Disclaimer: I do not own the characters herein. Nor do I make money off of them. The work is its own reward. The song lyrics are owned by Disney, as are about half the characters. Squenix owns the other half.
Love, it seems like only yesterday you were just a child at play.
Kairi was twelve when she realized things were different.
She sort of knew before then, when she was told that girls and boys grew up differently (she felt sorry for her adopted mother, who explained the whole thing and answered Kairi's questions with an almost superhuman fortitude). But that was just abstract, one of those things that adults said would happen "some day", and which she never believed would really happen any more than she believed she would thank them "some day" for making her eat her broccoli. She didn't think she and her best friends would ever really be different.
Then she was twelve, and they were.
It wasn't just the physical things, like how Riku was suddenly taller than Sora after they'd been the same height their whole lives, or how Kairi's body started developing curves in unexpected places. That was just a thing, like how Sora's hair stuck straight up no matter what he did. That wasn't a real difference. The real difference was in the way they looked at each other.
When they went swimming, Kairi found herself looking at Riku and blushing, just a little. When Sora did something especially sweet and dumb, she laughed but blushed too. Riku didn't blush, but he smiled a little, tiny bit and hid his eyes behind his hair when Kairi brought him mangos from her house (Riku loved mangos more than any other food in the world), or when Sora smiled at him like the sun coming out from behind clouds.
Sora didn't notice, yet. Kairi was glad for that, in a way, but also worried, because until Sora noticed they couldn't talk about it. Without Sora it would just be Riku and Kairi, talking about something Sora didn't understand. Changing things like that spoiled the point of talking about it at all.
She thought Riku started to notice right after she did (he was a year older, but girls grew up faster, her mother said). She hoped it was only then. Otherwise, if Riku had been thinking about it all alone, she had to worry. As much as he pretended otherwise, Riku wasn't as good at being alone as Kairi was. He had more practice, what with his home and all, but that didn't mean he was any better at it. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Later, she wondered if Riku had known long before she had, if he had been brooding over it all alone for two years. She didn't want to think that, but it might almost have been an explanation for some of what happened later. She had known almost all the time that she wasn't alone, and it had still made her do some things she wasn't proud of. She didn't know what she would have done if she had been the only one who knew.
Now you're all grown up inside of me--oh how fast those moments flee.
The problem was that they were two boys and a girl, and everyone knew how this story should go. The boys, the tall, strong, somewhat mysterious boy and the sweet, friendly boy next door, should compete to see who was the best for the girl, and then she would choose one of them to be with forever. And the two of them would live happily ever after, the end.
That was the first thing that made Kairi worry, because if she picked Riku, Sora would be alone and sad, and if she picked Sora, it would be Riku. Sometimes the boy who hadn't been chosen found another girl, in the stories, but much too much of the time he just disappeared. She didn't want either of her friends to disappear.
As she got older, she learned to worry about all the other things there was no room for in the story. There was no room for Sora to be the mystery he could be sometimes, when he looked into nowhere. There was no room for Riku to be the boy next door who helped her get her kite out of a tree. There was no room for Kairi and Sora to hug Riku tight when his parents hadn't spoken to him for months and he started looking wilted around the edges with being unloved. There was no room for Kairi and Riku to look at Sora playing in the surf with the exact same fond look, then see the similarity and burst out laughing. There was no room for Sora to give Riku that eye-blinding smile, grab his hand, and drag him to play blitz. There was no room for Riku to drop everything and show up at Sora's house with his favorite tea when Sora was sick.
There was no room for Kairi to love them both.
She was supposed to choose the one she loved most and stand by her choice no matter what. Kairi wasn't sure that was possible, but she tried.
She thought she should probably choose Sora. It wasn't that she loved him better, but he didn't understand what was going on. If she chose Riku, Sora would be confused and hurt. If she chose Sora, Riku would understand that she was forced into making the choice. But it was hard; again and again she found herself backing away from saying the words, "Sora, I like you as more than just a friend. Do you like me that way too?" She would see Riku, or even just think of him, and she couldn't bring herself to make the change irrevocable. Then the world ended. Frightened and alone, she reached out desperately for Sora and Riku, for a blinding-sun smile and a promise to fight off the monsters in her shadows.
She thought she'd chosen, then, when she grasped Sora's heart with all her will and refused to let go. She thought she'd chosen when she turned away from Riku where he stood, lost and still so desperately strong, buying her time she knew he couldn't afford. She thought she'd chosen when she made Sora promise to come back to her.
And then there was the time in between, when she woke up one day and realized she hadn't chosen at all, because she wanted Riku to come home as fiercely as she wanted—that boy whose name she knew she used to know like her heartbeat. Part of her thought that was funny, though she didn't remember why.
She had to find them. That kept her going when everything seemed wrong, frustration at her own faulty memory threatening to overwhelm her. She couldn't remember what had happened, only that something had. She could remember Riku, and some people she was sure had never lived on Destiny Islands—but Destiny Islands had been gone then, for some reason that involved shadows skittering across her heart. She remembered standing in a library she only knew from her very earliest memories, but this time her head was higher and her eyes could read the words on the spines of the books. She remembered thinking she was in a nightmare, with all the places that had once been so safe turned into traps full of monsters.
She used every trick she knew to aid her memory, tricks she had perfected the year before when she had finally decided to find out as much as she could about the place she had come from. It took a lot of fishing about, deliberately making her mind go blank so the snippets of memory would slip in around the edges. Still, little by little she began piecing the moments together, one by one like the paper-clip chains she made and used to decorate her desk at home.
One we watched a lazy world go by; now the days seem to fly.
She knew when she had enough to be getting on with. When she could remember a few names—Donald, Goofy, Yuffie, Aerith—and a few places—the castle in what Aerith told her was Hollow Bastion, a small house in Traverse Town—and some part of the reason why—Riku opening his heart and letting the darkness in, shadows and terror and something about having a pure heart—Kairi decided that she wasn't going to learn any more by standing around waiting. She had to do something.
She didn't know what she could do, but, as if following directly from her decision, things started happening again. First of all, she remembered Sora and spent half her time hugging the memory close like the stuffed, velveteen rabbit that had been her comfort and companion longer than she could remember. Second of all, she finally got a chance to leave under her own power and go find her boys.
She thought she understood how Riku had felt. The time between remembering Sora and leaving seemed to stretch out forever. Space got correspondingly smaller, until the islands felt about the size of a cardboard box and less comfortable to be stuck in.
Despite being frightened, a part of her was singing as she ran into the uncertainty. She was leaving, she was going to find Sora and Riku, and though she was technically running away from Axel, somewhere in her heart of hearts she knew she was running to something she'd been waiting for since before her birth.
She could tell friends from enemies as soon as she got a good look at them, she found. It was as if someone were whispering into the back of her mind whenever she met someone, telling her, "That's Hayner. He's a friend," or, "That's Saïx. Run!" As she got closer—to what, she didn't quite know, but she could have played "Warmer and Colder" across a thousand worlds to find it—the whisper got stronger. At last it turned into a real voice, belonging to a real person. Naminé. Kairi rolled the name around in her head. Now she knew what she had felt was missing since she'd come back. Naminé had been missing, all the bits and pieces of Kairi that had gone to make up Naminé more than a year before.
With Naminé beside her, Kairi felt a little less incomplete. All the same, she knew she was still missing two (Or was it three? Somehow she kept thinking three.) vital pieces. She had to find them, or she was quite willing to die trying.
As it turned out, Riku found her. It seemed almost too easy. She worried all the same. He might be hiding an injury under that coat; she'd seen him do it before. She couldn't be happy until she saw his face and knew he was all right.
She should have known he was the wrong shape. In her own defense, they'd all changed a lot in two years. Still, Kairi had few memories, even including the ones that belonged mostly to Naminé, as heart-wrenchingly terrifying as the moment she saw that face that wasn't Riku's under his hood. It was even worse because she could see, somehow, the real Riku underneath, Riku as he was now. She couldn't pretend it wasn't really him. It was Riku, her Riku, trapped behind someone else's face.
And he did it for Sora. She knew, then, what she'd spent years trying to figure out: she couldn't choose between them, not ever and no matter what, because the three of them belonged together.
Sora knew it too. That was always the way; what Kairi spent ages puzzling out, Sora seemed just to know, in the same way he knew the sky was blue. She could tell when they all joined hands and felt the pieces slot together for the first time in far too long. Sora knew that they all three belonged together, whether Sora made other friends or not, whether Kairi was some kind of princess or not, whether Riku looked like himself or not.
This time Riku was the one who didn't know. He actually wanted to leave, as though he could ever be in the way with them. Kairi understood how he thought. He thought she'd chosen Sora way-back-when, just like she had at the time, and he was noble enough not to want to get in the way and selfish enough not to want to see them happy without him and hurt enough to think he didn't deserve anything better. But Kairi remembered everything now, what Riku had done, what she and Naminé had done, and, yes, what Sora had done, and if Riku had let the darkness in, she had torn Sora apart from the inside, and Sora had killed a lot of people, even if they were not quite whole, so if Riku didn't deserve to be happy, then neither did they.
That was what she said to him, when she and Sora cornered him in the cave at last. Kairi talked, Sora nodded along, and Riku listened, his eyes getting wider and wider as he realized they meant every word. When she was done, he smiled more happily than she had seen him smile in years.
And, Kairi said firmly, they all lived happily ever after. So there.
Life is brief, but when it's gone love goes on and on.
Note: This was updated because the document hiccupped, losing about a paragraph. Sorry about that.