So, this is my Kingdom Hearts 2 fanfic. This is so weird...I haven't posted a fic in ages...I barely remember how to do this.

Disclaimer: (This is pointless, 'cause everyone knows what I'm going to say...) I do not own Kingdom Hearts. I own the three games, and I would like to own Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix +, because it has Re:Chain of Memories, which I want sooooo badly I could cry. But that's all.

General Warning: Swearing and the mention of self-mutilation in this chapter. If either of those things causes you discomfort/nausea/PTSD, then hit the back button.

Warning for Homophobes/People who hate shounen-ai: Even though there's a little warning on the summary that's nearly impossible to miss (it's spelled y-a-o-i), I'll say this now in case you did: there will be yaoi. There will be one-sided yuri. This translates to boy-on-boy love and girl-on-straight-girl love. So if you're totally repulsed by homosexuality or just don't like reading it, here's your warning.

Warning for the people who hate straight pairings/yuri: Ok, I should've mentioned this in the summary, but there wasn't enough room. There are SOME straight pairings in this thing. You'll probably be happy to learn that they are mostly with the minor characters. There's also some yuri. I don't know if this will be a big thing in the plot or not. We'll see. Y'all can expect warnings, though, for when it comes around.

I should also say that the gray lines indicate a change in POV. The asterisks indicate a scene break within the SAME POV. Don't confuse 'em, or I think you'll be a little confused...

A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Boy

Chapter One: Like We Knew

Our mom pretty much sprang the plan to move on us and wasn't going to take no for an answer. Tifa was like that. She was sweet and caring, and all in all the best mom you could ask for. Except for one thing.

She hated our dad.

But could you blame her, honestly? Cloud left Mom for his best friend Aerith, and two years later, left her. Which pissed Mom off even more, because she felt like Dad had left her for no reason. Ever worse was that he didn't want to get back together with her. The only reason we ever got to see our father was on his visitation days, which happened to be every third week. We'd grab our stuff (not that we took a lot, since we had a stock of clothes and video games and other bare necessities at Dad's place) and trucked three blocks to his cruddy apartment. We'd been doing this since I was eight and the twins were seven. It was sort of fun, getting two sets of new clothes in September—even if Dad could only afford one new shirt per kid—two Christmases, and two birthday parties. It never bothered me at all, having split parents.

Apparently, it bothered Mom. A lot. She finally cracked right in the middle of my junior year. While I was stressing over my numerous exams and prepping for the practice SATs, she was looking into real estate in Hollow Bastion.

Here was how I found out about the upcoming move:

I was in the shower.

The rule is, everyone gets fifteen minutes to shower. This was to save time, fighting and hot water bills (the stuff was a bitch to pay for in Twilight Town), but if you were lucky you could sneak in a few extra minutes if the person after you wasn't paying enough attention.

(In my mom's defense, Dad doesn't even have running hot water. If you wanted to wash your hair, you have to either go use someone else's shower or resort to the system we'd developed when I was eleven: warm up two pots of water on the stove, then hold your head over the sink while one of your siblings poured said warm water on your head with a cup. Later, rinse with the second pot of water, and towel off. I got into huge trouble for this once for burning Naminé head because I'd heated the water too long.)

So when Roxas yelled from outside the bathroom at me, I'd figured he was just pissed off that I was using his hot water.

"I-WILL-BE-OUT-IN-A-MINUTE!" I screamed, trying to get the shampoo from out of my ears.

"GOOD!" Roxas screamed back. "BUT-MOM-SAID-"

"WHO'S-DEAD?"

"MOM-SAID-WE'RE-MOVING!"

"I'M-NOT-GROOVING-I'M-"

The door banged open, hit the wall, and then the shower curtain was ripped open to show my younger brother, screaming in my face. "WE'RE MOVING!!!" he roared, blue eyes all wild and bloodshot like that time I gave him six Vaults. "DO YOU GET IT NOW, DORKUS?"

"WHY!" I screamed, this time because I was in total disbelief, not because I had shampoo in my ears.

"LIKE I KNOW!" Roxas shouted. His face was livid. He was livid a lot, but this was a whole new standard of lividness.

Over the sound of the water running, I heard small feet stomping up the stairs. "Would you guys stop-MY EYES, MY EYES!!!"

"Naminé!" Roxas yelled, whirling around to howl at his twin, who stood in the open doorway.

"Cover up! What are you even doing in there, Roxas?" Apparently, Naimné hadn't thought to just leave and save herself the sight of seeing me sans apparel. I mean, she's the smart one. Smartest one. Whatever.

"I'm trying to tell Sora that we're moving!" Roxas told her while I turned around.

"We're moving?" Naminé shrieked, this time in confusion and not horror.

"Yeah!" Roxas yelled back.

"Would all of you get out of the bathroom and quit yelling?" Mom screamed from downstairs. "NOW?"

Damn. My joyride shower was over.

Now, honestly, the move was a total surprise. We all knew Mom hated living in Twilight Town with Dad, where she could run into him at the grocery store while he was stocking up on sea-salt ice cream and Eggo Waffles. She didn't like calling to tell him to tell him there was a parent-teacher conference he had to be at next week. Mostly she hated how we generall had more fun at Dad's place, despite how Naminé slept on towels in the tub 'cause Roxas and I had to share the couch while Dad slept in the only bed. Dad had less rules-we could eat when we wanted, watch TV when we wanted, have Kairi over whenever we wanted.

But we didn't think it bothered her this much. I mean, she'd been doing fine for the past eight years! Why was it a problem now, in the middle of November? Couldn't she have waited until summer to betray us? Then we could enter our new school and not be so obviously new. Now, we'd have to go in Monday morning and be gawked at like freaks. The cherry on top of this ice cream sundae of horror. Perrrrrfect.

While Roxas sulked and Naminé tried to cleanse her eyes (using her twin's hot water, I might add), I tried to interrogate Tifa.

Key word: tried. I got nowhere.

"Sora Strife," she told me in her bossiest voice with her hands over her hips, "this is not up for debate. I've already put a down payment on a house in Hollow Bastion. The truck's coming Thursday for our things and we're leaving Friday."

Today was Monday. She wanted us to pack all our stuff in two days?

"What about Dad?" I half-yelled, intercepting her as she tried to sidestep around me. "He's got visitation rights! You're violating them by moving!"

"He only has visitation as long as he pays child support, which he can't anymore." Mom growled. "So I'm not violating anything. Move, Sora."

She got past me that time, but only because I let her in my mad dash for the phone. I punched in Dad's number-wrong, the first time, I was so hyped up-and the moment I heard him mutter, "Lo?" I started in on him.

"WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO OUR CHILD SUPPORT MONEY?" I screamed, using my full volume to get my point across. "I THOUGHT YOU HAD A GREAT JOB AND ALL! WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT?"

"You call bruising your thumb with a hammer a great job?" my dad retorted in his slow, dark voice.

"DAD! AT LEAST IT PAID MONEY!"

"Not much," he argued.

"BUT ENOUGH FOR CHILD SUPPORT!"

"Barely."

"SORA!" Mom shouted from the living room. "BE QUIET!"

My solution to that request was to take our cordless phone into the downstairs bathroom and lock myself in.

"C'mon, Dad," I whined. I sat on the toilet. "What happened? Why can't you pay Mom anymore?"

Dad sighed. I could just picture him running his hands through his blonde hair, just as spike as mine. "I got hurt, Sora," he said. "My foot got crushed and I had to pay for the surgery out of my own pocket, since I don't have medical insurance. I can barely afford my apartment and food, let alone you and the twins."

I could only blink. My dad didn't have medical insurance, and he worked for a construction company? "Won't your company pay for it, since you got hurt on the job?"

"I didn't get hurt on the job," Cloud said simply. "So SOLDIER won't pay a thing."

"But-can't you borrow money from Barrett?" I said, thinking of my dad's best-and probably only-friend.

"He's got his own daughter to support," Dad said. He sounded very tired. Very very tired. Which isn't unusual for Dad, but this was pretty extreme. "I'm pretty much stuck, Sor. I can't do anything until I finish paying back the hospital. After that, I can start paying Tifa your money again."

"After that," I mimicked, getting closer and closer to losing my temper with each moment, "I'll be living in Hollow Bastion. Hollow Bastion, Dad. It's hours away."

"You can commute. Or something," Cloud said. "I'm sorry, Sora."

He really meant it, but I was too pissed off to do anything except hang up.

Which left only Kairi to whine to. She lived right next door to us, with only two windows and a tree between us. After she moved to Twilight Town when we were eleven and beat me up after I asked her why her hair resembled a cherry tomato (well, let's face it: her red hair in that bob did kind of look like a tomato), we'd become best friends. We figured out how to climb across the tree to each other's windows and got away with it until we were thirteen, when I fell off a branch and broke my ankle.

Needless to say, after that, Tifa was not happy about our preferred method of meeting. Still, it never stopped us from sneaking over to each other's rooms to play video games/copy homework off each other/waste time doing nothing.

Kairi was fairly furious. I say fairly because when she heard that we were moving to Hollow Bastion, she got all excited. Coincidentally, Kairi is from Hollow Bastion. I find it ironic that I am going to the circle of Hell Kairi hails from. It's funny in a just-my-luck kind of way.

"I just can't believe your mom wants to move now," she said, pacing in circles in the middle of her floor. I watched her from her unmade bed, where I sat on various notebooks and articles of clothing. "I mean, I can totally understood wanting to get away from your dad—"

"What's wrong with my dad?" I asked rather defensively.

"Nothing, Sora," she said soothingly, stepping over her pink math binder. "It's just probably real hard for Tifa to be around him when she still loves him."

"Mom doesn't love Dad," I told her, vaguely surprised she's suggested it. "She hates him."

Kairi sighed and gave me one of those looks that plainly said, "Are you really this stupid?" "Sora, Sora, Sora," she said, shaking her head slowly. "Girls don't always show people how much they really like a person."

She was giving me really wide, anime eyes that told me she was trying to convey something to me. Probably, she was attempting to inflict on me exactly how stupid she thought I was. Knowing Kairi, and how she knew just about everything I'd ever need to know about girls, she probably thought I was at the Cro-Magnon level of intelligence.

I moaned and fell sideways onto her bed, smushing my face into her lab book. "Kai-riiii," I whined, pouting. "I don't wanna go to Hollow Bastion. I wanna stay here with youuuuu…"

"You big baby," she accused. But she did come sit beside me and run her fingers through my hair, which felt nice. As she did this, she said, "When you get to Hollow Bastion, do something for me, would you?"

I sat up. "Sure, what?"

"Try to find Riku Nomura. He used to be my best friend before I moved. Just tell him I say hi, okay?"

I blinked but nodded. "Um, sure. But I might not even go to the same school as him. And I don't even know what he looks like."

Kairi just laughed. For a really long time.

Let me tell you something: it is no joke trying to live with two brothers. Particularly if your brothers are Sora and Roxas Strife, who are walking disasters. You'd think that having lived with them for fifteen years, I'd have been desensitized to their antics.

Think again. I'm still not used to them. And Roxas is my twin, for crying out loud. I know him better then he even knows himself, I think.

So, by that reasoning, I should have expected him to throw a tantrum once he'd showered (because nothing will stand between Roxas and his fifteen minutes of shower time, not even the prospect of moving) but I didn't. That might have something to do with the fact that I was trying to erase the image of my naked big brother from my mind by blasting Gullwings music as loud as possible on my iPod and then staring at the sun, in hopes of burning the image from my mind (obviously, all that happened was I got spots in front of my eyes for about twenty minutes afterwards). Either way, I shouldn't have been surprised when I heard something crash downstairs, and then some frenzied screaming.

"ROXAS!" Mom yelled, her voice straining from having shouted at so many people today. "WHAT WAS THAT!"

"FUCK YOU!" he shouted back, then stomped out the front door. I heard it slam as I went downstairs to see what he'd done.

It turned out to be nothing, really. All he'd done was thrown a drinking glass at the refrigerator, which was perfectly normal of Roxas and his temper. I swept up the glass and then thought about slashing Mom's tires with the pieces, but decided that it wasn't worth the fortune four new tires would cost me and just threw it away.

Mom came downstairs just as I was finishing up. The first thing she said was, "I'm sorry, Nam. I know you don't want to leave."

Damn right. Even though Twilight Town wasn't necessarily the greatest place to live-a bunch of the kids were way too sane and way too boring for my taste-it was my home, the place I'd been born and raised in. I'd gone to school here, made some friends here (and then promptly lost them all in middle school when I became "arty" and they became "cool"), fallen in love here. Dad lived here, and I sure didn't want to leave him, irresponsible as he is.

But on the other hand, I could tell how much Mom wanted to leave. I guess it was because I'm a girl-and therefore profoundly more wise than either of my brothers-I knew the real reason Mom hated living in the same town as Dad. Roxas thought it was because Mom was mad at him for leaving her for someone else, and I was pretty sure Sora thought along those same lines. I could tell that Mom hated being here because she loved Dad, and he didn't love her. Seeing him free to love her and not loving her was agony for Mom, I was sure, so she hid behind rage. I could relate to this, in a way. I knew plenty well what it was like to love someone and not have the feelings returned. Only, I had it worse. The person I loved was in love with someone else, and everyone knew it.

By everyone, of course, I meant everyone besides the object of my beloved's affections. He had no idea. Then again, Sora was always oblivious to romance when it was directed at him. Other times, he was annoying perceptive (though I guess in the case of Mom, he wasn't). He picked up on my crush probably only a month after I did, which caused me a ton of embarrassment at first. I mean, how many eleven-year-old girls fall in love with other girls?

Not many, because they were all preoccupied with the BOYS!

But Sora was pretty cool about it. He told me I might grow out of it, and it could just be hormones and me not having any friends, because at this point all my old ones were ditching me for cooler people who didn't draw all the time. He also said no hard feelings whatsoever, and then proceeded to go on about how I was still his favorite little sister and he'd always love me and blah blah blah. You can imagine the rest for yourself.

So, in response to my mother's assessment of my feelings about the upcoming move to Hollow Bastion—which was four hours away by car, two and a half by train because it took a more direct route—I sort of just shrugged and said, "It makes you happy, doesn't it?"

Fine. Technically, I dodged the question. But I couldn't tell Mom the truth, which was that leaving made me feel like I was leaving a piece of my heart behind. An important piece at that, like the aorta, or something. One of the valves you need to pump blood to the rest of the body, in order to survive.

I didn't really have any friends of my own to comfort me. Sora had Kairi, who he was probably with now, and Roxas had this guy named Seifer, who he swears is the biggest asshole in the whole Town. They like to beat each other up in Struggle matches. For some reason, they're friends. I think. Roxas does not like talking about Seifer with me, probably because he likes to uphold the image of the badass kid who will mercilessly take down any offender with a cold, unfeeling heart. Or something. But I guessed that my twin was with Seifer now, blowing off some steam in a practice Struggle match. He'd come home later bleeding but in a better mood.

I did have friends in elementary school. Vivi, Fuu, and Rai, who accepted me into their little group in first grade when I gave them my gummi worms. Of course, then, they ditched me in sixth grade, and after that I didn't bother to make new friends. I didn't know how, for starters, since I'd never had to when I had those three. And then there was the whole complication of me being related to Sora and Roxas who, at the ages of twelve and eleven, were already proven to be nutso. Roxas got into fights and Sora was just plain strange, always daydreaming about being somewhere else and falling over a lot (he was one of those clumsy pre-teenagers).

It was great. At the age of eleven, I was already a white-dress-wearing, constantly-drawing, one-of-those-Strife-kids freak who had trouble talking to anyone at all.

So when Kairi came along, showing up at our doorstep one Saturday morning with a letter of apology to Sora for having beaten him up the other day, I was infinitely grateful to find out that there was going to be a girl in the house who would actually be here a lot, to play with Sora. Sure, she was a seventh grader and I was a sixth grader, but she was new and she didn't know that I was a freak. We became fast friends. Mostly because whenever she was in the house I wouldn't stop talking to her. Then we started teaming up on the boys whenever we played games, and that made us really close. Almost like big sister-little sister, though I knew that in her heart, she was more attached to Sora than she was to me.

The moral of the story is, I only had one person to call when I got depressed about this move thing, and that was Kairi. But I couldn't call her! She was busy with Sora, who was over there right now-I could see him from my bedroom window, in her room-telling her all the gory details. I couldn't just go in there and start unloading, Sora would probably get annoyed. And then Kairi would get annoyed, because generally, anything that annoyed Sora annoyed her too.

So I did the only thing that would make me feel in the lease bit better: I drew. I pulled out my colored pencils and my sketchbook-my 32nd sketchbook, to be accurate-and let the colors flow out my fingers and into the pencils, finally leaking out onto the page. I pressed down hard to make the colors richer, more intense, to match my feelings. Red spread all over the paper in wild, swooping lines that arched high up to the plastic spirals of the notebook and back down again to the bottom, sometimes making smaller points or twisting into curls. I shaded in the points but left it alone after that, pausing to admire the bold streaks of red on white. Then I reached for the Sharpie I carried with me, and shaded in the white that remained enclosed in the wall, leaving only a white bar at the bottom unmarked. That, I filled with blue spikes, a light blue that you saw on clear days that lifted your heart. I finished it by going in again with the Sharpie and filling in the white places next to the blue.

I held up my finished picture in front of me. Red and black flames, with a pure blue core at the bottom. Blue, the color of peace, buried underneath the black of my frustrations. Red, the color of her hair…

I hated my mom. I hated her, I hated her, I hated her. I hated her more than I hated anything else, which said plenty, because anything I hated I hated with a burning passion. Like...people who got in my way. They were the worst. School was full of them: guys who wanted to be the BGOC, girls who were tripping over themselves for my attention. Assholes who just liked to be underfoot because they liked getting a rise out of people. Yup. Hated 'em.

I didn't like people who hurt Namine, either. Sora, I wasn't worried about. Nothing bothered him much, probably because he was oblivious to anything people said about him. But Namine, I worried about. She had no friends. None. Zero. And to top it off, she was shy and seriously introverted, so the possibility of her making new friends was low. I heard girls talking about her sometimes. They said the same things over and over: she was nice, she was smart, but she was shy, wore white a lot. Some girls went so far as to call her a freak for that last one. I can't stand to hear it.

I'd gotten all the way to the train station and managed to work myself up into a thoroughly pissed off mood. Even though the station was closed and the trains weren't moving, I sat on the steps and looked out across at the sun that was sitting low on the horizon, the long shadows it created. How could Mom take us away from Dad and still sleep at night, I wanted to know. She knew how important he was to us. Dad was the parent who understood why I'd gotten into fights in middle school, Dad was the one who took care of my black eyes and bruises, and he was the one who came and got me when I got suspended and promised not to let my Mom know. He was the one who'd shoved me into therapy in ninth grade when I'd started cutting myself. He understood that, too. Mom didn't. Sora didn't, but he didn't try to force me into helping him. Namine didn't, but she knew I was in pain, so she gave me space and tried to heal me with the kindness from her heart.

And she wanted me to leave Cloud? Fat chance. I'd do everything in my power to stay home, where I was understood by at least someone, where even though there was pain…at least I could recognize the source and avoid it like the fucking plague. Hollow Bastion was pretty much just a potential cesspool for more damn misery.

And, to quote Sora from one time when I'd nearly bled to death, like I know how to deal with anything.

So, why is Roxas so messed up, you may ask?

I dunno, don't look at me. It was HIS decision, not mine.

(By that, I just mean it just sort of happened. So I went with it.)

Tell me how I did. I've never done a KH fic, or even a yaoi fic..though I do read a lot of 'em...so I'd appreciate feedback. Or even just something that says "kool" or whatever.

-Wind