making itself known.
A lingering sorrow worms its way into his heart. The exact cause isn’t something he could point out but it pulls him down slowly. For the first time, he feels like he should say something.
“You know, I think the darkness has gotten to me too…”
A thud from behind rips his attention away from the waves to Riku who wasn’t able to keep himself upright. Regret tangles Sora’s mind as he runs to check on his friend.
The words are long forgotten by the time he reaches his side.
“Do I have to do this?” Sora groans as he blows a piece of paper into the air.
Riku snatches it before the wind could carry it to the ocean.
“Even if we’re gonna go soon, at the very least, we have to catch up when we can.”
“Can’t I do that later?”
Kairi shakes her head as she playfully smacks him. “No can do, you both are a year behind.”
This makes Sora groan even louder as he falls onto his back. He was never a bad student, but you couldn’t call him a model one either. The papers were full of things that were barely processing in his brain. How could he focus on shapes and numbers when people needed to be saved?
“Come on,” she gently encourages, “I’ll get you something from Tidus’s mom’s shop if you finish this one page.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll do it.”
He wants to ask when that shop opened but the question feels heavy in his mouth. When he went there, it looked like it had already been around for a few months but no matter how much he wanted to ask, he also didn’t want to remind others of the him-shaped elephant in the room when they seemed perfectly fine with moving on as if nothing happened.
It did feel nice, being treated as if he’d been here this entire time, or that he was only gone for a few weeks.
The breeze is fine but it occasionally messes up Riku and Kairi’s hair. They don’t notice it but they often fix their hair at the same time and in similar ways. Sora likes how soft Riku’s has gotten. It fits with his taller frame that still startles Sora when they stand up. The gap between them has gotten wider in that sense ( the only sense , Sora reassures himself). Kairi, on the other hand, remains around a similar height to him but her voice is a little different and she talks to the islanders about things like a birthday party he missed or a conversation she had with his mom three months ago. ( That’s fine , he thinks, I can’t be there for everything. )
The weirdest part is himself actually. His limbs are longer than what he’s used to despite fighting for his life with them for the past how many days. His hair brushes against skin it couldn’t reach before. It annoys him that he doesn’t feel as familiar with himself as he used to. Off-handedly mentioning that to Wakka once, he was told that it just came with this growing up thing.
“It’s the same for all of us, man.”
And Sora is relieved because that means he isn’t alone with these thoughts. It’s a normal feeling then, to feel out of touch with your body and the world around you. Teenage angst, teenage normalities—teenage everything, that’s what it is. He’ll catch up to his body eventually. Time is all he needs. (Wasn’t time the reason why he’s feeling this in the first place?)
Sora isn’t used to arguing with his mother. An easy-going family like theirs was never one to argue for too long—anger flowing like a fast-paced river.
“But it’s been over a year,” she said, “we all forgot you.”
“I know,” he responded, ignoring the way her words chip away at his heart, “but they really need me.”
She gritted her teeth and he understood why she felt that way.
“What, are you their only option?”
And Sora has never been good with long arguments. He’s never been good with debates. And as much as he wasn’t the only one in this fight against Xehanort, he knows that there aren't enough of them to back down. Besides, there are people only he could save apparently. The words feel too hard to say, too long for him to explain succinctly. Even he dreads the dark night ahead.
“Yeah…I am…”
His back remains pressed against his bedroom door. The windows are partly open and it’s a deep-rooted impulse to jump out and sleep somewhere else for the night. He doesn’t know when he noticed it but the room had been feeling stuffier. Even if the bed remains bigger than him, it felt weird knowing that his toes were brushing the edges.
“Look at you,” his father had said while ruffling his hair, “ all big and strong.”
And Sora had grinned and laughed back then because he had gotten big and strong physically. A year can do a lot to people, he’s noticed. People change drastically. He’s had all the chances to learn that the hard way.
Again, he’s tempted to jump through the window but he knows that his mom checks his room at least once throughout the night. The one time he was careless was enough. Sora knows when to be considerate.
He’s been told that problems don’t go away just because he wants it to, and rarely does it go away right when he finds a solution. Life needed to make its changes and people needed to accept it or be left behind.
(Time—it’s always time. Sora realizes that he might be a little sick of it.)
The bed is accommodating to him as it's always been. Consequently, It makes him feel bad that he doesn’t feel fully settled down. Maybe it’s because there’s still more to do. So maybe if it all ends well, then he should go back to feeling oka—
Normal. Go back to feeling normal.
(What is normal after a whole year you’ve missed?)
Sora’s eyes flutter shut as he wonders.
Hopefully, he won’t remember in the morning.