Creative Expression, a Kingdom Hearts fanfic by Raberba girl for the 100 Themes challenge on DeviantArt (Variation 3 by DavisJes)

The Next Life: Sparkle (theme 95) [rough draft]

Dedicated to Medli45

Summary: After more than a decade, it finally occurs to Riku to release his freckles.

A/N: This is barely a "Next Life" fic, but little Dawn has a little bit of screentime, so I guess this is where I'll post it. ^^;

In this fic, Riku starts out at age three or four, then later is 17.

o.o.o

Riku was crying.

Part of him was angry at his mother and how terribly unfair she was being, but that fury was rapidly turning to self-disgust. "I can't do it!" He could never do what she wanted him to do. No matter how desperately hard he tried, even after he'd been locked in that horrible pod for so long, immersed in the Mako that was supposed to unlock his 'true potential,' he still couldn't do things that his mother thought should come easily to her children. There was something wrong with him.

"I can't do anything..." He couldn't win fights, he couldn't make a weapon materialize out of nowhere, he couldn't even do things as simple as float or make his hair glow. He was the most weak, stupid, and useless of his mother's children, and he could never make his parents proud of him. His father took little notice of him; his mother berated him harshly and locked him inside terrifying dark places and sometimes struck him. Her words were so painful, he could never get them out of his head.

'You're so human it sickens me! Even if you're useless, at the very least, you can look the part of a worthy specimen, but you can't even do that much! Look!' Riku shuddered at the remembered feel of her tentacles of hair lashing around him, sliding over his skin, pulling at his body as if he was a doll to be played with. 'Always cut up and bruised like you can't win a fight to save your life, always smelling foul; and look, these blemishes that make you look like someone threw mud in your face, they're EMBEDDED IN YOUR SKIN."

"Mother, it hurts, please stop-"

"They won't come out! No matter what you do to them, they won't come out, and you're so stupid you can't even figure out how to hide them!"

"Please!"

Then she'd flung him to the floor and called him a disgusting human and left him there, and he'd crawled to the closest shelter so that no one would catch him crying.

'She's right... I'll never be worthy.' He felt aching and exhausted from crying so much. He dragged himself out of the closet and went to the bathroom and glared at his reflection through tear-blurred eyes. An ordinary person would have seen a very pretty, if deeply unhappy and somewhat battered-looking child, with silky silver hair that never tangled; white, even teeth; beautiful skin between the bruises; and a light dusting of freckles across his cheeks, as was common on the sunny islands.

What Riku saw was a monster, a creature light-years away from the perfection his parents always expected of him. His hair, though not quite tangled, was in disarray; his eyes were red, his face streaked with tears and snot; and there were the freckles his mother hated, each one of them looking like a blot of failure to him. And he did smell. He must have sweated since he last bathed, maybe when he'd been playing outside before his mother found him.

'I hate myself.' He slapped his hand against his reflection and screamed, wanting to erase the sight of every failure through sheer force of will.

Riku felt the sudden heat of magic. He cried out at the sensation of burning pinpricks on his face, and then he stared at the mirror in shock: his freckles were gone.

"Wh...What...?!" In his astonishment, he let go of whatever he hadn't realized he'd been holding onto, and the freckles reappeared.

Riku stared. Then he leaned close to the mirror, narrowed his eyes in concentration, and willed away his freckles again. They faded obediently. "I...I did it. I did it!" He didn't know why hiding his freckles was easier than any of the other magic he'd tried, but he didn't care. He practiced for a while, then he bathed thoroughly and dressed in clothes that hid most of his injuries and carefully arranged his hair. Then, feeling breathless with hope and fear, he went to find his mother.

Jenova was lying on the couch, staring into a vast hologram of the galaxy, her fingers dancing across stars and planets. Riku side-stepped a stray floating lock of her hair and approached her. "Mother?"

"What?" she growled.

He hesitated, but forced himself to keep going. "I...cleaned myself up." He kept checking, over and over and over again, to make sure his blemish-concealing magic was still in place.

Jenova threw him a disdainful glance. Then she frowned, and a lock of hair wrapped around his jaw to pull him closer. She inspected his face closely for a minute, and he didn't dare to even breathe. Finally, she pushed him away and turned back to her work. "Hmph. Good. Keep it up."

Riku fled, overjoyed at the precious scrap of praise. He spent the rest of the day practicing, determined to banish his freckles forever.

o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o

Many years later...

o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o

Although Riku was obviously calmer about it, he felt almost as excited to go to the beach as Dawn was. It had been an exhausting week of work for both of them, and they were both ready for a break.

Riku didn't bother to tell Dawn to calm down after he had doused them both in sunblock. The little boy hopped around him, screeching happily, as Riku packed a bag with some things and shut the front door and turned his Keyblade into a glider. Then he did have to tell the child to calm down. "Dawn, I don't want you to fall off. Put your arms around me and hold tight, okay?"

"WE'RE GOING TO THE BEEEAAACH!"

"Yes, we are most definitely going to the beach." Off they went. Sora, Kairi, and Lea were already waiting for them; as soon as Dawn laid eyes on his friends, he leaped off the glider and nearly barreled straight into them. The children screamed gleefully at each other for a moment, then took off for the water en masse.

"Oops," Lea said. "I'd better go with them. Roxas! Xion! Wait up!" He rushed to join the children, and was soon playing with them in the waves.

"Aaaahhhh." Riku shed everything but his swimsuit, lay down on one of the towels Kairi had set out under a beach umbrella, and blissfully fell asleep surrounded by the warm sun, the sound of the wind and waves, the laughter of the islanders as they enjoyed the beautiful day, and the knowledge that someone else was looking after Dawn for a while.

"Oh, poor baby, he came all this way just to take a nap," Kairi laughed. She smiled affectionately as she smoothed a lock of hair out of Riku's face.

"We're at the beach, how can he be tired?!" Sora exclaimed.

"I don't think he realized he was so tired until he got a chance to rest."

Riku woke up a little later, feeling refreshed. When he'd been younger, he would have wanted to spend the entire day out in the water, running over the sand, playing, chasing the horizon... He would do all that today, but...later. At this moment, he felt content to simply sit talking and eating with his best friends, watch Dawn play, and let Sora build a sandcastle on his foot.

"Ah! It moved!"

"Sorry."

"Uh oh...trouble, I think..."

Riku looked back out at the kids and sighed. Aqua and the others had shown up with Kazé while he'd slept. The kids had done all right for a while, but now Kazé and Roxas were screaming and struggling in their respective guardians' arms, Dawn and Naminé were crying, and Xion was wisely grabbing the boys' Keyblades out of their hands so that the weapons would disappear.

"Dawn," Riku called. The little boy turned to him. All Riku had to do was hold out his arms, and then Dawn was running to fling himself into Riku's embrace, sobbing.

"I hate them! I hate them I hate them I hate-!"

Riku popped an ice cream bar into Dawn's mouth. The little boy lay back against Riku and closed his eyes, sucking forlornly at the ice cream, finally quiet. Riku stroked his hair, which, while not tangled, was sticky with sweat and sand. Riku wistfully wished that he'd been allowed to sweat without getting yelled at when he was Dawn's age.

"Aw," Kairi noticed, "look, Dawn has freckles from all the sun." Sora poked at Dawn's cheeks. The little boy batted the hand away without opening his eyes. Kairi peered closer at Dawn's face, then looked up at Riku's. "Huh. But you don't."

"What?"

"It's funny - you guys are genetic twins, but he has freckles and you don't."

Riku stared at her.

"What's wrong, Riku?"

"...Normal people have freckles." It sounded so obvious when Riku said it out loud, but for some reason, he hadn't realized it until this moment. "It's normal to have freckles. Humans have freckles."

"Riku?"

Riku closed his eyes. When he was a child, he'd gotten so used to it that he did it now as automatically as he breathed. He couldn't find the suppression magic for a minute, and when he did, it was difficult to let go. At last, he managed to unclench it, and his freckles were revealed for the first time in over thirteen years.

Kairi gasped. "Oh, Riku, that's so cool! How did you do that?"

"You look like there's glitter on your face," Sora laughed.

"Glitter?"

Dawn was frowning up at him now. "Your face is all shiny. You look like the SOLDIERs."

"Huh?!" Alarmed and self-conscious, Riku hid his freckles again. He waited until that evening, after they'd gone home and Dawn was in bed, before he closed himself in the bathroom and studied his freckles in the mirror.

They did glow a bit, and it was similar to the 'Mako eyes' of Zack and the others. 'I've been pressuring my freckles for so long...did they get infused with the Mako I was using to hide them?' He hid his sparkling face in his hands. "Great. Way to be a freak again, Riku."

Over the next week or so, Riku couldn't make up his mind about whether to keep hiding his freckles or let them be free. He kept trying it both ways, feeling differently about it from day to day and even hour to hour. He hoped that the Mako effect would fade with time and make him look more normal, but...so far, no good...

The next time he saw his father, he defiantly revealed his freckles, just to see what would happen. He was not a little boy anymore. He didn't have to fulfill his parents' demands or take their abuse anymore. He was secure in his identity and he knew his own value, so his parents' opinions were now worth nothing except to indicate whether or not they'd grown.

Sephiroth stopped in mid-sentence and just looked at him for a while. Riku gazed calmly back. Finally, his father said, sounding slightly surprised, "They don't look too terrible."

"They don't look bad at all, Father," Riku said. 'Weird, yes, but not disgusting like Mother kept calling them.' "This is me. This is how I am naturally, and there's nothing wrong with it."

Sephiroth tilted his head slightly.

"Did you forget that I have freckles?!" Riku realized. 'Or did you never even notice?!'

"...Genetics," Sephiroth murmured, sounding almost like he was talking to himself. He raised his hand, in which a glassy, mirror-like sheet of magic materialized. Then he dropped whatever glamour had been hiding what Riku had never realized existed before now.

Of course, it was Sephiroth. Ordinary people had brown spots; Riku looked like someone had sprinkled a pinch of fairy dust across his cheeks; the One-Winged Angel, as if not to be outdone, had Mako-infused freckles that made his face glow like the horizon at daybreak.

After studying his reflection for a moment, Sephiroth dismissed the mirror-magic, and his freckles faded out of sight again. "I will consider it," he said, then resumed whatever he'd been talking about before the revelation of his son's freckles had distracted him.

'Freaks,' Riku thought wearily. 'My whole family, every single one of us.'

o.o.o

Author's Notes: I was thinking about my friend Medli45 the other day - specifically, about an interesting element of her art. I'm not a fan of freckles in general (I don't mind them; just not a fan), yet I LOVE the way Medli does freckles. She can make them look good on any character, regardless of whether the character is canonically freckled or not. (Like Spock! Spock! How do you give a Vulcan freckles, yet still make him look freaking cute instead of odd?! I think that was what decided me. XD) Medli's Kairi, for example, is heavily freckled; so I was thinking about a freckled Sora, and then a freckled Riku, and then this one-shot wrote itself in my head.

I don't think that Riku with freckles will be part of my main headcanon, but after such a long creative dry spell (I haven't posted any writing in over two months X''D), I was so happy to get a postable working fic idea that I HAD to write it. XD