Our Promised Land
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Riku knew he was dreaming—a dream that was all too familiar, one that came to him time and time again just as waves crashed upon the shore.
He was at sea, far off from Destiny Islands, surrounded for miles and miles of rolling, tumbling salt water. The raft he, Sora, and Kairi had made had maintained its form—for once. Bamboo sticks rolled across the waves as though the vessel was built for such a tremendous journey. It was watertight by some miracle, keeping Riku dry, the magic and mysticism afforded only in dreams—if only the harsh logic of the waking world was so simple!
Seated across from him, beneath the shade of the rippling flag that he and his best friends had designed, sat Sora, the Sora from his dreams. Sora was still, calm, quiet, uncharacteristically so. His face was blurry as though he was a ghost, scrambled in its details, misremembered. Perhaps Riku couldn’t bear to remember it as it actually was. It was too painful, too surreal.
Maybe, too, that was why Sora didn’t dare speak, why he wouldn’t form a sentence, why he couldn’t even be granted eyes with which to look upon his cherished friend. Riku couldn’t stomach his voice. He couldn’t handle the concept, especially, of the Sora that used to be, the Sora from when they were naïve, innocent boys—when their dreams were intrinsically locked together, their shared, exclusive promises that were abandoned and long forgotten. Riku felt he was such a fool for the way that his heart still clung to them, still heavy with the longings of a child.
Riku resisted the urge to rush to him, knowing that their distance was the anchor for their raft. If he threw them off balance, they’d surely sink to the bottom of the sea. He watched the vision of Sora as it danced under the heat of a radiant sun, his hair filtering through fragmented shades of blonde and brown, the sight of his face vibrating, a mess of swirling, intersecting lines and grids, shakily framing his form, reaching close to familiar but never close enough. Sora’s arms, though, looked exactly the same as he remembered them, in startling detail compared to the obscured nature of his other features. Riku could even see the exact patterning of freckles that faintly dotted along the strokes of his tan.
Riku felt a bittersweet sense of calm in this moment, even as the clouds came crashing together, the sun falling fast in the sky as though it were just a paper toy in a puppet show, held high on a popsicle stick. The darkness rolled in, crystal clear waves sulking, boiling into shadowy blacks and indigos as impenetrable as the deep distant sky and the thousands of tiny, glittering stars that now twinkled against their cottony blankets of tousled plumes of storm clouds.
Oh, Riku remembered his place in this life now, now that the ocean had turned into its true, threatening form. How endless it was in its finality, here, on this simple raft carried from the bonds of childhood, he and Sora the anchors to the only solid, unmoving shape in the waters that remembered both the beginning and the end of the world.
His body was that of a man now, his hair longer, down across his shoulders, wet from sea salt and brine. He could remember; the dream had reached the present day, the present hour—deep in the seat of Riku’s suffering, he remained locked here, the stalemate between himself and the ghost of the only one he’d so recklessly let himself love.
The waves roared, the sea itself opening its jaws, shaking Riku and Sora as they buckled and bounded forward into the thick craters between each furious wave, every one of them taller than mountains. They were destinationless across the open sea, in search of the promise of the new world that they both knew better of now, that could never exist—that never was.
The ghost of Sora stood upright with a perfect sense of balance, even within the chaos that had Riku clutching to the rickety driftwood that barely managed to maintain its shape. Seafoam and hailing jets of salt water crashed onto him, as cold as ice.
Sora was still in the same form, still the memory of the shape of the boy Riku adored, the life from his body and his dreams glowing a faint halo around his flesh even here in the defeating blackness at the edge of their Promised Land.
He waltzed towards Riku, footsteps steady and sure. His bare feet settled across the rapids of water as though they were a pane of glass, even as they rocketed across the crest of the howling swell of wave after wave. Riku was enthralled by the demonstration, lost in a state of profound veneration. Sora walked across the pools of water hissing across the slopes of the poles of their bamboo raft, water that was pounded so violently by the commotion of the storm it had faded away into a bleached white. Riku was helpless to accept the advance, wishing with all of his heart for the tenderness he’d so dearly missed but could never allow himself to accept in other circumstances—maybe, he reasoned with the hazy judgment whose home dwells within dreams, he could accept Sora’s feelings and affection just this once.
The Sora from his dreams stood before him, so close that Riku’s mind struggled to create any pleasing shape for the boy's face, opting to skirt over it entirely, leaving it obscured in flesh tones and shadow. Riku closed his eyes, realizing when the thick, cold droplets from Sora’s arms hit Riku’s cheeks that he had been shedding warm tears.
Riku felt Sora’s hands graze his throat. Riku was shocked, but he still let himself perish into his heartbreaking touch—how temperate and mild Sora’s skin felt even now, the very same as the rays of summer. Sora pressed harder, firmer, harder, until Riku realized that he was choking, distantly, faintly. He wasn’t afraid. He probably deserved it. Tears rolled down his face in earnest and he was, in the most shameful way, grateful that his neck was being crushed so the sobs couldn’t escape his lips.
Their raft started to fall apart, likely because the two boys had collided with one another, crossing the boundaries that would shatter the whole world. The Sora that lived within the darkness of Riku’s heart pressed him forward, threw him with unbridled strength into the waters. Riku felt terribly weak already, so short on oxygen, so close to what he knew was the end of the line. He reached for Sora, the thick arms of water curling around him, pulling him further and further away.
Riku had no hope of keeping his head above the water. It spewed forth, bursting, twisting and tumbling. There was no defense against its onslaught. He was like a leaf in a tornado, being shredded into nothing by the indifference of nature.
Water rushed into his mouth and throat, through his nose. He could barely keep his head above the swells of waves, the deafening rings of his beating heart amplified under the folds of heavy surf. He choked against the invasion, but it was useless. Water rushed to fill all the space of his lungs until he felt he could burst.
Through the impossible surges of piercing nothingness, a primal, glacial cold sunk into his body as he descended, further and further, into the places under the giant dunes of ocean water where the light had no hope of ever reaching.
The chill was startling, almost crushing in how it made all that remained of his thoughts spin and drift away into nothingness. It caught in his throat or somewhere in his chest, just like his breath, all replaced with formless, heavy, warbling water.
The familiar shadow crept into his mind, his body instinctively trying to draw breath despite his acknowledgment that it was inevitably the end. The corners of his awareness faded, drifting somewhere more comfortable, the rush of fluid feeling a new, surprising—but welcomed—sense of gentleness as it rocked him into deeper and deeper sleep.