君という光が私を見つける 、 真夜中に

Riku decided he didn't like snow. Trudging through the forests of Arendelle with his feet sinking deep with each step made for a slow and exhausting journey. Ahead of him, Pearl was struggling less with the conditions, but they still couldn't travel very fast at all. Riku didn't know what the pair would do if they were attacked by Heartless. Pearl glanced behind themself to make sure Riku was doing all right, and noticed he was falling behind. They stopped and waited for him, smirking a bit.

"This your first time seeing snow, island boy?" they teased. Riku thought about it for a moment. At first, he wasn't sure. His memories from the time when Sora was asleep were often foggy and discontinuous. He didn't retain much of his day to day life during that dark, low year. But thinking back further than that, he remembered. The End of the World. He had run through the powdery, cold snow, searching for his friends, for some sort of light in that pitch-black place. The feeling of the foreign substance beneath his shoes had been drowned by the other emotions he was feeling at the time, though. Panic, self-hatred, fear for his friends and for himself, terror that Ansem would come back to take his body again. But on the other side of that door, beneath the feet of the last light he thought he'd ever see as he closed it, there had been snow.

"Riku?" Pearl's voice brought him out of his thoughts, and he realized he'd been staring at the ground. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah," he said, raising his head and starting to move forward again. "I have seen snow. At the End of the World."

"Oh," they said, "I'm sorry. That... probably wasn't a good memory to bring up. Sorry."

"It's all right."

The two walked side by side for a few minutes more. There was something peaceful about the environment, even though Riku's legs were starting to burn from the strain of pulling his feet out of the snow every step. It was night, and though the shadows the pair's flashlights cast were numerous, none of them moved. Riku began to relax. He started to notice how still and silent everything was, as if the world was asleep under a white blanket. It was kind of nice. When he'd first arrived in this icy land, listening to Pearl brag about how much experience they had with the cold, he'd wondered how they could stand living in a place that got like this every year, but now, he could at least see a few upsides to it. Pearl suddenly stopped, letting out a little 'ooohh' as they pointed their flashlight up, catching bright flecks in its beam.

"It's snowing!" they exclaimed excitedly. Riku couldn't help but smile a little at the tone of their voice. It seemed like they were more excited to see snow than he was, even though they had lived their entire life seeing it many times every winter.

"More for us to walk through. Great," Riku replied sarcastically, though he did acknowledge that it was very pretty, fluttering quietly down between the trees. The flakes were small and fell quickly, different from most of the snow Riku had seen on TV. He caught one in his glove to try and look at the crystal pattern, but it melted when his breath hit it. "You know," he said, "this is the first time I've ever seen snow fall."

"You like it?" Pearl asked.

"Yeah," he replied, "it's pretty."