Disclaimer: I don't own KH.
Theme: Defying Gravity

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
-"Invictus," William Ernest Henley

Some disgusting taste lingered in his mouth, only proof that he still hadn't fallen asleep. At some dark hour Riku lay awake in his bed, quarrelling with a loneliness that tasted too much like spite. Though as long as Sora fought the darkness on the outside, Riku refused to give up the struggle in his head.

Riku had seen him the night before. In some world far from their own that had thrown them together on the same playing field, perhaps if only to see how they would move their pieces. The words Riku had wanted to say and the words he had needed to say had split into two different animals; the fribble he wanted, the side dish, that something to conceal what he really meant, while the words that meant the most had clawed and cried at the back of his throat, needing only to be spit out. But Riku had kept quiet.

Sora had talked away, all worries over the little girl, all smiles with his new replacement friends, all full of pride because of his weapon. No "So glad to see you, Riku; so happy to have found you, Riku; I missed you, Riku." Those important words had all slipped away, silently and sadly crawling back down Riku's throat, dejected and denied. Out of spite and jealousy, thoughts of "How could you?" drove him away, in the end having said nothing at all.

Riku lay still in the shade of his curtains, remembering but never regretting. He never let on that he had felt beaten, nor that he had felt pained. He had no reason to admit any weakness. He sat up in his bed, hand out, gently cradling a sliver of moonlight in his palm; a silver light so alone and so useless. All those important words meant nothing here, alone in the dark; awake in the night. Riku knew that eventually he would say what he needed to say to Sora; the words left unsaid becoming his promise to meet him again.

His heart, regardless how full of shadows, still had shards of hope and strength ground somewhere at the bottom, some broken mirror of himself lost and forgotten. The danger to the darkness lied in those slivers; beautiful slices of altruism he believed could save him. Dream catchers after all, with their twisted webs and nightmarish captors, don't arm themselves with daggers and knives, but with glimmering beads and soundless feathers. As Riku looked to his bare empty walls, his gray walls, he felt sadly reminded that he had no dream catchers to snatch away any frightening dreams for him, that any trouble that came his way he must fight himself. He clenched that outstretched fist knowing that he could never trap his silly beam of light inside of it, he didn't care. If he didn't make it himself he couldn't care to keep it. Even if he had already become tangled in the catcher's web and they had already dammed his soul, these shadows would not keep him, would not kill him, nor would they control him.