(no subject)
Challenge: [71] Castles
Title: Freewill
Words: 599
Notes: He's back, but his mother still misses him.
Warnings: slight KH2 ending spoilers, takes place post-KH2
Sora’s been too old for bedtime stories for years, but you still remember the way he’d fuss about them every night when he was young. It still excites you, the stiff covers of a new book and the positively delightful creaking it makes as you pry open the pages for the very first time. You remember the musky scent of old books too, bought from old garage sales and ones dug up from the attic, so dusty that you have to wash your hands every time you use them.
Your favorite part of the day was coming home to Sora and showing him all the new ones you had waiting to be read. You’d never get through them all (he made you do the different voices, complained when you read too fast), but he always insisted on you fetch more.
Nowadays, he doesn’t ask you to read him much of anything.
He's a veritable well of exciting tales since his return, and he never hesitates to tell you any of it if you would just ask. The part of you that treasured reading to him every night about glittering castles, valiant knights and refined princesses aches like an old scar, and you have to stamp the feeling back down because you know he’s already seen everything there is to see. Anything you have tucked away in your tattered old storybooks pales in comparison to the real.
For every new account of his travels (he fumbles with excitement to tell you), it becomes painfully clear how much you really can’t tell him in return. Like how you’re still terrified to this day that you’ll make the long trek upstairs and find his room empty again. That’s why you close and lock all the windows every night.
None of your bedtime stories can explain why the neighbors avoid you. Or why they apologize to you all the time. (How dare they make you think you’re crazy when you weren’t and you kept telling them, see, you did have a son, you really did, you hadn’t just imagined it.)
Or that at one point, you forgot him too (like an old book you hadn’t read for years). You spent an entire week trying to figure out why all your photos were two inches to the right like someone else had been in the picture and jumped out at the last second. If not for Kairi’s incessant reminders that something in your life was indeed missing, you think you might have gone crazy like everyone said you were.
The Sora that came back to you on a warm, midsummer sunset is a remarkably gifted young man. But for all the things you’ve read to him when he was younger, he’s not that way because of you. You missed those important years. You blinked and somewhere in the span of a thousand lonely sunsets, he’d become an entirely different person. It’s hot coals to the heart every morning when you have to remind yourself that this battle-worn, blue-eyed teenager is really is your baby and not some faintly familiar stranger who knows far too much about the world.
It’s only when you sit down and really think about it that you finally realize what Sora is.
Sora’s the book whose final chapters have been torn out by people you’ve never met for reasons you can’t understand. He’s that handful of untarnished pages you would have cared for, would have treasured but waited too long to get to.
He’s that last stretch of prose you’ve been aching your whole life to write … but can’t.
Title: Freewill
Words: 599
Notes: He's back, but his mother still misses him.
Warnings: slight KH2 ending spoilers, takes place post-KH2
Sora’s been too old for bedtime stories for years, but you still remember the way he’d fuss about them every night when he was young. It still excites you, the stiff covers of a new book and the positively delightful creaking it makes as you pry open the pages for the very first time. You remember the musky scent of old books too, bought from old garage sales and ones dug up from the attic, so dusty that you have to wash your hands every time you use them.
Your favorite part of the day was coming home to Sora and showing him all the new ones you had waiting to be read. You’d never get through them all (he made you do the different voices, complained when you read too fast), but he always insisted on you fetch more.
Nowadays, he doesn’t ask you to read him much of anything.
He's a veritable well of exciting tales since his return, and he never hesitates to tell you any of it if you would just ask. The part of you that treasured reading to him every night about glittering castles, valiant knights and refined princesses aches like an old scar, and you have to stamp the feeling back down because you know he’s already seen everything there is to see. Anything you have tucked away in your tattered old storybooks pales in comparison to the real.
For every new account of his travels (he fumbles with excitement to tell you), it becomes painfully clear how much you really can’t tell him in return. Like how you’re still terrified to this day that you’ll make the long trek upstairs and find his room empty again. That’s why you close and lock all the windows every night.
None of your bedtime stories can explain why the neighbors avoid you. Or why they apologize to you all the time. (How dare they make you think you’re crazy when you weren’t and you kept telling them, see, you did have a son, you really did, you hadn’t just imagined it.)
Or that at one point, you forgot him too (like an old book you hadn’t read for years). You spent an entire week trying to figure out why all your photos were two inches to the right like someone else had been in the picture and jumped out at the last second. If not for Kairi’s incessant reminders that something in your life was indeed missing, you think you might have gone crazy like everyone said you were.
The Sora that came back to you on a warm, midsummer sunset is a remarkably gifted young man. But for all the things you’ve read to him when he was younger, he’s not that way because of you. You missed those important years. You blinked and somewhere in the span of a thousand lonely sunsets, he’d become an entirely different person. It’s hot coals to the heart every morning when you have to remind yourself that this battle-worn, blue-eyed teenager is really is your baby and not some faintly familiar stranger who knows far too much about the world.
It’s only when you sit down and really think about it that you finally realize what Sora is.
Sora’s the book whose final chapters have been torn out by people you’ve never met for reasons you can’t understand. He’s that handful of untarnished pages you would have cared for, would have treasured but waited too long to get to.
He’s that last stretch of prose you’ve been aching your whole life to write … but can’t.