Author's Notes: Hi, here. I decided to do something different from my usually Inuyasha crossovers. This is a Naminé/Riku and is apart of a various collection of one-shots dealing with the KH universe and all its comedy and romance.

Well, actually I just wanted to write about Namine/Riku, but there are other pairings too.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Boys Club

1st Story:

Title: How to Make a Cake

Summary: (Prequel to KH2) Naminé innocently asks Riku how to make a cake. And this, like all things, starts everything.

She looked up at him, her blue eyes innocent and her mouth parted in question.
Riku was trapped and he knew it. He should have never started this. Of course a Nobody...

"Hey, Riku, are we through mixing it?"

...Wouldn't know how to bake a cake.

"How..." Riku paused, his head pounding. This was a nightmare—a total nightmare. "How the hell can you get batter on a vaulted ceiling!?"

Indeed, what had started out as a vanilla raspberry cake with sugar cream icing with strawberries and pineapple had ended up being a vanilla and raspberry covered ceiling fan with eggshells and cream.

"How...How...How...?" Riku smacked his head against the wall. This was not happening...This just was not happening. Not here. Not now.

Naminé licked her fingers and then pulled on the end of his coat sleeve. "When are we going to add the berries?"
There were a hundred things he would have liked to say to her right now. But "berries" weren't it. And so, to prevent himself from grabbing her by the throat, throwing her upon the ruin that had been a cake, and strangling her till Ansem came back tomorrow morning, he just continued beating the wall.

"How...How...How...?"

It just wasn't possible.

Taking a deep breath Riku turned to Naminé only to find her gone.

It had taken him five hours to clean up the kitchen and there still was batter in a few places on him and the kitchen he would rather not mention.

Maybe he had taken things a little too badly. How could he expect a Nobody to possibly listen, understand, and be able to successfully complete a command? It wasn't like they were human, so it only stood to reason she would be like this. He had asked the impossible of her.

"Naminé, I'm not mad. Look, I made another cake! You can add the berries to this one!"

Damn kid, he shouldn't have to do this work. Why did Ansem leave her care to him? He wanted to leave here, but Sora and Ansem held him back. He just had to wait. Just be patient.
But Riku was going crazy being here. Taking care of her wasn't bad, Naminé listened to (almost) everything he said and didn't give him any problems yet... He longed for the day when things would go back to normal. Even if that day meant that he could never see his friends again. Even if it meant his unhappiness.

Or Naminé's death. A death which Naminé did not know was her fate. Cruelly, both Ansem and Riku kept it from her.

Or at least Riku knew she had no knowledge of. Riku stopped pacing the gardens and looked down at his gloved hands, the dark skin showing where the leather stopped at his wrist. Her fate, his fate. Put in context he couldn't hate her. He felt sorry for her. He knew what she was, that she wasn't a person—she didn't have a heart like he did and so was not alive or worth his pity, yet the thought of the girl that had tugged innocently at his shirt sleeve, the same girl who had smiled at him without flinching at his appearance when they had met again, and the same girl which had asked him with that same smile to teach her baking, the thought of that girl dying bought him pain.

An enemy Nobody passed right before his eyes, drifting out of sight behind one of the ruined statues in the mansion's garden. His heart skipped a beat.

That innocent girl didn't know how to defend herself.

Her smile flashed before his eyes and he raced after the Nobody, screaming her name.

"Naminé?!"

Riku turned the corner and there she was. Her knees pressed to her chest and her back to him, drawing pictures in the sand with a stick. So absorbed that she didn't turn at the call of her name.

"Naminé..."

She didn't have a heart. She wasn't a person. Yet in that moment she was 15 and she was lovely. Just a blond girl a little too short and a little to skinny for her age in a white sun dress drawing in twilight.
"Naminé..." He didn't know why he called her name with such longing, or what the heart wrenching feeling in his chest was. Riku just knew it was lovely and fragile, impossibly small and light, something which if glanced at would disappear in a flash of light never to return.

Naminé, as if finally sensing a presence, stiffened and turned her head slightly to the right, the stick stilled by her fingers.

"Riku?"

He couldn't explain what had made him bridge the gape between them. Or what had made him hold on to her like that. Even now, with everything over and done with and Sora and Kairi and their worlds back to normal, he couldn't explain why he had held on to her so desperately.

Except maybe it was because she was a girl and he was a guy. And she had wanted to bake a cake and in the middle of an argument she had left and he had chased after her. And maybe, after all that running, he wanted someone to catch him as he fell.

The stick dropped from her hands. Naminé leaned against him and Riku held on to her, his fingers digging into her shoulders painfully. Possessively. Purposefully.
She was needed. And that's her explanation for the whole thing. Looking back on it, a heart inside of the heart of the girl that had loved him once, that moment was the first time she had ever been needed.

Did they love? Did she love him?

Did it matter?
"I thought... I thought I had lost you..." Riku buried his face into her neck. Naminé's lips parted, a question upon her lips, but then she closed her mouth and brought a hand up to his platinum hair, his dark skin.
"You didn't lose me, I'm right here." Words unspoken.

Did she know of her fate, looking into the twilight with this boy trapped in an adult's body?

Again, did it matter?
When you bake a cake, you don't ask the how and whys. You just do. You follow the recipe or throw it away and make your own.

That's how you bake a cake.

She looked up at him, her blue eyes innocent and her mouth parted in question.
Riku was trapped and he knew it. He should have never started this.

"Riku...?"

"Hm?"

Naminé looked up at him and smiled, tugging at the hand clasped around her own. "You skipped a step."

Riku frowned. The arrogance of this girl... The onslaught of a headache.

"I did not. Now do you want to learn how to make this thing or not?"
"I'm not talking about the cake."

Naminé leaned over the almost finished product and managed to catch his lips.

"You're suppose to kiss a girl after you catch her."

Riku's eyes widened and he dropped the spatula. Naminé just laughed.

That girl, that Nobody.

Yet in his eyes she was only 15.

"Why didn't you tell Sora and Kairi about this? You're a pretty good baker!"
"Shut up about it or the next thing I'll bake is you!"

"Ha, ha, Riku's shy!"

"Whatever. Hey, don't-"
And that was all that mattered.

(How to Bake a Cake—End 2/29/08)