Writing by AmatusVanitas

This is probably really sloppy and isn’t at all as ominous as the original prompt list, but this was too cute a mental image. Also, I just really wanted to finish a prompt/request for once in my life?? And actually sit down and write something??

Fun fact: I subbed as a teacher’s aide for a second grade class for about a month and a half this year, and I freak out any time I see kids climb and jump off ledges half as tall as those on the Destiny Islands’ play island. (I would be a helicopter mom, I’m so sorry.)

Enjoy baby!Kairi making new friends!!

2) A fear of heights, a hand to hold, and a smile.

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

The ocean shrinks farther back from the outcrop the longer Kairi looks at it. It makes her dizzy, and the sun beating down on her doesn’t help. She’s never been this hot before (she can’t remember anything yet, but she knows that), the boys won’t stop looking at her, and the paopu tree island is so tall.

“Sure it’s safe!” Sora chirps, bouncing in place beside her. “Me and Riku do it all the time! Riku even climbed up the tree and jumped once!”

“I didn’t climb that high.” Standing on her other side, Riku crosses his arms and glances at the curved tree behind them, but Kairi see the corner of his mouth curve upward.

“It was still awesome!” Sora grins at his best friend, then turns back to Kairi. “It’ll be fun, I promise.”

In the few weeks since Kairi woke up on the beach, Sora has never lied to her, and he and Riku have been way more fun to play with than Tidus, Wakka, and their ballgame. Still, her stomach drops when she peers over her sandals, and she shakes her head. “It’s too high…”

“We’ll go together,” Riku says, taking a big step right to the edge and smiling at her.

“Yeah!” Sora hops forward—toes sticking out over the edge, just a little farther out than Riku—and holds out his hand. “The three of us at the same time!”

Kairi stares at him—this cheerful, crazy boy with a smile as bright as the sun—and reaches out to grab both her friends’ hands. “Okay. Together.”

Oh thank God it’s finally done. Note to all writers out there: never write a birthday-present plot bunny the day before someone’s birthday and completely rewrite it on their birthday. Especially not when you have laundry and a metric ton of reading to do that night. (Although I should also tell you that it’s damn well rewarding getting it done, if you have to take the opportunity as it arises.)

As hinted above, I found out that today was the lovely Sakura-Scout’s birthday and was determined to actually get something written for a friend’s birthday—especially since I told her about it before I wrote it, haha. In honor of her birthday and the wonderful contributions she’s made to the RiShi pairing love, I wrote a whole oneshot using references to her own work (with her permission), in particular the “marshmallow” series in “Shadowed Land and Imaginary Tide” (which you should read if you haven’t), while combining it with a plot bunny I’d already had for a scene included in “The Beginning and End of Everything” that she’d asked to have written out. I promise, though, the blatant SoKai just kind of emerged on its own—I’m really intrigued by the idea of what a “mature” Sora acts like, and apparently I think mature!Sora actually realizes he needs to get a move-on with Kairi.

As is referenced in the work itself, the following is set during KHIII, sometime after Sora completes his quest for the Keyblade to Unlock Hearts and frees Xion and the others, but before the final confrontation with Master Xehanort. (While I’m talking about this, if you want to talk theories, bring ‘em on and drop me a message somewhere.) Blatant, BLATANT RiShi and some SoKai, unbetaed due to time constraints.

Of course, special thanks to Sakura Scout for the use of her headcanons and for being one of the few users who stuck with me from the very beginning of my fanfiction days—whether or not she ever realized it, she’s been mentoring me since I was a sophomore in high school, and for that, I’m most grateful. Enjoy, love!

My God, I’ve had this prompt since, what, mid-August?  D:  I am a terrible, terrible writer friend, I swear…  XD  Figuring out my personal headcanon for KHIII really helped, though, and there’s a few hints about what all is involved in this…  Enjoy it all the same, kingdomheartsfanforever!!

Number 5 - Firm Kiss

Her voice is a gentle murmur in the night, like the rustle of windblown palm leaves as a storm rolls in or the waves receding from the shore, barely audible over his heart pounding in his chest.  “Don’t you see?  It’s perfect.  All they have to do is separate us from the others and threaten you, and they’ve won.”

“I don’t go down that easy.”

Xion does not look away from the window, instead rubbing absently at the scar over her heart and letting the other hand lie limply in her lap.  He can only imagine how dead her eyes must be, and his throat constricts when she speaks again.

“You can’t hold them all off.  No one can.”

“Xi—” He crouches down to her level, resting his weight on one knee on the floor—

—and it’s so stupid, and now is completely the wrong time, but all he can think is that he’s only supposed to go down on one knee like this for her at the start of forever, not the end.

“I swear, I won’t let you go,” he says, heart racing now, and he reaches out, puts a hand on her shoulder like always—but still Xion won’t look at him.

“Better me than Sora or Ventus.  I’ve already done it before—”

“That’s not true!” he snaps, but the sudden flare of frustration dies when she finally turns back.

It’s the first time he’s ever seen her cry.

“What’s best for everyone isn’t right this time,” he chokes; conscious of his grip tightening on her shoulder, he forces his muscles to slacken, but the weight in his throat doesn’t.  “You’re just as good as them, you always were, and I never should have told you that—“

And then his words fall to Xion’s lips; she grabs his face in both hands and crushes her mouth to his, firm and unyielding—unfeeling, or trying not to feel.  His hand gliding over her skin to cup her jaw, he circles his free arm around her and pulls her closer, moving his mouth against hers until she’s forced to move with him again.

“I love you,” she gasps between kisses, “I love you, I love you, please don’t leave, I’m scared…”

I meant to go through with it: is that the truth? Yes. No. Yes-no. There is such a word, but it has never been allowed into the dictionaries. Yes-no: every woman knows what it means at it defeats every man. “Are you going to do it?” asked Vercueil, his man-eyes gleaming. “Yes-no,” I should have answered.

– Mrs. Curren from “Age of Iron” by J.M. Coetzee

When Haruki opens the door, he blinks.

Apparently Xion gets sassier than ever in this AU - then again, growing up with Riku and Lea would probably do that…

“What do you think, purple or blue?” 

“Are you seriously asking me what color to paint your toenails?”

“Yes.”

Riku rolls his eyes up at the ceiling, furiously tapping a button on the controller without looking—much to Xion’s annoyance, however, his button-mashing technique still works.  “I thought that after ten years you would have figured out that I don’t really care.”

“And I thought that after eighteen years, you would have figured out that I don’t quit until you give me an answer.”

“We’ve only been friends for fifteen years.”  Riku’s smirking under those too-long bags again, though—Xion will have to chop the fringe off again in a few days, she thinks, when Riku’s mom has complained long enough that she commissions his other other best friend to help her.  “What the hell happened to Sora anyway?  It’s been fifteen minutes, he can’t get lost on his way to the kitchen.”

Around the corner where Xion can see him, hiding next to the bedroom door behind Riku, Sora narrows his eyes at Riku, then glances back at his little sister and jerks his head in Riku’s direction.  Just do it already.

“You were friends with Sora before I was born, so you’ve been friends with me my entire life, and that’s eighteen years.”  Xion rolls the purple nail polish bottle between her fingers, looking at her feet and seeing nothing.  “You wanna go on a date with me sometime?”

The clicking of the controller button stops abruptly, and the character on the video game makes a delayed grunt of pain—almost like Xion can hear the full weight of what she asked Riku hit him full force.  Out of the corner of her eye, Sora mimes groaning in agony and hits himself in the forehead a few times.  Xion forces herself to exhale, then unscrews the nail polish bottle and reaches down to her toes, looking up just before she starts painting.

Riku’s recollected enough sense to pause the damn game but not enough to close his mouth all the way—yet.  As she watches, he works his mouth, then swallows.  “What—what do you have in mind?”

Sora leans forward, sticking his whole head in the room, and Xion smirks and leans back before her shaking hands streak her toes with neon purple.  “Well, pretty much what we always do, just without Sora.  Catch a movie, go to McDonalds and shoot straw wrappers at each other, have deep philosophical conversations about the state of the world, make out.”

“We don’t make out around Sora, though.”  Riku’s relaxed again, even unpauses the game and starts tapping the buttons again, but much more quietly; under his bangs, he’s smiling faintly—not smirking, smiling, and no matter how faint it is, that’s like Riku beaming.

“Have to add something new to make it a date.”  Xion crosses her legs, curling her lips in to keep her grin from being too obvious.

“It’s a date, then.”  The TV screen fades into white—apparently Riku won whatever part he was at—and he puts the controller down and properly turns to face her.  There really isn’t another word for Riku’s smirk but “devilish,” as cliché as Xion knows it is, but then again, everything in the world is beautiful right now, so Xion mentally calls it devilish as he leans forward and stares her right in the eye (oh God her heart is doing jumping jacks and she loves it).  “Pick you up at seven tomorrow night?”

Forgive the shoddiness; it’s late and I’m tired and I didn’t do anything that needed doing tonight so I’m gonna sleep now and work all morning.  :)  Enjoy this, though!  I only hope that it meets your expectations, amazing writer friend…

These white halls never end, door after door after door yielding another blank room and Sora closing the next set of doors in front of him, and Riku knows he runs faster than this, but he can never catch up—

But the boy behind him is gaining, Soul Eater in hand, arm raised and poised to drive the blade straight through his Heart if Riku doesn’t push himself harder—

The last hall changes, though, and he’s running through the Grand Hall in Hollow Bastion, and he can hear the static popping from the Final Keyhole above and feel the cold tendrils of Darkness against his spine as he runs past glass coffins standing upright, the Princesses still standing in them as if dead, and up, up, up the stairs on the left he goes, circling around—

His legs give out at the top, and he collapses in front of Sora’s immobile body—his friend’s eyes are closed and his arms spread out, and beside him is Kairi, still without her Heart, still not breathing, and Riku grits his teeth and bangs his fist on the floor, trying to fight the stinging in his eyes and the fear in his heart—

He hears Mickey calling his name and Ansem laughing from the shadows, and he pushes himself upright—

Too late—

The Replica has caught up to him, and with that savage light in his eyes that Riku recognizes all too well because he put it there the puppet brings down the sword and plunges it through his chest—

You’re prooobably expecting a fic when they’re older, like, when they get married or whatever the official thing is with lions in The Lion King..  Instead, we get children.  Is this creepy to fill this prompt like this?  I don’t know…

Nala rushes from her mother’s side the moment Sarabi sets her son down, King Mufasa’s roar harsh in her ears as Scar defends himself hastily in the background.  “’Re you okay?” she asks, circling her best friend where he lies curled into a ball and sniffing at his still-dirty fur cautiously, afraid to touch him when he doesn’t immediately look up at her.

The sucky thing about three-sentence fics is that I can’t really pull off that sentence variety thing I reblogged earlier, but I tried to incorporate it a little…

The creature disintegrates into flecks of light and shadow, photos fluttering around Roxas as he straightens with the weird sword thing in hand—and then the pictures stop in midair.

“It’s called a Keyblade… Roxas.”