The first time that she finds him perched on the hilltop, eyes scanning the town nestled below, Kairi, foolishly, tries to pretend that she doesn't know what is wrong. Of course she knows—his darkness sings to her, running through his veins, the opposite of Sora's light, but it is not a bad thing. It croons a beautiful song, one that is tempting, and lovely, and so soft. Others might wonder what it was that made his heart give into the darkness in the beginning, but when Kairi feels it like this, she does not blame him. The darkness was smooth to his edges, beauty to his brokenness, and Riku never (at the tender age of fifteen) had the willpower to say no to something so beckoning.
It is tainted, she knows, but so is he. That doesn't make it any less beautiful.
She drags him back home, listening to the waves and the crickets sing around them, and hopes that Riku has opened up his ears enough to hear something besides his own failures.
The second time, she sits beside him, and tells him that she thinks that the night is just a beautiful as the day. There's something ethereal in the way that the moonlight hits the ocean (and his hair, but she doesn't say so), and something so tempting in the blackness that wraps around them; it isn't like the sun that pushes its way through everything, too intent on warming to notice what it is burning.
Riku says nothing, even when she reaches up to push his bangs back from his eyes and plants a kiss on his forehead, though the palm flat on his chest lets her know that his heart is singing.
The third time he actually talks to her, and it's heartbreaking when he opens his mouth, because though she knows all about his supposed failures, she doesn't like the way that his confessions drown out the sounds all around them. Halfway through she shushes him and tells him to close his eyes and open up his heart, and listen. She cradles his head against her chest, where her heart is beating serenely. "You're here now, and that's all that matters. That's all that we expect from you. You don't need to try so hard to break yourself."
The bosom of her shirt is damp when she finally crawls into her bed, so she takes it off and balls it under head like a pillow, so that she can keep Riku's tears close, and remind herself that she still needs to fix them.
The next time that he appears at the hilltop, eyes on everything that he once threw away (home is starting to make her sick, because it is Riku's trigger), darkness singing through his veins (a sweet melody that reminds him of what he's done), Kairi presses her face to the crook of his neck and whispers, "I swear I'd burn this city down to show you the light."
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For the KH Drabble community, challenge [260]: Music. I encourage everyone to go over to livejournal, and if you don't participate, then at least vote at the end of the week!
The last line comes from a Fall Out Boy song, 'Sophmore Slump or Comeback of the Year.'