Kingdom Hearts fic: The Potential to Fall

[mistressofmuses]

I think I'm going to have to resign myself to being behind on the prompt list. (I'll likely be missing the next two days as well, but my intent is still to finish the prompt list... just likely not by the end of the month.)

This is the fill for Day 17: Fallen Angel AU

It's set in the same (otherwise unwritten) AU as a prompt I filled in the 2020 AUgust challenge, though this scene is much later in that hypothetical fic.

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An angel loved their fellow angels, and he loved Kairi.

A guardian angel loved their charge, and he loved Sora.

It had become very clear that the love he was feeling was not the angelic kind that he should have been feeling.

It didn’t feel like Riku had imagined falling would.

Foremost for an angel was the feeling and devotion to a broader concept of good. It was love, but it was a broad love of all things, never something too directed or specific. And never, ever selfish.

An angel loved their fellow angels, and he loved Kairi.

A guardian angel loved their charge, and he loved Sora.

It had become very clear that the love he was feeling was not the angelic kind that he should have been feeling.

He’d always thought falling would be painful. That was what they were told: the impurity would burn the angelic nature out of them, like fire and rot at the same time, seeking out and destroying every bit of goodness and divinity from within them. It would cast them down, to join the ranks of the demons of hell, forever locked away from any concept or experience of love.

This felt slower, if just as inescapable.

Was he already so far gone that he just didn’t feel the rot and fire within him? Or was falling always like this? He supposed he could ask Axel. The thought was bitterly funny. Could he even trust the answer, if the demon gave him one?

It was almost worse that it hadn’t happened in some horrific conflagration. Nothing had externally changed: his wings looked the same, he hadn’t received any repudiation from the rest of the angels, he hadn’t been cut off from his divine powers. The fall had been purely internal, the knowledge that cut right to the heart of him that he was not as he should be.

If something forced him to choose between the divine love of all and protecting Sora or Kairi, he knew he would choose them. The kind of selfish love that was incompatible with being an angel.

All he could do was finish out his mission here. He was supposed to protect Sora, so hopefully that objective would never come into conflict with anything that would prove his fallen status. Perhaps his love for Kairi could be forever believed to be the pure feeling of loving kinship that it was meant to be. If he never told her, she wouldn’t have to know. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the other angels would know. They would have to, wouldn’t they? They’d have to sense that something had broken within him.

He thought back to the last thing that had been said when he’d been given this assignment. “You’ve always had the potential to fall.”

Yes, they would know. He had been warned of as much.

Kairi didn’t seem to suspect anything. She hadn’t given any indication that she did, anyway. That shouldn’t have been surprising. He couldn’t imagine anyone ever telling her she had the potential to fall. The very thought was impossible.

At least his own failings would never put her at risk. He would not pull her down when he fell the rest of the way.