Chapter Text
Riku blurs back into consciousness and stares at the strange curve of metal in front of his face, trying to make sense of it. A wing? A boot?
The scent of darkness fills his nose. The world is gray-black, wet, cold. All too familiar by now.
It’s not over.
“Mickey?” he calls, shaky. His head’s pounding. He’s pretty sure he’s bleeding, but he doesn’t bother to take stock. Either his body can keep fighting or it can’t—nothing else matters. “Mickey?”
“Riku—” It’s faint, muffled. He’s still trapped in the demon tide. But he’s alive. Riku clenches a hand over his heart, feeling their connection. Then reaches out, trying to summon his keyblade.
Aqua’s winged steel boot, shadow-stained, lands on his wrist.
He grits his teeth, struggling. The dark realm itself is draining the last dregs of his strength. For a moment, with tremendous effort, Braveheart flashes back to his hand—it’s harder to summon than Way to the Dawn, unfamiliar, too large—
Aqua kicks it away, spinning across the black beach. He doesn’t have the strength to call it back. She’s keeping it from him, just as she’s keeping Mickey’s keyblade locked to her hand. She’s still a Master. Even painted with darkness, a silent scream scrawled over her in ink and corpse-gray. Even white-haired and yellow-eyed.
She shoves him onto his back with one heel, but he has only a moment to look up the length of her and try to figure out what to do before she reaches down. Her hand looks stained with blood already. She flinches and grits her teeth as she pushes past the fairy wards to take a fistful of his shirt. Then twists it halfway to strangling and lifts him bodily with uncanny darkness-fueled strength.
His feet dangle. She holds him one-handed, staring at him with narrowed gold eyes. He scrabbles at her arm. “Aqua…Aqua…come back.” His throat rasps. “We’re here for you.”
“Really?” She looks up and down his body. The teeth of Mickey’s stolen keyblade drag down his side. They scrape against some wound near his hip and he hisses in pain, kicking against nothing. “Why bother now?”
“Riku,” Mickey calls again, weaker, and just hearing his voice makes him shudder in relief.
“Hold on, Mickey. Just—just hold on. I’ll…”
“I can’t see you, Riku! Are you okay?”
“I’m.” Riku would really like to be optimistic right now. It’s the sort of thing Mickey appreciates. “I’m not dead yet,” he manages. “Just hold on.”
“You’re right,” Aqua murmurs, and holds him closer. Face inches away. Her wide gold eyes search his. Her breath mists black. “Dying is too easy, isn’t it? I should have died years ago. Finally been at peace. If all your foolish light hadn’t given me hope.” She spits the word like it’s a curse.
“Can’t die yet.” Riku’s close enough to kick her legs. Leverage, maybe. He plants a boot on her thigh and pushes. “Can’t give the world the pleasure.”
She smashes the keyblade down against his leg and the side of his knee explodes in pain. “Then suffer,” she whispers.
“Sure,” Riku says, shaky, and it cracks on another shout as she grinds metal teeth into his calf. “It’s—a habit.”
“Pretty thing,” she whispers, and Riku’s whole sense of what’s going on here lurches a step sideways. He squirms in vain. Digs fingertips into her arm. “You look better when you suffer,” she says, and there’s a strange, almost wistful tinge to it. There had been nothing but sorrow and grim satisfaction in her until now, and here’s a thread of—what, exactly? Could he consider delight a good thing under the circumstances?
She starts walking.
He thinks for a moment that she’s taking him out. Over the water. To plunge to his death. When he realizes she’s not, he’s so relieved that he almost starts struggling. She spins him and shoves him face-first against some wall of stone, holding him by the scruff of his jacket. A clawed hand in his hair. A clawed hand running down his back, pressed into everything that bleeds. Riku presses his forehead against cold stone and shakes with pain and tries to breathe. Sideways. Sideways.
Every moment she’s playing with him is a moment where they still have to a chance to get out of this. Somehow. He’s not sure how, but stranger things have happened.
Metal, still warmer than just about anything else here, hooks into his belt and tugs. Riku gasps, once, and shudders head-to-toe. The fairy magic might protect against darkness, but not against a keyblade. He fights her mindlessly. Then she freezes his hands to the stone with a quick cast of ice, and all he can do is feel his bones scream from the cold and try to keep breathing and kick vaguely where she’s got a leg shoved between his. Helpless as she shoves his pants down.
This is happening. Something is happening. He’s not entirely sure what until he hears the shimmer of a keyblade transforming and cranes his neck to see Star Cluster—wrapping itself around her waist? No, lower. And extending. She’s—she’s giving herself a—
Ice thaws slowly, crackles off his hands, but he doesn’t burst free. He’s still, numb. Feels like he’s tipping off the edge of a thousand-foot cliff. This is happening. Here on the brink of death. With the woman who he’s trying to rescue, who he’s never met, to whom he owes his life. Who isn’t in her right mind. With Mickey’s keyblade. With Mickey…
He can’t think about that right now. He decides that with what might be his last shred of sense. Mickey’s alive. That’s the important part. Everything else is. Trivial. Let this tide take his body. He’ll get back up if he survives. He can trust himself in that.
He’s a ragdoll in her grip as she pulls him off the stone, knocks him to his knees, shoves his face down. Bare ass up. The sensation of this realm right against his skin makes his spine crawl. He’s in freefall, maybe. “Feel you,” Aqua whispers, almost as if to herself. “Squirm,” she whispers, and darkness spills from her to him. Darkness connects them, dripping, liquid. Down the crack of his ass, his thighs, his balls. It’s acidic, intoxicating, an all-too-familiar old high, and he feels like all the pieces of his life are jolting out of order, jumbling around.
Darkness drips inside, prying him open, and he shudders and bucks around it, and his body—his idiot body. He’d already had a bit of a battle boner from sheer terror. The touch of darkness has wrenched it harder. He’s primed, he’s hardening. Nobody’s supposed to know that he’s like this, yet here he is. She can’t help but notice.
She digs fingers into his hip.
Riku wrenches his neck to one side, trying not to breathe the freezing cold water, and digs fingers into soggy black sand, and laughs. Softly, at himself, because what else is there to do? It’s not like this is the first time some piece of darkness or another has bent him over like this and wormed its way inside him. More literal, maybe, this time. But if anything, that makes it easier to handle. It’s just his body about to be split open, not his heart.
His heart is his own.
His heart is his own and Ansem’s smug voice—Xehanort’s smug voice—is nowhere to be heard. Just Aqua murmuring low and black in his ear. “Take my sorrow. It’s more than you ever afforded me.”
Something more solid than darkness nudges inside. Unyielding steel. Riku digs teeth into his gauntlet and wails, muffled. As much from the knowledge as from the sensation. How could he not scream for this?
Her blood-red fingers fist in his hair and hold his cheek into the ground as she presses deeper. Deeper, deeper, until he’s gasping. Too raw to be pleasure, too welcome to be pain. Or maybe he’s just a masochist. Could she kill him like this? Probably—it’s still a keyblade. He’s still laughing, faint and scattered, broken into pieces as she starts thrusting. Darkness keeps tingling inside him, a gut-wrenching power-kick.
“Can you feel it?” she hisses.
“I feel you.” His voice breaks as she kicks his legs, forcing him into a position that only makes her feel bigger, deeper, folding him in half. “I feel you,” he says again, more ragged. “I’m sorry.”
“Not sorry enough. Not yet.”
You have no idea, he wants to say, except she’s settled into an angle that’s hitting his prostate, dark-steel and merciless, and he’s got no breath left for words. This—this hurts, huge and wrenching, and he spasms under her. But instead of getting any leverage, he’s caught. Another pair of hands, ice-cold and lifeless and slick like glass, holding his wrists. Then more, pinning his ankles, groping up his bare thighs. Her reflections. Oh, hell. Next to them, her darkness-stained hands feel burning warm, like one last lifeline, even as they claw down his back deep enough to draw blood.
The pain builds, and his body forges it into pleasure, because what else can he do? His breath sends ripples in the waters of death. He can see the glimmer of his cries. He’s made of sorry. Has been for years. He’s made of sorry and keep-going, and he’s moaning on every stroke, ragged.
Still hard, even through this. Well, he already knew he was twisted. The bliss of dissolution wracks through him. There’s so little that’s new about this that he holds onto what is: Aqua, and why he’s here. He’s rocking in her many-armed grip, limp, and wishing he could hold her hand, the real one, as she makes him scream.
Instead that hand yanks his head up by the hair, twisting his neck so hard that for a moment he thinks that’s the end. Her reflections, flickering and glitching, wrestle him over and down, onto his back with his legs spread high and wide. He’s not even sure he’s in the water. They might just be holding him. Everything is terribly cold except for his arousal, wrenching, and the hot trickle of dread that won’t leave him. He can see her now. His hand reaches, but the reflection’s grip is like a manacle. She’d pulled out as they started moving him, and the relief is huge and hollow and he almost wants her back.
She leans over him like she’s hungry for something. Reaction, maybe. Pain. Xehanort would do that sometimes, only down in his heart and harder to hide from, and Riku would always try to keep his composure, give him as little as possible. But her bright gold eyes are wet as she wraps a hand around his throat, and some part of him yearns to let her see everything. “It was you, wasn’t it?” she bites out. “He abandoned me to protect you.”
Riku shudders in grief. “Yes.”
“Then it’s fitting,” she says, and then she’s broaching him again.
“Ye-es.” It’s broken by her first stroke. She’s slower now, like she’s savoring each one as his body bucks around—it’s not her, it’s Mickey’s keyblade, but Riku can’t bring himself to think about that. Instead there’s nonsense spilling from his lips as his heart aches. “It’s fitting that I take this.”
“Show me,” she says, and pure liquid darkness drips over his skin, familiar agony as comfortable as an old blanket, and he screams, writhing on the steel that impales him.
“I’m sorry,” he gasps out between cries. His teeth are chattering from the cold. He’s so hard it hurts. “Look in my heart. Feel my darkness. All of that is sorry.”
She digs claws in over his heart, all five in his skin, and blood wells around them. “You’re blinding,” she hisses, and Riku falters in disbelief. “Too bright. Why hasn’t anything put out that light yet?” She slams the heel of her hand into his face and blood spurts. He rattles in pain. She hadn’t quite broken his nose, but still.
“Suffer for me,” she growls, and more darkness lashes over his skin, and he howls, fraying. And he still doesn’t try to guard his expression. It’s fitting. “You think you can understand what I felt? The shadows feasting on the marrow of my bones?”
“I know,” he says, and she slams into him, furious. He pulls at the cold hands holding him.
“Knowing that nobody will come for me and every promise is a lie?”
“I’ve known it for days,” he says, breathless. White-cold pleasure-pain wrings another scream out of him. “You’ve known it for years. I know. I’m sorry.”
“My worst nightmares taunting me with every step?”
“Became—what nightmares fear.” He doesn’t even know what he’s saying anymore. He’s clinging to glass fingers. “Consume the darkness.” It’s madness. How could he possibly help her now, here, like this? He’s probably just pretending that he isn’t broken.
“You can try,” she says, and that red-clawed blood-warm hand, real and solid, latches onto his dick. He quivers, reeling in shock. He hadn’t expect that somehow. Whatever raw and vulnerable thing is crawling across his face makes her eyes glint. “You’ll burst,” she whispers, terribly close, and it feels like she’s even deeper. Maybe the keyblade’s lengthening. Maybe it’ll just keep lengthening until he dies.
“Pop,” she says, quiet and fierce, and he arches for freedom and shakes to pieces. She strokes him awkwardly, unpracticed, painfully rough, like she’s never done this before. He’s run out of words except some half-voiced thing that might be please.
“Pop,” she says, wringing his throat with her other hand until the blood pounds in his ears. One of the reflections has him by the hair. He can’t look away. He wouldn’t anyway. He’s taking this from her, for her, it’s fitting, it’s perfect.
“Pop,” she says, and the tide building in his body is too huge to ignore. He fights it in spite of himself, instinctive, because he’s never felt it coming on quite like this before. Or because he’s scared of what happens after. Aqua, he moans, maybe.
“Pop,” she says, one last time, and he does. The orgasm comes down on him like a tidal wave. Crest and crest, wringing him dry and leaving drowning exhaustion in his wake. He isn’t sure how long he stops breathing.
For one moment of silence, he hangs there, held up by glassy hands, panting, and her hand moves from his neck to his face, tracing his cheekbone. It’s still bloody from the holes she’d torn over his heart. His insides are still spasming around the steel buried deep within him; his legs shake like leaves. She’s silent, almost thoughtful.
Then she recoils, pulling out of him so fast it hurts.
“Now,” she says, low and raw-throated, and kicks him flat on his back. Reflections blink and flicker away. He sprawls, clothes rucked aside, wincing at the icy chill on his bare skin. He can’t quite catch his breath. Dizzy, stupid from coming. His fingers twitch; his ass hurts in ways he doesn’t want to think about. Somewhere, he thinks, he might have a keyblade—but is there really time? She sets her armored heel on his chest, and her borrowed keyblade transforms again, peeling off her body, returning to her hand, lengthening, growing teeth.
Riku swallows hard. Their eyes are locked. She looks down at him almost tenderly, gaze burning gold, as she sets the tip of her blade against her throat.
Is this the end?
His chest rattles. His replica tries to drive him forward. He searches for every bit of strength he can find in his worn-out heart. The memory of Ansem’s chained-up corpse. The shattered remains of his replica’s heart. The warm soothing darkness of the dream eater’s crest. Light…?
“We’re done,” she says, grim again, and shards of ice drive into his ribs, seeking his heart. Slow. Excruciatingly slow. She’s playing with her food—or she’s fighting herself somewhere in there. He grits his teeth and manages to move his hand, clutching the shaft of her blade. It’s—slippery. He can’t think about that slipperiness, or context, or consequences, or any of those little things. The important part is that, even for this just second, they’re both still alive. And she’s not lost. He refuses to believe that after everything he’s been through.
But it’ll be a lot harder to get her back if she crosses this line.
“No, Aqua,” Riku says with as much force as he can muster. “You’re not done.”
Her eyes widen a touch. She snarls. Ice drives deeper.
White-gold light flashes in the black sky.
Sora is clearly freaking out, and Riku can hardly begrudge him, given the whole lying there with his ass hanging out thing. He can only hope that Sora didn’t notice the spatter on his stomach. He’s never been happier to be so pale. Nothing to be done about the blood on his thighs, though. One second collides with the second that comes after it, and then the second after that, and these things are happening, and there’s so very little he can do.
The burst of light they’d summoned drove away the worst of the Heartless swarm, forcing them to spit out Mickey. Aqua hadn’t let up. Sora’s facing her, more or less alone, with more confidence than Riku’s seen in him for a while now.
Riku’s had a lot of surreal moments in his life, but this one’s up there. He pulls himself back together, painfully slow. He can’t stop shivering. He feels like his skin’s been stripped off. The two most important people in his life can see his guts squirming with every breath he takes. His muscles trembling with every inch he moves. His eyes are hot, like he’s about to cry, which—makes sense, maybe, if he lets himself think about it like that, but he can’t, because he doesn’t cry. It’s stupid. There’s no point in freaking out about this. Not the time.
He breathes, and he buttons his pants, and every second of Sora and Aqua’s fight is like thunder in his ears. Cold hard reality. Simply accepting it takes most of what he’s got.
He can’t bring himself to even look in Mickey’s direction. He can hear him moving. Feel the glimmer as he heals himself. It’s—enough. Mickey will be okay. He stares at the silver line where ice-flat water meets the haunted sky, shot across with the black flashes of Aqua blinking around Sora. Some small part of him squirms with worry, but he’s too exhausted to have anything other than complete faith in Sora.
“Riku,” Mickey says, very quietly.
Riku doesn’t know what to say. He has no idea how much Mickey had seen. He spins around that uncertainty for some unknown stretch of time.
“Gonna heal ya, all right?”
Riku nods, and sways on his feet as the welcome light pours over him. It’s dizzying, not being in pain.
“I’m here,” Mickey says. “Always.”
“Mm,” he manages.
“Is it keep going, talk later?”
Riku laughs, once, without humor. “You…” Words feel too large in his mouth. Fumbling. “It’s almost like you know me or something.”
“Gosh,” Mickey says. “I think I might.”
Aqua stumbles. Mutters something in sorrowful fury. Sora’s fighting angry, Riku can tell. His bladework is sharper, closer to Roxas’ brutal precision. Angry but not murderous. He’s panting hard when his final blow sends Aqua flying. His keyblade sparks bright.
The darkness melts off her clothes as she falls, and Riku takes one huge involuntary gulp of air in relief. Had he remembered to breathe before that?
Aqua, clean and bright, lands limp in the dark water. And starts sinking.
Sora hesitates one long moment. Looks over his shoulder at Riku, questioning.
“Sora.” Riku drives a fist into the ground, trying to get himself to his feet. How could he wrap words around this? Just push forward. They can’t let her fall. “She’s not gone.”
Sora nods, and clenches his jaw, and plunges one arm into the freezing waters of death. And again, light blooms.
The warm sun of Destiny Islands is blinding after so long in the dark. So blinding that it stuns Riku, leaves him feeling like he’s floating.
Another sensation that’s a little too familiar.
Aqua’s unconscious still, bruised and bleeding sluggishly from her fight with Sora, though Mickey’s hit her with some healing. He’s also slid sideways to whisper with Donald and Goofy. Riku can barely hear it from where he’s hanging back, and he doubts Sora can hear it at all. “Riku ’n Aqua might both be a bit raw right now. The darkness had her for a bit there, and she hurt him. So be gentle with them, all right?”
Riku wants to protest, on principle—about the implications, about Mickey bothering, about—he’s not even sure what. But it’s another thing that he can’t muster the energy for, and he’s not sure he can handle an overexcited Donald right now. Sora hovers, swaying between where Aqua lies and where Riku stands, like he’s not sure which one of them he’s supposed to fuss over.
“Sora,” Riku says, blunt and raw, because it’s burning in his throat and he can’t not say it. “You saved me.”
“Of course I saved you dummy,” Sora says in a rush, and turns to fling his arms around Riku, who hiccups. “Of course I saved you.” Sora hiccups also, and Riku abruptly realizes he might be close to crying. “This is so messed up. Ahh I’m sorry are you wounded or something did I hurt you?”
“I. Got healing. It’s okay.” Complete sentences aren’t quite coming. “Sora…” He’s un-hugged just long enough to look up at Riku, eyes wet, radiating worry, and then Riku can’t meet his gaze anymore. “Sorry,” he says, and looks away, and Sora shakes him gently.
“Sora,” Mickey says. “Riku might want a little time to himself right now. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you.”
Riku loves him so much he could puke. Sora disentangles himself, face going on a whole complicated journey that Riku can’t even begin to decipher.
Then Aqua moans, and all of them look to her in an instant.
“Aqua?” Sora calls cautiously as they both drift over, separated now by an awkward few feet.
“Ven?” she mumbles, eyes half open. “Terra?” She levers herself up on her elbows, muzzy. “No…a-another illusion…”
“Aqua,” Riku says, firm, because how many times had Mickey called his name just like that as they traveled in the Realm of Darkness? Back when Ansem was ravaging his mind and every shadow was crawling spike-haired or with Kairi’s soft cheeks to tell him he was forever unforgiven?
She focuses. And he can tell the moment she recognizes him because she crumples like tissue. Horror, shame. She curls up painfully small, burying her face in her knees. “Sacred light,” she breathes. “What have I done?”
Silence but for the waves and the gulls. Riku fumbles for words, because how can he possibly answer that? In front of everyone else here, no less? But he has to, and he has to get it right, because how close is her heart to shattering?
“I’ve fallen to darkness too,” he says finally, numb. “It can bring out…things we’d rather not be. But we can always move forward.”
She picks her head up and stares at him, wide-eyed, going on some complicated journey of her own. “But,” she says, like this is somehow the most unbelievable part of all this. “You’re a Master.”
“Aqua,” Mickey says. “I know it’s hard to believe with everything we’ve learned back in the day. But those who fall can come back. I’ve seen it. Master Yen Sid himself gave Riku his Mark.”
“Then…” She shakes her head. Shakes her whole self. “Wait—this. Is this the Destiny Islands?”
“Yeah?” Sora offers, clearly even more lost than Riku.
“When did they fall?” she asks, eyes darting around the beach in a whole new sort of horror.
“Aqua,” Riku says. And then, when she can’t bring herself to focus on him, he takes a knee to be closer to her, shoving aside all his lingering pain. “Master Aqua. We’re in the Realm of Light.”
Aqua gasps as that sinks in. One huge choking sob. Then another. Then she wails, teeth bared as the tears spill.
Goofy’s there to catch her as she breaks down. Thank goodness for Goofy.