A/N: For Dubious. Mischief. Maker, who requested this about a bajillion years ago. I DID IT, I DID IT! And it only took me, like, an eon or so. But who's counting? Credit to Square Enix, Disney, and The Academy Is...for utter brilliance that isn't mine.
upside down & inside out
[Kairi/Selphie]
attention, attention, may i have all your eyes and ears
to the front of the room here for me
if only for one second?
1.) stop
Stuck between the minutes or seconds or the spaces her fingers leave when they spread themselves on her stomach, Selphie starts to hate her. This girl, this beautiful girl fills her with disgust as she layers kisses on her temple.
She can't stand this girl. She can't leave this girl.
Can't stand her pretty face or her pretty mouth, can't stand the way she tilts her head to the side when she whispers.
Can't stand with that girl. Can't be with that girl.
Can't hate that girl.
2.) on hold
"Hi, you've reached Kairi's phone. I'm busy, so just leave a message and I'll get back to you, okay? Bye-bye!"
Selphie spends a lot of time chatting with Kairi's voicemail.
3.) fantasy
Guys have this thing about girl-on-girl action. They all seem to revel in it and pester their female buddies (if they happen to have any) to carry out man's most precious fantasy.
"C'mon, Kai." Tidus pleads at lunch. "Be a pal."
Kairi laughs, shakes her head. "I don't think so. I'd need to be seriously trashed for that to happen."
But underneath the table, she gives Selphie's hand a squeeze.
4.) finishing last
The worst part isn't Kairi's tears or her helplessness. It isn't even those rainy-day shriekings of, "I'm crazy, Selph, I must be crazy. He isn't here, but I'm loving him. I'm loving people who aren't there, Selphie."
It isn't Kairi's desperation, or the way her smile seems to be so lopsided.
It's that Selphie (alive and real and very much there) is losing to a boy who may not exist.
5.) signs
"I know when Kairi's sad 'cause she brings out those CDs, the ones with the slow songs. And her face closes in, you know, and she bites her lip until it swells. I always way know when she's feeling down. Always."
"So, how does Kai know when you're sad?"
"She doesn't."
6.) strike
It's like a punch to the stomach the day she mumbles, "Because you're my best friend," and Kairi turns to her and sneers, "My best friend's name is Sora."
7.) revelation
Love, she decides, does not make women beautiful. It turns them into selfish, gibbering morons with complexes the size of condominiums.
8.) me and you
Kairi's rather predictable as teenagers go, so it's completely left-field when she tells Selphie that she's going to go help save the world, she loves her, and maybe she'll see her later? The younger girl balks, snatches at her sleeve.
"You can't just leave! What about me?"
And Kairi just blinks.
9.) make believe
It's too early to be thinking coherent thoughts, let alone exchanging whispered assurances over the telephone, but she's a good friend. A good pal. A good buddy.
(she could be a better lover)
Kairi's voice is shaking over the telephone, her vowels and consonants meshing together and entangling themselves. "Sorry, I just—I had this horrible feeling, I felt like maybe I'd made you up inside my head."
She laughed, and it echoed and bounced around her room. "I don't think you're that creative."
10.) camera
Selphie's obsessed with photographs. She snaps pictures of Kairi eating sandwiches on her lawn, of Tidus wrestling with Wakka, of the flowers lining her garden. She's constantly shoving the evidence in Kairi's face ("See? See? There's no boy with an 'S'!"), badgering her and forcing her to see.
He may not be real, but more than anything, she doesn't want him to be.
11.) addition
Kairi is Kairi, but she's also Namine and some other girl named Xion, and the thought of sharing a bed with three other people makes Selphie anxious. It's an orgy, a rave, a crowd in Selphie's twin bed—a mattress made for two, not four.
12.) roll the dice
"I bet you could love me if you just tried."
"I'm not a gambling sort of girl."
13.) tune
Selphie can't sing, but whenever Kairi smiles, she wants to break out into a rousing chorus.
14.) losing my religion
On her knees before the statues of gods that Kairi's mother keeps stacked up in her kitchen, she clasps her hands together. Directs her eyes towards the ceiling and mumbles to herself.
Kairi's praying for that boy to be alive and well and to come see her soon.
Selphie's thoughts aren't so pretty. She squeezes her eyes tight and prays fervently, Please let him be dead.
15.) pain
Kairi's a lot of things, but a fighter she is not.
She holds her skinny arms above her head, backing away and scowling. "Stop, that hurts."
Selphie snorts. "Suck it up, Kai. I've been hurting for years, and did you ever stop?"
16.) first
Once upon a time, she'd knocked a tooth out. Tidus teased her for a week until she burst into tears and ran away to the raspberry thicket to feel sorry for herself. Kairi had come stomping along, sandals in one hand, batting leaves and thorns out of the way with the other. She sat down before her and said solemnly, "Quit being stupid, okay? You look fine, even with that gap." Then there were lips pressed to her teeth and Selphie's sort-of first kiss came and went without much of a fanfare.
Months later, when Kairi's nose got knocked crooked by a stray baseball, Selphie returned the gesture.
17.) beauty
Selphie's not beautiful, when Kairi hisses it into her ear as the New Year's ball drops she (almost) believes it.
18.) general audiences
The rating goes from G-rated to NC-17 within the confines of an hour, too quickly for her eyes to hold it all in, for her heart to work in conjunction with her brain and document it all. It's too fast and it's too much and it's Kairi pulling her shirt over her head, palming her back and kissing her shoulder blades. Wrapping her tongue around her clavicle and putting her fingers around the curls of her hair and tugging, ever so slightly.
(and through all of this, all of it, Selphie doesn't make a sound. Doesn't breathe, doesn't blink.)
She didn't say yes, but she didn't say no either.
19.) fear in your eyes
She loves her, but is afraid of her—of the older girl's thin fingers crawling like spiders around the circumference of her face. Of Kairi's dead eyes and flat-lining voice, an "I love you, baby" that sounds as if she'd bought it off the black market.
20.) disaster
She's a whirlwind, a twister, an (un)natural disaster; a bleeding eyesore sweeping through their midst, screeching and crying and dribbling snot everywhere, bidding them a tearful farewell of, "FUCK ALL OF YOU!" and running up the stairs to hide.
No one can get close. Tidus can't get past the locks on her door, Wakka has been sacred off countless times. Kairi moves to touch her arm, but she barks, "Don't you dare touch me" in a voice so sharp and brittle that she flinches and falters, backs away and stumbles out.
21.) people like us
Selphie realizes that Kairi is human (painfully, achingly so) in the first time she sees her cry and takes note that it's not as pretty of a sight as she would've thought.
22.) fractions
Kairi won't hold her hand, but she'll face parental wrath to talk for hours about two boys that she isn't quite sure she ever knew.
Kairi will kiss her in the dark, but she won't come out to the playground to play jump-rope, or to sit and jabber out stupid, silly things.
Kairi will like her, but Kairi won't love her.
Kairi can be half, but can't (won't ever) be whole.
23.) graffiti
During break, Selphie finds, written on the surrounding school wall, KAIRI LOVES S—
--and she fills in the rest.
24.) games
When she kisses her neck during a less-than-stellar round of Tidus's brand of Dirty Monopoly (a bit one-sided because Tidus won't kiss Wakka and vice versa), Selphie sucks in her breath so hard, she can hear each and every one of her wishes turning swiftly to ashes.
25.) apples
Apples have been called the symbol for womanhood, but they aren't quite there yet. They are girls—shiny-eyed children with sticky fingers folded into each other.
26.) hair
Everyone who meets Kairi marvels over her delicate doll's face, her large eyes, her hair—a peculiar shade of wine-red that isn't common on the Islands. They finger the strands and tell her to take care of it, "You've got such nice hair, Kairi, I'm jealous."
But when Kairi takes her mother's pruning scissors to her hair, it's Selphie who sits beside her, collecting the stray pieces and egging her on.
27.) waste
Selphie has a feeling that if she could unzip Kairi, she'd find a wad of cellophane in place of her heart.
28.) equation
"I'd give anything to see him again."
"Anything?"
"Anything."
But if Kairi gives up everything to see Sora and Selphie gives up anything to be Kairi's everything, then really, don't they just end up with nothing at all?
29.) rules
"This isn't fair!" Selphie howls at her retreating back, but Kairi turns and pauses, giving her that odd half-smile before saying simply, "Whoever promised it would be?"
30.) touch
Close enough to smell the iced tea on her breath, Selphie fits their palms together and says earnestly, "I'd swim the ocean for you."
This says an awful lot, because Selphie can barely stay afloat in the water, let alone swim in it.
Kairi giggles and Selphie frowns, tries to squish the heart of her palm into her friend's. Tries to make them get closer, tries to get near enough to become part of Kairi, instead of just being beside her.
"What're you doing?"
She tries, she tries, she tries, but it never (won't ever) works out. Getting close to Kairi is impossible; they are constantly separated by pockets of air and skin and ashes of left-behind dreams, melting and turning sour between her lips.