For Learn: 111, a contest that took place a while back in the khdrabble community on LJ. Still not mine.
Sora finds that he has a great many things to learn when he and Riku return from their adventures, from their nightmares. He has to learn school work, the words, how to analyze them, how to add, multiply, subtract, divide, how to do all manner of things that are utterly foreign to him. Distantly, as he stares at a series of letters and numbers, he thinks that, really, the Cheshire Cat would be much better at this kind of thing, with all his nonsense. He takes another glance down; scribbles what he thinks might be an answer and then smacks his forehead down onto his desk, raises it up and then does it again for good measure. No, Alice would be better than him at this-this-whatever this is because with all the things that he's experienced, patience is not one that he has learned.
It takes time for he and Riku to learn everything that they need to, in order to catch up with their peers. Kairi helps them along as best as she can, but she is learning as well and while she is a Princess, and has absorbed all the material, she has yet to learn how to be a teacher.
Riku has learned a great many things in the past three years. He's learned it from experience, first hand, at that and it was both terribly painful and yet it made him what he was today.
He learned that there was something else out there, something bigger than their Island, something fierce and wonderful and terrifying all at the same time and he learned it the hard way. He learned that he never, ever wanted to see Kairi's eyes oh-so-blank, never wanted to touch her cheek and feel only the slightest bit of warmth and check (he always, always checked) to see if she was still breathing. He learned that he never wanted to have Sora see him at his worst, not like that, because it wasn't who he wanted the brunet to remember as his friend.
Riku learned that happiness isn't always found when it's all that you're looking for; for him, happiness was waking up to Kairi grinning at him and finding out that every morning when he was late to school, Sora was downstairs threatening to eat his breakfast.
Kairi learned that her boys were far too grown up for their age and it ached because as she held their hands and they curled together at night, she could feel the tension all the way down to their bones, almost as if it was hers. She learned how to fight, she learned how to hold a Keyblade, how to swing, how to block, how to kill and it was something she realized that she never wanted to have to do again.
Together, perhaps, they learned the greatest lesson, one that went unspoken but lingered in the air, almost tangible. They learned to hold onto what they had, to their most important things- to each other, and that as long as they were together, their hearts were the strongest things they had.
"We can take anything on," Sora said with a wild grin, clasping Kairi's hand in his left and Riku's in his right. And they could, because their hearts were intertwined; it took no lessons to realize that.
Haha, have so much to post drabble wise. Same little blather- if you read and like it, or dislike it, or fav/alert it, please drop me a review as well as any other author that you do that for. :)