Another microstory for @breadling, this time from Kingdom Hearts. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve actually played any of the games, so hopefully I remember the correct canon timeline lmao. This one is 16. in dreams + Soriku.
There were times when the absurdity of each new world he visited juxtaposed with the stark, endless white walls of the Castle threatened Riku’s sanity.  It was hard, he told the witch—Naminé—to believe this was reality sometimes when his life was full of enough vivid nonsense to be a dream, at least compared to how it was before. She asked him, once, if this wasn’t what he wanted when he left the Islands.  Hadn’t he known it would be strange and wonderful?
He didn’t tell her that it wasn’t.  Strange, sure, but Riku in his right mind never meant to journey alone, and perhaps the real reason his mind was desperate enough to conflate dreams and reality wasn’t that the Castle defied reality itself.  It was that, in dreams, there was a smile that made everything matter, and slipped away like a knife against his skin every time he woke up.












