The King is Mine, the King is Dead: A Series of Little Things

A/N: Riku's crazy. Or maybe he isn't. He's probably just sick. Whatever. Either way, Sora's pretty sure he's both crazy and sick. Here are a series of little things, that have the same characters and such, but otherwise barely relate to each other. Oneshots! Oneshots based on images that I find disturbing. If you have an image I might exploit, please share. These will probably end one of two ways, lovey or sexy... Lucky us!

Song and dance of disclaimer! And that's the only one you get! My legal obligation has been filled, I will not be sued, nor shall I sue.

Chapter one: Histrionics

Image: Kids kill other kids. One of them freezes. And also, my theme is apparently euphemisms.

"So... this one kid killed another kid," Riku said. Sora could barely hear him, as he spoke through his scarf, wrapped up to his nose.

"What do you mean?" Sora asked, rubbing his hands together. It was cold out, one of those gray October days when the wind was so very quiet, but so very cold. The horizon looked bleached, sad, and the only clouds in the sky offered no majestic, sweeping, daydream images, but rather, sad wispy protection from a white sun that had singed the mare's tails to frazzled tips.

"That's it," Riku said, shrugging. "Just one kid killed another. I don't know if it was an accident or not." Riku closed his eyes. Sora watched his purplish eyelids throb like butterflies. "But there he was, all spread out on the ground. He looked cold, and he wasn't bleeding or anything."

Riku opened his eyes. "He looked a bit like an angel really. He couldn't have been more than five. A perfect little Hollywood death too, nothing gross about it, just the breath taken right out of his pink little body. The other five year old came clean about killing him. He said it was an accident, and he just left him laying there in the snow."

Those eyes turned on Sora. They were strange. Many called them sky blue, or 'sea foam,' though that felt more like a white colour to Sora. The colour of Riku's eyes had nothing to do with foam or skies. They always conjured a very specific image to Sora. Blue bottles. Old blue bottles, hundreds of them lined up on a beach, reflecting onto emerald waters.

"Did you actually see the kid, Riku?"

Those eyes turned away from Sora. "No, but it was pretty vivid."

Sora's looked up when he heard the breaks of a bus settle. It was theirs. He was happy to be able to get up off of the uncomfortable plastic seat. He looked over at Riku. He had pulled his bag over his shoulder and was standing as well. His rather elegant profile almost blended into the gray sky. There were crows in the dumpster that Sora could see over Riku's shoulder. The blended in with him as well. Odd.

The two sat together. Riku let out little puffs of breath against the window, and then he drew things with a gloved finger. They may have been horrible things, but the glove obscured the elegant lines and motions that Riku made. The strokes were wide, tapering too dramatically.

"Did that really happen? The kid killing the other kid?"

Riku looked at him, and Sora could almost swear he was smiling behind his scarf. He said something that Sora couldn't hear around the engine, and the scarf, and the chatter of the other people on the bus.

They got home later than they'd hoped. Riku shed his cold weather garb, hanging his scarf carefully on the back of his wicker desk stool, but tossing the coat casually on the couch. Sora watched him, chewing on his thumbnail. Sometimes things that the other man did entranced him. He particularly liked it when he used the phone.

Because Riku loved rotary phones. They looked elegant in his hands, and that look was never really lost on Sora. The way he tossed his coat, though... So casual, so -truthful isn't the right word, but it was the only one he had- truthful.

"How are you feeling?" Sora asked, as he grabbed Riku's hip, spinning him into his arms and pressing his chin against Riku's head. Riku was taller, but Sora preferred this position. Riku's soft crown bumped and brushed his chin. "You aren't... acting right."

"Am I ever right?" Riku asked, bringing a hand up to rest against Sora's chest, running soft, teasing circles over his shirt. "But yes, I am fine. And I don't know if you heard me earlier. When you asked me about the kids, if it was all real."

"Was it real to you? Did you make it up entirely?"

Riku didn't answer, just looked at his hands.

Sora kissed his head, placed a hand over his bottle blue eyes, and hushed him. "Kids don't kill kids, Riku. When you kill someone you aren't a kid anymore." Riku let out a soft breath. It sounded like his last breath, a short wave of happy air. Sora felt it against his collar, ostensibly warm with life, though cold with his death.

"Riku..."

"Hey, it's okay. Don't look at me like that. Shostakovich had it too."

"Was he this miserable?"

Riku frowned, though Sora didn't see it, so much as feel it. The little cogs in Riku's brain were trying hard to work out an answer. "I am not miserable. But... he was. Ever listen to any of his later music? He was sick all the time, broke his legs, stopped being able to play piano. Luckily I don't have the polio. He had more of a reason to be miserable. But kids still kill kids Sora. You know they're kids when they leave a dead body in the snow, hoping that no one would notice, and maybe hoping they'd come back to life. That's a kid, Sora. That's still a kid."

Sora pushed him away, putting both hands roughly on his shoulders. "Why are you thinking about this!?" He shook the other man, frustrated, worried, pissed even. "Why are you obsessed with death!?"

"I hardly call it an obsession," Riku said. The shaking hadn't done much to faze him, though Sora could see in his eyes that he was somewhat disoriented. The bottle blue, the emerald sea green, those irises were hazy. "It's an awareness."

Sora pulled him close again. "A poetic awareness." He tried not to strangle the other man. His best friend, his lover, his dying pitiable lover. "A freakish, poetic awareness. If I can't help you... then tell me what you saw, tell me everything you saw. Will that help?"

"I'm sure it will," Riku said. Sora's scent eased him. Even when the other man was on edge, ready to rip his hair out, ready to kick Riku out of their apartment, ready to drop him for someone who wasn't about to die, for someone who he didn't think was crazy, it still eased him. Even though Sora felt like that then, even though Sora was ready to slit Riku's throat to end it, both of their pain and frustration, he still trusted that scent to ease him. Sora knew that, Sora trusted that would never change, not until the day that the crab growing in Riku's chest began to usher blood across those pearly pink lips of Riku's, not until the coughs got worse, not until a dull ache settled in his chest and never went away.

That night he mounted Riku, who's hands balled up the sheets. The coal coloured sky outside the window distracted them both. Sora ripped open a condom with his teeth. Riku asked him why he bothered, it wasn't as though they could get pregnant, and they had never been with anyone else. Sora didn't answer, he knew Riku would be upset if he told him.

He was scared of the crab growing in him, scared that he'd feel it, scared that it would touch him in such a private place. If he felt the stray strands of sex crazed cells at least there would be something between that writhing mess of death and his flesh. And he looked at Riku's chest and knew that it was in there, not down there. Sora pressed his ear against Riku's chest when he entered him, listening for it. Riku assumed it was an act of affection and put his long, delicate, snowy hands around Sora's head. He urged him to move, softly asked him to go harder, deeper, closer to the thing growing in him.

Sora heard his voice echoing in the hollow of his chest, but not the crab. They both looked out the window. That lasted a while, and then Sora captured Riku's lips, and they stopped looking. They pretended for a bit that there was no oppressive darkness just outside of their curtains. There was nothing in his mouth. It was only in his chest, around his lungs, near his heart. The crab ate the light out of his heart.

Sora finally understood him, understood that Riku wasn't crazy. He enjoyed, for the last few moments, the slippery sounds of lube, flesh in flesh, human body on human body. He pulled Riku close and the last thing he thought of was Riku in the snow, his heart swollen from its touch of brutal pain. A real Hollywood death, clean, bloodless, just a white little boy on white snow, no crab, no sickness, and no murder.

"No," Riku whispered. "There were no children."

A/N: Eugh... They are feeling things here that I'm not really sure they should have been feeling. And also, if the cancer thing seemed out of left field, it was. It wanted to get written, so I wrote the first reference (the Shostakovich line, by the way), with every intention of erasing it. But it wanted to stay, so there it is. I also really hate the word cancer. It seems more like a thing to me than a disease, and 'cancer' just sounds like a disease name. I also apologize for the sheer amount of obscure and not so obscure lyric references in this piece. Sorry for any bad grammar and such, I believe some would called this 'hot off the press.'