#deviledmeg

This was wrong. Deep in his gut, he knew it was. A bad idea, a horrible mistake, a drunken regret he wouldn't ever be able to take back—but then the sunset hit the back of her head, orange rays slicing through the curtains, and suddenly her hair was fire, her eyes were violet and her lips were so, so soft. Her hands lingered shyly at the hem of his shirt, and selfishly, he wished she'd press on. The knot in his stomach wouldn't twist as hard if she was the one to move things along.

"Are you sure you want this?" she whispered. She brushed her thumbs against his hips and they betrayed him eagerly.

He did. He didn't.

After five years a ghost, he just didn't want to feel so goddamn alone anymore.

This is wrong, he thought, wrapping his arms around her waist and hoisting her onto his. Why am I doing this? he asked himself as she slid into place and grinned into a kiss. This is a mistake.

But her touch made him feel alive again, and when he closed his eyes, he could see the girl he left sitting on a paopu tree instead.

She was kind, and funny, and a genuinely wonderful friend. He cared for her deeply, and if he was honest with himself, there was chemistry there. A wink across the battlefield, a glance that lingered just a moment too long, hands that wandered past stitches and bandages. All things he thought he could tamp down before they got out of hand.

Quadratum put them through so much together. Five years of dreaming about home. Five years of searching for an escape that, so far, did not exist. Five years of quietly building each other back up, ignoring that the pieces didn't fit together the same way they fell apart. In a way, he did love her.

In a way.

He flipped them easily and his lips found her breast, her stomach, her center. A busy mouth couldn't utter the wrong name, after all. The couch creaked awkwardly under them, as if to remind him what a grave mistake he was making, but her thighs muffled the warning. He held her open as he licked her and guiltily enjoyed the way she wriggled and groaned.

He wondered if she was thinking of someone else, too. She had a life before she lived here. Maybe she pictured someone else between her legs, someone with eyes like stars and skin like honey, who loved her the way she should be loved. That would be best, he thought—if he, too, was a body warm enough to make her feel a little less alone.

She pulled him on top of her, clutching fistfuls of his hair and kissing him sloppily, and he tried not to notice that she moaned his name differently.

"Where did you learn that?" she asked with a chuckle, a finger on his chin.

A girl with red hair. A secret place. A promise on a deathbed.

"A video," he lied, and sank into her emptily.

The liquor came up so much more sour than it went down.

He deserved this—to be hunched over the toilet at 2 in the morning, sweaty and disoriented, his only company the sounds of late night traffic from the street below. Condemned to remember starry nights on the beach with sweetened wine and stolen time, only to realize he'd tainted them all with one stupid, selfish choice. He deserved to be punished.

Strelitzia once told him that Quadratum was a punishment: a world that took you in when you had a lesson to learn, and only the hard way would teach you. They were sat together on the roof of the 104, watching people who couldn't watch them back scramble through the crossing.

"What's yours, then?" he had asked with a cocked eyebrow. "What does the world think you need to learn?"

She pondered that for a long moment, long enough that Sora thought twice about asking.

"I think it's to be brave," she finally said, gaze lost somewhere in the skyline.

His brow furrowed in confusion. "I think you're plenty brave," he offered.

She chuckled bitterly, but offered him a small smile and nod. "Thank you," she said, "but even after everything we've done here, there's still something I'm afraid of."

"We're all a little afraid of something," he countered, "it's what you do about it that makes you brave."

Her eyes crinkled slightly and her face softened. "Who taught you that?"

"A bear that lives in a magic storybook."

A pause. A head shake. An incredulous laugh that made his stomach flip. He threw a wink that made her blush and he thought, for a moment, that maybe purgatory wasn't so bad after all.

What a fool he had been.

Never before had Sora felt so heart-stoppingly empty—and it wasn’t just his stomach. There was a constant chill about him, like a wet shirt he could never peel off. But there was an even deeper wound, somewhere inside the chasms of his heart, where lives used to sleep within him, that ached enough to tear him apart.

He used to fear that his heart was a prison. The tears that weren't his, the lives he never lived, the promises he didn't make—they used to terrify him, like he was being puppetted by the will of the people he housed.

Now, he'd give anything to feel that whole again.

Sora flushed what remained of his stomach down the toilet and sighed, the heels of his palms pressed deep into his eyes. He must have dozed off like that, pathetically slouched over on the linoleum tile, because the next thing he remembered was gentle footsteps at his side. A hand on his shoulder. A soft voice by his ear.

"Are you okay?"

"... No," he slurred, eyes welling, cheeks puffy. "I don't think so."

What a real answer, he thought, as Strelitzia helped hoist him to his feet. She teetered slightly under his weight, but he was aware enough to stumble his way to the couch. She clumsily dumped him onto it and it hit his lower back like a brick.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked. She sounded heartbroken.

No frowning. No sad faces. A lesson learned.

"M'sorry," he mumbled, sleep already overtaking him. "I miss her. Miss them."

If only they could see him now.

She had tried so hard not to love him.

She first spotted him unconscious in the middle of the crossing. Strelitzia was sure someone would call for help, but as she watched the scene from her balcony, she quickly realized that they were blind to him the same way they were blind to her. How they narrowly and unknowingly avoided him, as if their steps were gently guided by fate, was far too familiar to her. She'd seen it for centuries at this point.

He was lighter than he should have been. That was the first thing she noticed—his lean build felt hollow in her arms, built by hard battles and stretched meals. He had scarred hands and bleeding limbs and a chest that barely lifted for air; when she pressed an ear to him, she heard a rattle that made her own lungs freeze.

She made him as comfortable as she could on her cheap, creaky couch: peeled off his outer layers, propped his head under a pillow, and draped a light blanket over his lower half. Cleaned up his wounds, thankful at least that he wasn't awake for the stitches. Tipped a potion past his lips. It was almost midnight by the time she finished.

Wiping her forehead, Strelitzia sighed and analyzed her work. He did look a little more comfortable, she thought, noting his softened brow and steadier breathing. Content for the moment, she ambled back out to the balcony, letting the cool moonlit air sink into her lungs. She eyed the street below and, for the first time in her life, thanked the worlds for her cowardice.

For now, she had something to live for.

Days passed and patterns set. Tending to him became a daily ritual. Slowly, the cuts began to close and his breath came easier, and with every improvement, she felt a little lighter. She talked to him often, hoping it brought him peace the same way it did her. She'd tell him about the weather, or what she had for lunch that day, or the strange little creatures people started finding in alleys.

"I overheard some people talking about it," she said one day, knees pulled up to her chest as she sat on the floor by his motionless head. "They sound like something from my world. Something I used to fight, a really long time ago." She glanced up at him over her shoulder, as if expecting a response. His eyes just twitched behind their lids.

Seven days had passed since she found him.

On the eighth, the dead man walked, and Strelitzia had a feeling that everything was about to change.

His name was Sora. He was from an island, and he had two very best friends. One of those friends made a mistake, and that's how he ended up with the Keyblade. How he started traveling the stars with a magician and a knight. How he saved the worlds, again, and again, and again, giving everything of himself to protect everyone else. How he ended up here.

Weeks passed, and Strelitzia found herself seeking out his company more and more. Her heart fluttered in an achingly familiar way when he smiled, when he laughed—when he did just about anything, really. He was beautiful. He was a light she had lost for a very long time, and he made her want to do something she'd given up on decades ago.

He made her want to find a way home.

"There has to be a way," he insisted, hand to his heart the way only he did. "I've done it before. I can do it again. But I think," he started, voice softening, "it'll be a lot easier if we do it together."

The way he looked at her made her melt. Like he saw her. Really, actually saw her.

Like he believed in her.

"Besides," he chuckled, "I wouldn't leave you here! We're going to go home together. Oh, then you can meet all my friends! I'm sure they'll love you."

Effervescent, shimmering, blinding light.

How could she say no?

His name was Sora. He took his coffees with extra sugar, flicked his nose when he was being cocky, and slept best to the sound of crashing waves. He liked folk music, preferred morning showers, and had an objectively terrible voice. He slayed Heartless with a practiced ease that almost made her envious. And over the past three years, he had made Strelitzia fall absolutely, unmistakably in love with him.

She tried not to. Oh, did she try, but it was hard not to love him. She was certain that everyone who’d ever met him must have felt the same way. He was a force of nature, an unbending will determined for good, and every time Strelitzia felt herself succumbing to her darkness, he ripped her up and shook her free. “We’re going to find it,” he’d say, calloused hands on her shoulders and ocean eyes crashing into her. “I’m not giving up, so you shouldn’t either. We just need to keep trying.”

Then he’d smile for her, and Strelitzia could’ve sworn that every time, he looked a little more tired—but he said it, so she believed him. After all, what choice did she have? They just needed to keep trying.

The apartment was unbearably cold when they returned.

Sora was a good roommate; he did all the chores Strelitzia hated, even when she insisted that it was her turn. He cooked his favorite homeworld meals for them, and Strelitzia listened fondly when he complained that Quadratum didn’t have quite the right ingredients for it, so it wasn’t exactly the same—but it was close.

“Still beats Gummi Ship rations,” he’d say. Strelitzia would chuckle between bites, and he’d look at her like he’d done something right, and the butterflies in her stomach would take flight for the hundredth time that day.