Prologue
2006 had been a weird year, for Riku.
For everyone, in the town, actually, but for Riku, Kairi and Naminé in particular.
In the month of March of the second year of elementary school, Kairi's older sister went missing, and for a while Riku's parents forbid him to go play with his best friend.
As a seven-year-old boy, he hadn't had the means to understand why that was, and the only thing he had cared about was to go and find Aqua.
All he had known, back then, was that, as long as Aqua was missing, Kairi would not be free to play with him.
Riku wouldn't know what had happened to him that day, after he set out to go looking for Aqua.
He knew that he had been found by his parents, they had cried, hugging him so tight that he had barely been able to breathe, and they had screamed at him to never, never leave again.
He knew that his brother hadn't let him out of his sigh for months, after that day, and that eventually Kairi had started to come by the house again, so Riku – the seven-year-old child so selfish as to want to find a missing person just to have his best friend back, instead of having her happy – considered the situation as a victory for himself.
In the month of August of the same year, Riku's brother stopped talking.
When the adults whispered between themselves, ignoring Riku leaning against the doors and the walls and hiding in the shadows keeping his breath inside his lips not to be heard and discovered, they said it was post-traumatic stress disorder.
Riku, as a seven-year-old boy who barely paid attention in school, whose only care in the world was playing with Kairi and Naminé in the poppy fields of their town and stuffing his pockets with cookie crumbs to give the pigeons, didn't know anything about traumas, let alone the problems derivative from those and since he was still just as selfish as he had been in March, he tried to find a cure for whatever was hurting Terra, because he wanted his brother back.
Of the beginnings of September he had no memory at all.
All he knew was that people came around the house, later in the fall, to say hello to him and ask question.
Riku never answered those. He never could.
He didn't remember the things those people were talking about.
In October, Naminé's older brother fell asleep and he never woke up.
Naminé never stopped playing with them, and Riku never did anything for her, to have her near him.
The adults hadn't tried to take them apart, not that time, not again, and so he had to see Naminé crying all the time.
He had to see her staring into the void, sat on the grass with her legs bent tightly against her chest.
He had to talk to Kairi about her worries, even if he had never felt any worry for Naminé at all.
He didn't understand what was happening, then.
If he had, he would have cared more.
In December of 2006, Naminé's twin brothers disappeared.
Men dressed in blue started to show up at the house at any hour of the day, they roamed the streets, they wanted to speak with his parents, with his brother, with Kairi's and Naminé's families. What remained of those.
For a while, Riku hadn't stayed in his home.
The men dressed in blue brought him and Kairi and Naminé to an old woman living outside of Poppytown and they told them to be good.
The men told them that if they were good – very good – they would see their families soon enough.
Riku hadn't believed them.
Riku hadn't had a reason not to trust them. They had upset his family, his brother, his friends.
In the year 2006, the nights had been long, the days eerie, the words Riku had spoken had never been kind.
He hadn't been the best of children, always thinking about himself first, no clear idea of what real friendship was about.
The year 2006 had been a mystery he would always prefer leaving in the past.
The day they celebrated the end of the year, Riku and Kairi and Naminé were still living with the old woman. She had been kind, to them, and understanding of their weird behavior, their detachment, their coldness.
They had been away from their families for a while.
They received daily phone calls from their parents, and Riku from Terra, because, amongst them, he was the only one with a brother, still.
Even if Terra was different. Had been since March, maybe, or maybe since August, but Riku still had him. He was still awake, still there, he had also started to talk again, albeit much less than usual.
The last day of the year 2006 had smelled like freedom.
Like tears and pain and confusion.
Like poppies and wet soil, like mud and mold on old walls.
"Don't you think it's weird?" Kairi asked that night, after all of them had laid down under the covers, their three beds cramming a small room, slim walls doing nothing to block their words from reaching the old woman's ears.
But Kairi was whispering and she was a good whisperer and no one ever heard her when she didn't want to be heard.
"What?" Naminé asked, and even Riku could feel the cold coming from her. Naminé had stopped crying, but she had stopped smiling too.
"That we don't even know her name," Kairi said, "they never told us her name."
"It's because we won't stay here forever," Riku told her, trying to make his voice as small as possible. He wasn't as good at whispering as his friends were.
"But we will stay here for long, right?" Kairi asked, and even if it was dark, Riku knew she was biting her lower lip and her eyes were teary.
She wasn't the only one who wanted to go back home.
"Not if we don't want to," Naminé murmured.
Riku had never been as scared of her as he had been that night.
The year 2006 ended with three kids running away in the night, and an old woman worrying herself to death.