[Fic] Hearing the Falconer
Mar. 20th, 2021 04:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chirurgiqueTitle: Hearing the Falconer
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Relationship: Kairi & Riku
Rating: PG
Content notes: weapons, fantasy violence, canon-typical peril
Words: 1,997
Summary: Riku is long since gone on his search for Sora, and Kairi’s training has sent her to the Realm of Sleep. But maybe if they’re lucky they can still meet, with usual words on a slightly unusual street.
As she dove through the abyss of space, Kairi fought the urge to shut her eyes against the vertigo. After lifetimes or minutes of careening past shadowy facsimiles of buildings, the glow of a nighttime cityscape finally started to come into view, stretching out over the world below like a blanket. Its scale seemed to shift rapidly as she approached, from panorama to playset to present surroundings, until she slowed her descent and softly alighted, boots onto cobblestone square.
She had been to Traverse Town before. She had been younger then, and smaller, and the looming layers and tiers of ramshackle buildings had made the ceiling of the night sky feel impossibly high above her. Tonight it seemed much closer, and prowling the empty city felt like walking the streets of an outsized diorama, cloistered and holding its breath.
As she turned corners, Kairi kept her eye out for any movement. Aqua had told her not to expect this Sleeping World to be sheltering any current wayfarers, but what was the status of the local Dream Eater population? She had seen Dream Eaters before as summoned by Sora, and she would be lying if she said she wasn’t interested in meeting a technicolour companion of her own. Obviously she was one-hundred percent focused on her training mission, but if a sentient flower or fruit-themed feline just happened to appear and offer to be her new best friend, who was she to say no?
Not to mention she was all too aware that once the buzz of excitement wore off, exploring the Realm of Sleep by herself promised to be an exercise in loneliness.
In any case, a Dream Eater friend would be more than welcome. They might not be able to talk back to her, but Kairi was used to sending unanswered missives into the void. Besides, she was trying to keep her expectations realistic, and it was way too much to ask to be granted some kind of miraculous talking Dream Eater, a one-of-a-kind marvel like Chirithy or—
“Kairi!”
—Riku?!
It was Riku alright, gliding down from the starry sky like a fish cutting through water. Everything in this entire realm was the familiar made strange, but Riku moved as if he belonged there, as if by acting like it made sense he could render it so.
He stepped neatly onto the street in front of Kairi. “Glad I caught you. I was worried I wouldn’t be in time.”
“Riku... what brings you here?” It was happening again. Here she was, with her precious friend suddenly in front of her out of the blue after so long apart, wanting nothing more than to rush forward and throw her arms around him. But it hadn’t been the right time then, and it didn’t feel like the right time now. In this place, if she reached out, she might find him incorporeal, supposed reality retreating into mist under her touch, and her alone after all. She tucked her hair behind her ear instead.
“I could feel your heart in the Sleeping Worlds since I was already nearby.” He scratched his cheek with a finger. “You’re not... doing your Mark of Mastery, are you?”
“Oh my gosh, not yet!” She waved her hands in protest. “I’m not even close to ready for that! But Aqua thought that taking a quick dream tour would be a good idea, especially if I’m going to work on developing the Power of Waking. Besides, there’s not much happening around here these days...” She tilted her head a little to try to get a read on Riku’s expression. “Or so we thought. But for you to be here... were we wrong?”
“Let’s just say it’s a place of interest to some... allies I’ve made in Quadratum.” Riku half turned to begin walking down the street, and motioned for Kairi to join him. She skipped a few steps to catch up.
“Allies? Do you mean friends?”
“Ehh...”
“Aw, I thought you were getting better at making friends on your journeys! At least that’s what Shiki said, anyway.” She swung her hands and clasped them behind her back as she walked.
Riku paled a bit as he looked over. “You’ve met Shiki?”
“Yeah! Aqua has been sending me to all sorts of worlds for my training. Shiki and Neku and them all say hi!”
“H-hi...” Riku gulped, then began striding more purposefully. “Ugh, I don’t know why I never even thought to worry about a Kairi-Shiki combo. I’ve got a lot of fear to catch up on.” He shook his head. “You even look similar.”
Kairi broke into a light jog to keep even with him, laughing out of amusement and bemusement both. She and Shiki had similar face shapes, maybe? But mostly it sounded like Riku just thought all girls looked the same.
“So, it’s a place of interest, huh? Is there something going down?”
“We don’t know for sure yet, but...” He stopped and turned. “Maybe you should think about heading back...”
“What do you mean?” Kairi stopped short too, bouncing back on her heels. “I’m field training, it’s not like it needs to be perfectly safe.” She thought of the long sunlight of Merlin’s forest, endless hours that hadn’t been endless enough. “Do you worry this much about Sora when he goes off on his journeys?”
Riku made a face. “That’s... a complicated question to answer.”
“I’m not in a rush.”
Riku’s gaze moved from dark corner to alleyway, reconnaissance that conveniently didn’t lead his eyes to Kairi’s. “It’s just that... look. A lot has happened these past couple years. There’re a lot of things from right before we started journeying to other worlds that are... embarrassing to think about, now.”
Kairi nodded contemplatively. “Like your fishing waders.”
“Wha— not what I meant!”
“Oh come on, no reason to still feel bad about it anymore. Like you said, you’re a different person now from the boy who thought it was a good idea to wear that outfit.”
“Not what I meant...”
“I’m trying to turn it back on myself to make it fair, but I can’t think of anything. I’ve never worn a bad outfit.” She mused a little. “What was my style when you wore the fishing waders... I guess that’s when my haircut looked like Shiki’s?”
He looked at her a little askance. “Uhh... I think we’re remembering it differently.”
Passing again on a chance to establish a shared reality, she shrugged. “So, what fishing wader Riku thought.”
He sighed. “Back then... all I wanted was the strength to protect what mattered.”
“Your cool guy status?”
“You guys. You and Sora.”
She knew that. But needling him seemed to make it easier for him to get it out.
“That doesn’t sound too embarrassing to me.”
“No, that’s not the part that...” He started walking again, slowly. Kairi followed, listening. “When we were flung from the islands and separated... realizing that Sora didn’t need me to protect him anymore was like getting the legs kicked out from under me. I... almost wanted him to have a hard time so that things could go back to the way they were. And by the time I smartened up, he was way beyond me needing to worry about how he was doing on his journeys.”
“I see.”
“Like I said. Embarrassing.”
“A little. But I’m glad you told me.” She tapped his shoulder gently with the backs of her knuckles. “I hope you won’t mind when you won’t have to worry about me, either.”
“I don’t know if that day will ever come. You could become the world’s number one miracle worker and I’d still be wondering if you’d had breakfast that day.”
“Thanks, grandpa.”
He grinned. Then, distracted by something, he stopped short and put his arm up.
“Kairi, hold on.”
She followed his gaze. In the plaza in front of the fountain was a small shape, a smudge of purple and pink. Kairi leaned forward over Riku’s arm to get a better look.
For all intents and purposes it looked like a Dream Eater. Its beady red eyes peered out like little warning lights through the gloom. But there was something off. Not only was it surprisingly small, but normally Dream Eaters couldn’t sit still for the life of them, never able to contain themselves from dancing with imagination and verve. This one did sit still, almost like a plush doll.
Kairi whispered, “Chirithy?”
The Dream Eater that might have been Chirithy suddenly sprung into motion, disappearing in a flourish of smoke and reappearing with a twirl, clearly ready to put on a show.
“What a bright light! But you’re still not the one we’re looking for.”
“Huh?” Kairi could see Riku tense.
A dark fog rolled in. The Chirithy rose into the air, obscured by a violet light. There was a constriction, a pulse of pressure, and a release. And then it wasn’t Chirithy anymore.
Riku swallowed, and lowered his arm. “Alright. Kairi, get ready to support. I’ll go in, and—”
“Riku, wait!”
He turned to her.
“Aqua says my initial approach is one of my strengths! It’s faster than hers and Terra’s.”
“You’re telling me you want to go in first?” Riku looked conflicted. “You won’t do well if you’re hit by those claws.” He grimaced apologetically. “I’m not trying to call you fragile.”
“It’s okay, in battle it’s better to be honest. But I promise I can do this.”
He looked her in the eye. Then he nodded, turned back to the Nightmare, and summoned his Keyblade, readying it. “On three. One, two...”
Riku suddenly swept his Keyblade up, in position to summon a spell, and Kairi ran out under it.
The Nightmare’s massive claws came down again and again, fracturing the ground around her. But it wasn’t hard to close distance. The lurid pink vines that it summoned from sinister portals meant nothing to her dodge. It wasn’t long before she was in and over, shields up and on faith, the swipes of its claws in slow-motion. Kairi almost wanted to laugh with relief. Fragility meant nothing if you never got hit.
Riku’s magic soared overhead as she twisted and weaved. The beast was completely overwhelmed. It wouldn’t be long before—
“Kairi!”
She flipped backwards and reached towards Riku. She could see him standing there even with her world upside down. Feet planted, hand outstretched. She took it.
If One Heart was like rising on a thermal together, a giddy upward glide with lightness in their chests, then this was something different, a counterbalanced weight, whirling with centrifugal force around a steady centre. No matter their momentum, it still felt safe.
The familiar fractals of that wing of light stretched into her vision, reflecting crystalline gold up into the too-close sky. But there was something new, too. From Riku’s side, the bones of a batwing stretched, the vivid purple of the dream splashing out against the darkness, a rallying pennant of the nighttime circus. She gripped his heavy hand tight, and dove.
Together they spun, and the world spun with them, attending to their archetype like an orchestra following a conductor’s baton. The Nightmare retreating before them wasn’t worth Kairi’s fear, and neither was the strangeness of the Sleeping Worlds. Maybe soon Riku would leave, but for now he was here, not a lodestar but a touchstone, and the whole roiling phantasm of the wild empty world was grounded and made real in the rotational point of their clasped hands.
The wings broke into sparkles and stardust, and when Kairi’s feet touched down she keep going, collapsing to her knees in tired laughter. Riku held onto her hand, standing stalk-straight in exaggerated sensibleness. She expected his face to be comically stoic, too, but when she looked up he was smiling.
“Maybe I could stand to worry a little less.”
He yanked her up. Her feet were on solid ground.
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Relationship: Kairi & Riku
Rating: PG
Content notes: weapons, fantasy violence, canon-typical peril
Words: 1,997
Summary: Riku is long since gone on his search for Sora, and Kairi’s training has sent her to the Realm of Sleep. But maybe if they’re lucky they can still meet, with usual words on a slightly unusual street.
As she dove through the abyss of space, Kairi fought the urge to shut her eyes against the vertigo. After lifetimes or minutes of careening past shadowy facsimiles of buildings, the glow of a nighttime cityscape finally started to come into view, stretching out over the world below like a blanket. Its scale seemed to shift rapidly as she approached, from panorama to playset to present surroundings, until she slowed her descent and softly alighted, boots onto cobblestone square.
She had been to Traverse Town before. She had been younger then, and smaller, and the looming layers and tiers of ramshackle buildings had made the ceiling of the night sky feel impossibly high above her. Tonight it seemed much closer, and prowling the empty city felt like walking the streets of an outsized diorama, cloistered and holding its breath.
As she turned corners, Kairi kept her eye out for any movement. Aqua had told her not to expect this Sleeping World to be sheltering any current wayfarers, but what was the status of the local Dream Eater population? She had seen Dream Eaters before as summoned by Sora, and she would be lying if she said she wasn’t interested in meeting a technicolour companion of her own. Obviously she was one-hundred percent focused on her training mission, but if a sentient flower or fruit-themed feline just happened to appear and offer to be her new best friend, who was she to say no?
Not to mention she was all too aware that once the buzz of excitement wore off, exploring the Realm of Sleep by herself promised to be an exercise in loneliness.
In any case, a Dream Eater friend would be more than welcome. They might not be able to talk back to her, but Kairi was used to sending unanswered missives into the void. Besides, she was trying to keep her expectations realistic, and it was way too much to ask to be granted some kind of miraculous talking Dream Eater, a one-of-a-kind marvel like Chirithy or—
“Kairi!”
—Riku?!
It was Riku alright, gliding down from the starry sky like a fish cutting through water. Everything in this entire realm was the familiar made strange, but Riku moved as if he belonged there, as if by acting like it made sense he could render it so.
He stepped neatly onto the street in front of Kairi. “Glad I caught you. I was worried I wouldn’t be in time.”
“Riku... what brings you here?” It was happening again. Here she was, with her precious friend suddenly in front of her out of the blue after so long apart, wanting nothing more than to rush forward and throw her arms around him. But it hadn’t been the right time then, and it didn’t feel like the right time now. In this place, if she reached out, she might find him incorporeal, supposed reality retreating into mist under her touch, and her alone after all. She tucked her hair behind her ear instead.
“I could feel your heart in the Sleeping Worlds since I was already nearby.” He scratched his cheek with a finger. “You’re not... doing your Mark of Mastery, are you?”
“Oh my gosh, not yet!” She waved her hands in protest. “I’m not even close to ready for that! But Aqua thought that taking a quick dream tour would be a good idea, especially if I’m going to work on developing the Power of Waking. Besides, there’s not much happening around here these days...” She tilted her head a little to try to get a read on Riku’s expression. “Or so we thought. But for you to be here... were we wrong?”
“Let’s just say it’s a place of interest to some... allies I’ve made in Quadratum.” Riku half turned to begin walking down the street, and motioned for Kairi to join him. She skipped a few steps to catch up.
“Allies? Do you mean friends?”
“Ehh...”
“Aw, I thought you were getting better at making friends on your journeys! At least that’s what Shiki said, anyway.” She swung her hands and clasped them behind her back as she walked.
Riku paled a bit as he looked over. “You’ve met Shiki?”
“Yeah! Aqua has been sending me to all sorts of worlds for my training. Shiki and Neku and them all say hi!”
“H-hi...” Riku gulped, then began striding more purposefully. “Ugh, I don’t know why I never even thought to worry about a Kairi-Shiki combo. I’ve got a lot of fear to catch up on.” He shook his head. “You even look similar.”
Kairi broke into a light jog to keep even with him, laughing out of amusement and bemusement both. She and Shiki had similar face shapes, maybe? But mostly it sounded like Riku just thought all girls looked the same.
“So, it’s a place of interest, huh? Is there something going down?”
“We don’t know for sure yet, but...” He stopped and turned. “Maybe you should think about heading back...”
“What do you mean?” Kairi stopped short too, bouncing back on her heels. “I’m field training, it’s not like it needs to be perfectly safe.” She thought of the long sunlight of Merlin’s forest, endless hours that hadn’t been endless enough. “Do you worry this much about Sora when he goes off on his journeys?”
Riku made a face. “That’s... a complicated question to answer.”
“I’m not in a rush.”
Riku’s gaze moved from dark corner to alleyway, reconnaissance that conveniently didn’t lead his eyes to Kairi’s. “It’s just that... look. A lot has happened these past couple years. There’re a lot of things from right before we started journeying to other worlds that are... embarrassing to think about, now.”
Kairi nodded contemplatively. “Like your fishing waders.”
“Wha— not what I meant!”
“Oh come on, no reason to still feel bad about it anymore. Like you said, you’re a different person now from the boy who thought it was a good idea to wear that outfit.”
“Not what I meant...”
“I’m trying to turn it back on myself to make it fair, but I can’t think of anything. I’ve never worn a bad outfit.” She mused a little. “What was my style when you wore the fishing waders... I guess that’s when my haircut looked like Shiki’s?”
He looked at her a little askance. “Uhh... I think we’re remembering it differently.”
Passing again on a chance to establish a shared reality, she shrugged. “So, what fishing wader Riku thought.”
He sighed. “Back then... all I wanted was the strength to protect what mattered.”
“Your cool guy status?”
“You guys. You and Sora.”
She knew that. But needling him seemed to make it easier for him to get it out.
“That doesn’t sound too embarrassing to me.”
“No, that’s not the part that...” He started walking again, slowly. Kairi followed, listening. “When we were flung from the islands and separated... realizing that Sora didn’t need me to protect him anymore was like getting the legs kicked out from under me. I... almost wanted him to have a hard time so that things could go back to the way they were. And by the time I smartened up, he was way beyond me needing to worry about how he was doing on his journeys.”
“I see.”
“Like I said. Embarrassing.”
“A little. But I’m glad you told me.” She tapped his shoulder gently with the backs of her knuckles. “I hope you won’t mind when you won’t have to worry about me, either.”
“I don’t know if that day will ever come. You could become the world’s number one miracle worker and I’d still be wondering if you’d had breakfast that day.”
“Thanks, grandpa.”
He grinned. Then, distracted by something, he stopped short and put his arm up.
“Kairi, hold on.”
She followed his gaze. In the plaza in front of the fountain was a small shape, a smudge of purple and pink. Kairi leaned forward over Riku’s arm to get a better look.
For all intents and purposes it looked like a Dream Eater. Its beady red eyes peered out like little warning lights through the gloom. But there was something off. Not only was it surprisingly small, but normally Dream Eaters couldn’t sit still for the life of them, never able to contain themselves from dancing with imagination and verve. This one did sit still, almost like a plush doll.
Kairi whispered, “Chirithy?”
The Dream Eater that might have been Chirithy suddenly sprung into motion, disappearing in a flourish of smoke and reappearing with a twirl, clearly ready to put on a show.
“What a bright light! But you’re still not the one we’re looking for.”
“Huh?” Kairi could see Riku tense.
A dark fog rolled in. The Chirithy rose into the air, obscured by a violet light. There was a constriction, a pulse of pressure, and a release. And then it wasn’t Chirithy anymore.
Riku swallowed, and lowered his arm. “Alright. Kairi, get ready to support. I’ll go in, and—”
“Riku, wait!”
He turned to her.
“Aqua says my initial approach is one of my strengths! It’s faster than hers and Terra’s.”
“You’re telling me you want to go in first?” Riku looked conflicted. “You won’t do well if you’re hit by those claws.” He grimaced apologetically. “I’m not trying to call you fragile.”
“It’s okay, in battle it’s better to be honest. But I promise I can do this.”
He looked her in the eye. Then he nodded, turned back to the Nightmare, and summoned his Keyblade, readying it. “On three. One, two...”
Riku suddenly swept his Keyblade up, in position to summon a spell, and Kairi ran out under it.
The Nightmare’s massive claws came down again and again, fracturing the ground around her. But it wasn’t hard to close distance. The lurid pink vines that it summoned from sinister portals meant nothing to her dodge. It wasn’t long before she was in and over, shields up and on faith, the swipes of its claws in slow-motion. Kairi almost wanted to laugh with relief. Fragility meant nothing if you never got hit.
Riku’s magic soared overhead as she twisted and weaved. The beast was completely overwhelmed. It wouldn’t be long before—
“Kairi!”
She flipped backwards and reached towards Riku. She could see him standing there even with her world upside down. Feet planted, hand outstretched. She took it.
If One Heart was like rising on a thermal together, a giddy upward glide with lightness in their chests, then this was something different, a counterbalanced weight, whirling with centrifugal force around a steady centre. No matter their momentum, it still felt safe.
The familiar fractals of that wing of light stretched into her vision, reflecting crystalline gold up into the too-close sky. But there was something new, too. From Riku’s side, the bones of a batwing stretched, the vivid purple of the dream splashing out against the darkness, a rallying pennant of the nighttime circus. She gripped his heavy hand tight, and dove.
Together they spun, and the world spun with them, attending to their archetype like an orchestra following a conductor’s baton. The Nightmare retreating before them wasn’t worth Kairi’s fear, and neither was the strangeness of the Sleeping Worlds. Maybe soon Riku would leave, but for now he was here, not a lodestar but a touchstone, and the whole roiling phantasm of the wild empty world was grounded and made real in the rotational point of their clasped hands.
The wings broke into sparkles and stardust, and when Kairi’s feet touched down she keep going, collapsing to her knees in tired laughter. Riku held onto her hand, standing stalk-straight in exaggerated sensibleness. She expected his face to be comically stoic, too, but when she looked up he was smiling.
“Maybe I could stand to worry a little less.”
He yanked her up. Her feet were on solid ground.
