Disclaimer: The words are mine but not the characters.
A/N: Written for Lorei on khreqest over on LiveJournal. My first time writing Riku. This fic made me realise that Good Charlotte's Moving On is so very much a Riku song, even if saying so does make me sound like a fanbrat.
Moving On
© Scribbler, June 2008.
And all I've got are these two hands to make myself a better man;
I wonder if I'll ever see the end of this.
-- From Moving On by Good Charlotte.
She's sitting out on the sand, a lonely figure against the orange-purple sunset. This isn't the beach where everyone goes, which ends each day bearing stories written in footprints, castles and half-dug moats. This is a quiet little cove that remarkably few islanders know about.
Destiny Islands' main source of revenue has always been tourism, and the bigger islands trickle sightseers to the smaller ones once they've wrung as much as they can from the pockets of their Bermuda shorts. There aren't many places tourist-free during the Summer months, and those natives who don't want to be bothered retreat to the quieter places, in so doing ruining the quiet and complaining that nowhere's peaceful from April to August.
All of which makes this place extra special. You can be assured that here you'll get privacy – mainly because getting to this cove involves fighting your way through prickly bushes to reach the neck-breaking climb down the cliffs behind it.
There aren't many skills Riku is proud of from his time with Maleficent. Missions for her were mainly to test and improve his manipulation of the darkness, but sometimes they entailed physical stuff as well. Building on childhood rivalries over who could climb to the top of trees first, who could stay underwater longest, and who could swim farthest before hitting a riptide, Riku developed his upper body strength along with how to use a keyblade, and cultivated an uncanny ability to find footholds on sheer rock faces.
That doesn't, however, explain how Kairi got down here.
She doesn't look up when his feet slap the rocks at the bottom of the cliff and pick their way down to the sand. Neither does she look at him when he sits beside her. It's as though somebody told her the sun will steam when it hits the ocean and she's afraid to look away in case it's true.
"You missed dinner," he says at length.
"Mm."
"People are looking for you."
"Mm."
One of the upshots of being kidnapped so often is that whenever Kairi is late, or doesn't tell people where she is, they panic. Sora is at this moment combing the town for her with rip-up-all-flowers-from-their-beds-even-though-she-can't-possibly-be-under-Miss-Trepe's-rose-bush energy, but Riku took a more methodical approach.
He noticed Kairi's reticence for the past few weeks – strange silences, glazed looks and a stubborn refusal to talk about whatever's bothering her. She never looks rested and goes through each day with her thoughts clearly elsewhere. This isn't the first instance she's wanted time on her own, either – which might be why she chose this place to retreat to. If privacy really is her goal then someplace Tidus, Selphie and Wakka can't go, and which Sora and Riku wouldn't think her capable of reaching, would be the best place.
Another upshot of being kidnapped so often is that everyone underestimates Kairi's ability to take care of herself.
So of course Riku thought of here.
Lemon and apricot coloured clouds scud across the darkening sky. The Destiny Islands have the best sunsets. In all his travels, Riku never found another world that could match them. He allows silence to settle over them like flour on a breadboard, ready for the wet slap and hard kneading of dough to follow.
"Is Sora…?"
"Running around like a headless chicken? Yes."
"Oh. Will he…?"
"Be mad when he finds out you're okay? Probably. But it'll be Sora kind of mad." The kind of mad where he's actually just so relieved and happy that his emotions spill over their tops, into others, and everything scrambles for the exits at once. Sora cries sorrow, but he also sweats joy.
"I guess I'll have some apologising to do."
"I guess." It's entirely needless communication, but it bridges the gap between them.
"Riku?" Kairi murmurs, stepping gingerly onto that bridge. "Do you ever … dream?"
Riku glances at her, but she's still looking out to sea as though she'll go blind tomorrow and have nothing good to remember. "Everyone dreams. It's an indication of the deepest level of sleep." You wait for a target to reach REM state before striking, especially if they're stronger than you. They may snap awake in an instant, but the half-second of befuddlement may be enough for you to get in a critical hit.
Riku shakes away the thought as Kairi frowns.
"Not that kind of dreaming."
"So what kind do you mean?"
"Like … dreams dreams."
"I don't follow you."
"Like … dreams of things. Places. People." She's worrying her lower lip with her teeth. Riku finds himself importunately drawn to stare at that and chides himself to fix on her eyes instead. Kairi's eyes are distant in both senses of the word and something spikes in his stomach. "Things that aren't like dreams at all. Not just fantasies. Things that real, like you've lived them before."
Riku has never been stupid, except in the ways that count, and he's been making up for those since he was fifteen. "Memories?"
Kairi's teeth clamp down in a tiny bite that tears a sliver from her lip. She nods. "I think I've been … remembering things. In my sleep."
"Naminé's memories?" Sora sometimes has dreams of wearing a black coat and watching dispassionately as Heartless prise open ribcages. He tells Riku about them, even though Riku knows all too well what both of those feel like. He never tries to shut the other boy up, though. Sora's compassion can't stomach taking pleasure in the pain of others, but the idea of not feeling anything for some of the things Roxas did as a Nobody … that just confuses him.
But Kairi shakes her head. "Mine. I think. From when I was a kid."
Riku sits up a little straighter. "You remember who you were?" His own memories of that time are hazy, but he remembers the six year old girl dragged aboard a fishing boat, being bundled through town with such a blank look on her face that neither he nor Sora could stay away from the doctor's while she was there. She drew them even then: scrawny, bedraggled and empty of everything except her own name.
"I remember … things," she says cryptically. "They don't always make sense, but I've been getting bits every night and piecing them together when I wake up. Or trying to, at least."
"What sort of 'things'?"
"Things. Fragments. The smell of gun polish, even though I don't know what gun polish smells like. Someone, a woman I think, showing me how to plant seedlings so the roots aren't damaged. She used a little tool, like a triangle funnel thing. A planting bar. I've never even heard of a planting bar." Kairi's words speed up, tumbling from her mouth like baked beans sliding from an upended can. "There's a girl in some of them. She laughs a lot and I think she used to play pranks on me, but there's one time when I fall down and she puts antiseptic on my cut knees and calls me 'kiddo'. I can hear her voice, clear as a bell. And I can remember hearing some old man cussing and a lady telling him not to swear in front of me, and I know what wet owl smells like, and scorched beard, and sometimes I taste tea so much that I wake up and it's still there on the back of my tongue, and then last night … last night …"
"Kairi?" Riku reaches out to touch her arm, but she whips around to face him.
"Someone was holding me. I felt it as plainly as I can feel this sand here." She grabs a handful and lets it trickle through her fingers as she talks. "It was real. He made me feel safe. Not just like I feel safe when I'm with you and Sora, or when I'm home in bed, but safe like nothing could ever hurt me because he wouldn't let it. He was stroking my hair and telling me a bedtime story, and I felt …" Her eyes are huge and such a difficult blue she might as well not share the colour with Sora at all. Kairi wears it differently than he does. Sometimes it's horribly clear that she's a girl and they're not.
She looks down, and Riku realises she's been leaning so far towards him he's had to prop himself up on one arm to keep from falling over. There's sand in his lap and none left in her hand.
"Kairi?" he prompts. She feels things like Sora, too sensitive for her own good but a little more resilient about containing her feelings. They still all spill over in the end anyway, and Riku is still there to listen.
"I used to envy you and Sora so much, having parents," she says flatly. "I came over to play and I'd watch and I'd want that so much."
"Was the person in your dream your dad?"
She shakes her head. "No, but he … acted like it. He protected me, but even when I was dreaming about him holding me, some part of me knew that memory was the last time I saw him, and that he was gone after that because he couldn't protect … himself. He … fell … they said he fell ... and someone was crying … and he wasn't there when the bad man came for me …" She shakes her head again, this time in frustration. "I want them all, Riku. I want all my memories. When I didn't have any I could live and be who I am now. I didn't care because I didn't know what I was missing, and I had you and Sora and everything here so it didn't matter. There was nothing to look for and no need to try because I was happy being me, and no-one's the same person they were when they were six anyway. But now I have an idea of what I'm missing. I don't want only glimpses. I want to know more. I want to know if I do have parents out there – or someone who at least acted like it. I want to know if I have a family."
Riku is processing what she's told him, turning over each thought and examining its facets with a mental spyglass. He never used to be so introspective. Thoughtful, yes, but in the days before darkness and keyblades he didn't split himself open to glue the shards back together like jigsaw pieces from different boxes, trying to make a whole picture out of hopelessly mismatching parts – keyblade wielder, Maleficent's protégé, warrior of light, master of darkness, sinner, altruist, friend, enemy, bastard who knows how to snap a spine from the front by driving a ribcage into it, kid who once threw up over Miss Trepe's shoes after beating Sora in a sherbet-eating contest at the back of class. With Sora and Kairi's help, he's had to re-learn the fine art of lightening up since they came home.
Home.
Home.
"You've never visited Hollow Bastion before, have you?"
Kairi blinks at him. "Didn't that get renamed Radiant Garden?"
"Yes."
"No. Why?"
"You should."
Riku stands and swipes sand from his pants. He holds out a hand but Kairi gets up on her own.
"Why should I?" She wants guidance. Kairi, the anchor he and Sora clung to during their darkest days, needs an anchor of her own now the concrete of her identity has turned to sand beneath her. Sand may have stories marked in it at the end of each day, but by the next morning it's smooth again. You can go any way you want, but there's so much choice that actually there's no choice at all and there's nowhere to move on to when any mark you make is impermanent.
But sand can become almost solid if you add water to it, and you can retrace your footprints back to where you started in wet sand.
Riku thinks back to when Sora dragged him to Radiant Garden, when he was driven by a need to find some peace by apologising to those worst affected by the darkness. Riku can't reconcile himself with all his past misdeeds, but he can try to make amends and let Sora tell him that's enough. He remembers the people there, how they absorbed the two boys into their daily routine of restoring the once-proud kingdom, and how each of them reacted to their presence. Everyone greeted Sora warmly, even that Leon guy with his perpetual frown, and regarded Riku was polite wariness until Sora played piggyback and messed up hair as silver as the fabled Sephiroth's to show-not-tell them this was his friend.
Most of all Riku remembers a man with a ridiculously huge sword across his back, who stared at Riku when Sora introduced them, as though living with a body full of shadows was nothing new to him. There was no pity in that man's gaze, for Riku or for himself, but he wasn't cold either. Riku struggled to put a name to the shifting emotions he read in those eyes, until Sora said it on the way home to Destiny Islands.
"He's looking for something. He thought he'd find it when he found Sephiroth, but he's still looking. He's missing a lot of time and memories." Sora had shaken his head with typical sympathy. "I don't understand all of what happened between those two, and nobody likes to talk about it, but it affected him pretty badly. Tifa says he may never stop looking because he doesn't know what he's looking for."
Boy, now there's something Riku understands. It was easy when he had clear goals – looking for Kairi, looking for Kairi's heart, looking for Sora, looking for the Organisation, ands then looking for a way to put right everything that'd gone wrong because of them. Now it's not so clear. He's not sure what he's looking for either anymore – forgiveness, or peace, or fighting, or just who the real Riku is underneath the accumulated crap of what fate and fortune vomited onto his head. Is he the sum of his parts, or the product of events and other people?
Maybe the real him looked back at him the day his clone died.
"Radiant Garden's a good place to go to if you want answers. You find things there." Riku shrugs. It's calculated – the exact gradient of the rise and fall of his shoulders. Damn it. "It's where everything started, after all."
"I know. Ansem and Xehanort came from there." Kairi brushes sand from her legs and tugs her skirt down.
"That too." Riku puts his hands on his hips and leans back to take in the height of the cliffs. "How the heck did you get down here, anyway?"
"That's a secret only those with a Y-chromosome are allowed to know," Kairi grins. It's a welcome sight, but there's still a haunted side to it.
Riku slings and arm around her shoulders, so much narrower than Sora's but capable of bearing just as much weight. "Do you want to sleep on my floor tonight? My mom still has that futon. We can ask Sora, too. We haven't had a sleepover in a while." Not since they were three ordinary kids, two of whom were just beginning to notice the third was growing curves they weren't.
Kairi smiles and leans into him, allowing him to hold her protectively. Riku feels an old, vague clutch of nerves – Don'tou'llgethurtstayawaystayaway – but it's manageable. He wonders what she's thinking. He often wonders what it's like inside other people's head, where thought aren't frayed with darkness at the edges.
"Thank you," she says softly.
Riku just nods.
Fin.
Some friends become enemies,
Some friends become your family.
Make the best with what you're given:
This ain't dying,
This is living!
-- From Moving On by Good Charlotte.