Warnings and Disclaimers: Zodiac stuff. Little sprinkles of magic without any full-on commitment to the occult. A little bit of ghosty fun, augury, and completely useless and ridiculous "powers." Sex, drugs, and copious cursing. A great deal of bullshitting and lack of accuracy. Nonsense and self-indulgent drivel as per usual. I own none of the characters.

Title: Temptation by New order

Izzy would like you to note: I looked into a lot of the stuff I write about in this story pretty extensively, but I'm going to play around with it a lot and change things. Like, for instance, I did actually assign birthdates/places/times to the main characters and then got their natal charts and related information, but the whole premise here will be things growing steadily more chaotic, and I don't really care about being 100% accurate about it because it's supposed to be fun. Along the same lines, I looked up the movement of the planets in relation to the different houses and signs for all of the years covered in this story, but then I realized it's really not important to be accurate on that either. Anyways, hope you enjoy!

Temptation

Summertime, 1993. Just past noon.

Riku, for some reason, found himself sitting in a loose circle of his friends in Sora's basement. His ass hurt. It was blindingly hot. And his throat felt like he'd swallowed sandpaper and washed it down with actual sand. He sighed and thought of Leon's pool party, something he'd previously had no desire to attend, but was now looking more than appealing.

He took a moment to look around at the other attendees and grimaced pointedly. Selphie was never a companion he'd suffer by choice, yet there she was, taking up an unreasonable amount of space and sighing dramatically.

"What is taking that brat so long?" she said, the affected high-pitched whine of her voice grating on every single nerve in Riku's body.

He grimaced again.

"I'm sure he's digging through the heaps of clothes on his floor as we speak," Kairi replied, fanning herself. "It'll take him at least a year to find anything he's looking for in that room."

Tidus stood up. "I'm leaving then."

Zexion and Demyx nodded and started to join him when a sharp bang echoed through the basement, the clatter of footsteps quickly following.

"Hold on!"

The cry came from the stairs on which Sora now stood. The brunet brandished a book Riku had become all too familiar with, grinning and descending quickly. 'Here we go,' he thought, shaking his head. 'Now everyone is going to find out what a lovesick little stooge I really am for going along with this madness.'

Despite his weary thoughts, Riku smiled at his friend and watched as he came forward to join the circle.

"Alright," Sora called, settling in next to Riku "birthdays everyone!" He slammed the book down and pressed his finger against a page that read 'Aries' in large, flowing letters, a beaming smile on his face.

Everyone aside from Riku stared at him for a moment, then took the time to glance down at the book he'd brought. They hadn't been made aware of the purpose of this little powwow, so it probably came as some shock that Sora wanted to play astrologer in the middle of a heatwave. Still, considering the alternative activities available in their one-horse desert town, it's not like they had anything better to do. A collective, unspoken agreement ran through the group, and soon everyone was trying to remember their sign.

Sora cut in to clarify. "To determine your moon, rising, and midheaven signs I need detailed information about birthplaces, birth times, and birthdates. If you know all of that."

Sora grinned and turned towards Riku, his eyes glimmering with excitement. Riku was happy that he was enjoying himself and all, but he couldn't help wondering if they should be doing this. He knew what it might cost their friends. And as innocuous as it seemed, there would be blame passed around when things got crazy.

In spite of Riku's misgivings, and with no clue about what they were getting themselves into, everyone started giving Sora their information. Kairi was the only one who knew everything down to the time of birth, so Sora did her reading first.

"Kairi, your sun sign is Aquarius. Makes sense."

"That'd better be a good thing, Sora," she said playfully, shoving him with her foot.

He laughed and continued. "Moon in Capricorn, Scorpio ascendant and Leo MC. Your signs are all over the place."

She stared at him, uncomprehending, then finally asked, "Alright, so what does any of that have to do with anything?" She crossed her arms and waited.

"I was just about to tell you that." With a twinkle in his eyes, he began reading about the meaning of each of the signs, flipping through the book with a practiced familiarity.

Riku made a face at the whole thing, his concern growing as he thought about the things that had been happening to them — the crazy things he couldn't explain — since the first time they'd opened that book. He shuddered and glanced at Kairi, wondering what her horoscope would be when Sora was done.

"I see," the brunet murmured, startling Riku from his reverie. "Venus is in Capricorn until next month, which is a good thing for you since that aligns with your birth chart."

Suddenly, everyone in the circle was riveted. Even Tidus who would normally be ready to flee merely at the mention of anything that involved a book, was rapt with attention. They began clamoring for their own readings as Kairi's went on, wrestling over who got to use the phone to call their parents for their birth certificates.

'They're getting a little bit too worked up,' Riku thought, glancing at Sora with a frown. The brunet responded with a playful wink.

"I think they're getting into it," he chuckled, nudging Riku. "Maybe we should bring out the book you got today."

Riku gulped at the thought. He still couldn't be completely sure it was true, but he felt like opening the hulking old astrology book in front of Sora had been the beginning of all the strange events around them. He didn't even want to imagine what opening a book called Librum Dæmoniorum would unleash on them. On the world.

Still, he couldn't deny how curious he was, or how strongly the book called out to him. And he knew his fears wouldn't stop him if he really wanted to pop the lock on that whole new treasure chest of pseudoscientific knowledge.

Instead of delving into that in front of their friends, he ignored it for the time being and helped Sora draw out out everyone's horoscopes and natal charts. It took them hours, during which everyone else demanded constant updates on what Sora was finding in the book. He patiently told them everything they wanted to know, which surprised everyone except Riku. They all knew that, normally, the brunet would become overwhelmed under that kind of pressure and get snippy. But, as Riku had come to understand over the past two weeks, Sora had a strange affinity for astrology, and a strange harmony with the book in front of him. It made him calm; almost sage-like. It freaked Riku out even more than the fact that all of the horoscopes Sora divined were true. And more than the strangely specific events the two of them had experienced over the course of two weeks.

He thought back on the night everything had started and wondered if the same things he'd experienced were in store for his friends.

Dial everything back to May.

Sora and Riku were lazing around after a day of goofing off. It was the start of summer vacation and they had been up to their usual activities: skateboarding in empty car parks and dry lake beds, joyriding out on rural desert roads, cramming cheap tacos in their mouths until they were full to bursting, etc. It wasn't exactly inspired, or even all that fun, but there were only so many things to do in the middle of nowhere.

After a long day of this nothingness, they lay winding down on Sora's bed, yammering about bullshit as the minutes ticked by. It was horribly uneventful, and somewhat torturous for Riku. His head was always filled with things it shouldn't be when he was around Sora, and it was only made that much worse when he lay close and defenseless, completely unaware that he was being watched.

During one of the lulls in conversation that often came about when Riku became too wrapped up in his thoughts, Sora sat up slightly and gave the other boy a serious look, pointing at him with narrowed eyes.

"Riku, do you believe in astrology?"

The silver-haired boy had no response to that, at first. The question was completely out of place, and he was tired and irritable from spending all day thinking self-absorbed, lovelorn thoughts. After a small pause, he shrugged.

Sora frowned, but flipped around energetically anyways, sitting up all the way and digging around at the edge of his bed. An unreasonable amount of time passed as he dug through the debris that constantly littered his floor before the brunet turned to him and, with an unwarranted twinkle in his eyes, produced an impressively unimpressive book the size of his own torso.

"Well, anyways, I found this the other day," he said proudly, sliding his hand over the cover. "It looks interesting."

Riku looked from the book to Sora to the book again, sighing and shaking his head. He read the cover: Astrologia

"Don't tell me you believe in this shit because of that book, Sora?"

"Pfft, no," the brunet chuckled, waving one hand in the air. "That's not the point."

"Well what is the point then?"

Sora shrugged. "I dunno. We're not doing anything else anyways. I'm bored."

"And this will alleviate your boredom how? You can't read for more than 10 seconds without getting frustrated and throwing a fit."

Sora kicked him lightly, setting the book in his lap with a petulant pout.

"Come on, what does it matter? If I open it and it's boring I'll chuck it. But I might just discover the secrets to the universe inside of this big ol' hunk of paper."

The brunet wiggled his fingers like a corny magician, moving his hands towards Riku's face. The silveret grabbed them before he got his eye poked out and sat up next to his friend with a sigh.

"Alright, let's see what you got here," he grumbled, flicking open the cover with one finger.

And that's when they both became entranced. It was almost like all of their skepticism and derision were forcefully suspended, held in the thrall of some power trapped inside the pages of that book. They sat for hours determining their personality traits and inner workings, as though they'd never known themselves or each other before. In their fervor and mesmerization, everything felt so real and frighteningly accurate they started to wonder about using the book to determine their horoscopes. After all, if so much about who they were could be determined by the pages of Astrologia, the future couldn't be that far out of reach. It seemed reasonable at the time.

Later, after they'd thoroughly mapped out the events of the days, then weeks, then months ahead, they sat down and closed the book and wondered what the hell had happened.

Sora stared at Riku, who in turn sat gaping back, a slight frown forming on his lips.

"Well that was weird," the brunet murmured, scratching the side of his head. "I feel like I've lost some hours."

"Yeah that's- me too. What the hell? What a stupid waste of an evening." Riku sighed and stood up, stretching back. He felt dizzy for a moment as he arched and had to catch himself on Sora's bed. He and the brunet stared at each other again, a tremor of fear and confusion running between them.

"It's- it must be the heat," Riku reasoned, his head swimming. He touched his forehead and squinted, trying not to collapse. Sora reached towards him in concern but he was already stumbling away, looking around at the dozens of pages of notebook paper they'd scribbled on over the past four hours. He couldn't remember anything they'd written. None of it was recognizable, and he could barely see what was happening around him anyways. His eyes were getting blurry.

Sora seemed to be reacting in much the same manner, though he hadn't stood yet and simply sat closing and opening his eyes and squeezing his head.

Then everything went completely blank.

They woke up on the floor, still surrounded by the pages that seemed to chronicle their lives and their inner selves so accurately. And the pages that held their futures, too, those were crushed under cheek. Riku had to peel the top page off and give it another glance just to get his eyes to focus.

"It says that I'm going to receive bad news today," he grumbled, glancing over at Sora, who was reading a page they'd written about Leo ascendant.

"I can't remember doing this," the brunet replied, shaking his head and dropping the page. "I mean, I remember us doing it, but I don't remember the words. I don't remember what the book said. I don't remember any of this shit."

Riku grunted in concurrence, dropping his page as well and glancing over at the one they'd written on Sora.

"Yours says you should spend all day inside since an accident is waiting for you outside," he said, scanning just the first line. "This is just ridiculous."

Sora nodded and stood up with a sigh, shaking his limbs around to get the blood flowing. "You must be right about the heat getting to us," he laughed. But Riku heard the tremble in his voice. Sora was feeling just as unsettled as he was.

But there was no way he could bring Sora down; he didn't want to discourage or upset the brunet, so he had to pretend everything was okay.

"Yeah, I think we just need some proper rest and water or something," he said gently, joining his friend and patting his shoulder. "I'm heading home. I'm sure my mom's not too happy about me staying at yours without asking."

Sora nodded in his periphery. Riku couldn't bring himself to turn and look at his expression as he left.

Fast forward a few days.

Riku was utterly disturbed. He'd gone home from Sora's three days before with only a small knot of doubt in his chest. Nothing too drastic. But, in the span of time since, he'd become a paranoid mess. It had started with the news of his grandmother's death. That's what he'd come home to after the horoscope fiasco. He had a brief flash of what he'd written on that paper when his mother told him.

"You will receive bad news."

He shook it off at first, chalking it up to coincidence.

Then he received another bit of bad news: Sora had been rushed to the hospital with a head injury. He had a concussion from being hit by a baseball as he was riding his bike past the park. That seemed a little bit more freaky to Riku, so he visited his friend during his brief hospital stay to figure out what the fuck was going on.

Sora, though mostly recovered, was still somewhat concussion-y, and mostly garbled and laughed at silly things when talking to Riku. However, he did have one salient thing to say. He grabbed Riku's wrist as he was leaving and said, "I read that tomorrow I'm going to receive some money. And you're going to struggle with an important decision. Just keep that in mind."

Riku nodded and gulped, not sure how to feel. He tried to calm himself with the help of the more analytical parts of his brain which told him that these things could not possibly be accurate. That astrology was just a budding craze brought back after lying dormant for many centuries. That belief in new age bullshit was only so widespread because people were gullible and willing to trust the primitive parts of their brain. 'Yeah, this is all just nonsense,' he reasoned, slightly reassured. 'This was just a fluke. We're both messed up in the head from this heatwave, I'm sure.'

The next day however, his reassurance seemed to mean nothing. He heard that Sora had received an apology check from the people at the park. And then he was faced with the decision of whether or not he wanted to go to his grandmother's funeral. A difficult choice to make because he knew there would be people there he couldn't see without dredging up painful memories. He didn't like to think about what they'd done to him, let alone look them in the face, so he ended up telling his mother he needed to stay home. But what irked him more than the resurfacing of his past family trauma was the accuracy of his fucking horoscope.

"This is shit," he later told Sora, winding the cord of his phone around one finger nervously. "This is genuinely shit. What is happening here? Did we bring this on or did we figure out that it was going to happen using that book? I'm scared here, Sora."

"Yeah me too," the brunet said around a mouthful of chips. "I mean, looking at all this stuff we wrote, if it comes true we're a little bit fucked."

"Why?" Riku sat up in his bed, heart pounding out of his chest. "What else does it say?"

"Well, most of it is innocuous, at least," Sora responded slowly. "It just seems like a lot of weird, impossible things honestly. Like, the first two days were tame as hell compared to this, and I think we can both agree that getting crowned by a baseball while on a moving bike is pretty damn weird."

Riku sighed and rubbed his neck, thinking about that for a moment.

"Let's just erase it," he said. "Then they won't come true, I bet. Weird, impossible shit has never happened to us before so I posit that we caused it to happen by writing it down, or by sussing it out at all. So, getting rid of the source should make it all go away, right?"

"Mmmm, I dunno, Riku. I think it might be too late for that."

"Why do you say that?"

"I just think we opened the floodgates and there's no going back," Sora murmured, a crumpling sound coming from his end. "I don't know how I know that, but I'm pretty damn certain man. It's like something in the back of my head is literally buzzing and I'm getting these feelings. I feel like I know what all of this is about. Like I know that there's nothing we can do to stop what's coming."

"Great, so we opened Pandora's box," Riku sighed, knocking the phone receiver against his forehead in frustration. "What a great way to start the break."

Sora laughed. Riku could hear him turning the pages of a book and got the feeling he knew exactly what book it was.

"Sora are you looking at that-"

"This thing is pretty interesting man," the brunet interrupted. "I mean, I get why I was so drawn to it now. It was really hard reading it the first time, but ever since then I feel really good when I'm reading it. Really clear."

Riku just gaped at the wall, fish-mouthing into the open space in front of him.

"How can you possibly reopen that thing after what's been happening to us!? What is wrong with you?"

"Nothing's wrong with me, Riku. If anything, I'm better than I've ever been before. I feel so calm. And focused. This book is better than Ritalin."

"I'm hanging up."

"Riku-"

"I'm hanging up, Sora."

He dropped his phone with finality and rolled over on his bed, unable to shake the creeping feeling in his spine.

And over the next few weeks leading up to the astrological circle jerk in Sora's basement, all manner of freaky shit happened.

Sora went downstairs one morning to find all of his family's shoes on the dining room table, lined up from oldest to youngest.

Riku saw all of the pictures on the wall alongside his staircase drop one-by-one, following his pace as he descended hurriedly.

The two of them, while conducting research in Astrologia about what was happening, experienced a gust of wind that blew Riku's window open and flipped them to a page labeled "Your Sign and Death" - after which they decided to have an extended sleepover at Riku's.

Then it was just curiouser and curiouser each day. Swarms of bees that suddenly dropped dead all at once, sounds that only they heard like drums beating at night, small meteors falling to earth all around the house but causing no damage, and so on. It became so commonplace for the not-so-commonplace to occur around them, in fact, that they were almost inured to it. Riku was becoming cynical and apathetic, petulantly finding a reason for everything, even when no logical explanation was easily at hand. And Sora just ignored it, refusing to speak of the things happening even when they were happening right in front of him.

Riku stopped trying to bring it up, watching instead as his friend became more and more absorbed in Astrologia, and in divining the future from it. He was scary-accurate, and even though Riku could use and understand the book just fine, it never worked the same way for him as it did for Sora. On top of that, his zenned out attitude had become more persistent. Even when he wasn't using the book, he was much calmer than Riku had ever seen him in the 17 years they'd known each other. Not to say that he was suddenly the master of tranquility — he was still Sora after all. He just seemed to have a lot more control of himself. And there had always been something very unbridled about Sora in the past, but that was fading a bit with each day.

After awhile, they both decided that weird was the new normal and Sora went back home, adjusting to his role as the somewhat psychic wonder. And while weird shit continued to happen right up until the day Sora convened his friends in his basement, it no longer seemed to matter. Neither of them had been hurt since Sora's brush with the baseball after all, so it was almost like living a completely normal life.

That's how Riku felt, anyways. He wasn't sure about Sora, but it looked like he felt the same to him as the brunet finished up Zexion's horoscope. Riku scooted away from the circle after passing out the horoscopes that had been dictated to him and watched his friends scanning the pages hungrily. He wondered if they were being taken by the same strange fervor he and Sora had experienced the night they'd opened the book. He would only know after Sora closed the thing again since that's when they'd been hit by the side-effects. He waited for the brunet to end it, but he never did. He was still poring over it, his eyes locked on the words with an almost fanatic enthusiasm.

That was concerning. He crawled forward again and placed his hand gently on the pages, trying to get Sora to look at him. The brunet did lift his head, but only to frown at him, eyes slightly unfocused.

"I think you should close it now," he murmured, reaching for the front cover. "Draw yourself back."

They stared at each other for a moment longer. Riku was unsure if any of his words had reached the other boy, but there was something like understanding creeping into his features. He thought maybe it would be safe enough to make the move himself. He wanted to see what would happen to everyone else anyways, even if it made him feel a bit guilty. 'Well they seem like willing guinea pigs,' he justified to himself, slamming Astrologia closed and glancing around.

The reaction he got was even more intense than he'd expected.

It started with Kairi, who dropped her paper with a dazed look, her body slumping in its position on the floor. Her arms suddenly hung limp at her sides, head lolling to one shoulder as her eyes fluttered closed. Soon, everyone else was in much the same predicament, their bodies half-way suspended, yet without a doubt unconscious.

Sora and Riku looked at each other, and then the rest of them.

"That's not good," Sora breathed, still sitting cross-legged on the floor. He looked up at Riku and pressed his lips together.

Riku sighed and sat down next to him.

"Nope," he said, "that's not good at all."

End Notes: I really don't believe in anything in this story even remotely but it's really fun to write about. I had a friend who was really into astrology before and it seemed like something that would make a good story topic. I'm going to keep this going in a sort of wild way. I haven't made any plans, to be honest, I just know the general idea, so let's see how I do. Bye!