Sixteen Candles
Disclaimers: Kingdom Hearts and the rest of the amazing franchise © Disney and Square Enix; everything else © their rightful owners.
A/N: So, actually, this became a collection of chapters suddenly—I intended for it to be a one-shot, but lately one-shots have been extremely difficult for me to accomplish. -sheepish roll of the eyes.- But this is going to be quick and painless (for some, not necessarily the victims of plot, but you know how it is) and then I'll focus back on what I should be, in the blink of an eye.
ATTENTION NOSTER NOSTRI READERS: Updates are in progress.
Ratings/Warnings for this chapter: T—profanity
"Turning sixteen isn't easy when you realize that you've fallen in love. It's the time of your life that will last a lifetime."
Sixteen Candles—Chapter Two
The worlds were at a balance.
Darkness is in light, light is in darkness, all that philosophical junk about hearts and power and the strength of one—he didn't have to wrack his brains trying to decipher anything any longer. He was placid, back on the islands with Riku and Kairi, back in the normal life of a normal adolescent, days filled with school, people, and activities. "We may never see our parents again" was a phrase that had frightened him before, but he had no reason to fear as every resident of the islands had returned to their rightful bunks. Oh, the islands...how he had missed them. They were immaculately glorious, beautiful and lavish, from the lush growth of the plant life and the call of the sea-birds, to the warm sand with the waves licking at the land's lip and the impeccable skies, the secure warmth of the sun, all enveloping the base of their childhood innocence and dreams. Their play island was still there, still as magnificent as before with every cove and hiding place—though the forest there had gone through many changes, from being a terrifying rain-forest when they were nine-year-old explorers, to a plain forest when they were fourteen, and now an overgrown jungle but somehow still majestic. Even the comfort of the quaint mainland city was the same, each old building speaking it's own story of what it had been through, in the tongue of the dilapidated, poorer part of town or the upper side where new architecture boasted sufficient funds and wealthier families.
It was as though nothing had changed, and Sora relaxed into the stability with a heaving sigh, relief flooding every fiber of his simple-minded being. The past two and a half years had placed an abnormal amount of stress—if that word even summed it all up successfully—upon his shoulders. Save the world, save the girl, sleep for a year, save the world again, save everyone this time, and defeat darkness alongside his lifelong friend, there to back him up and ensure he was not alone, to bring it all back to peace.
Back to a peace interrupted by those strange, foreign sentiments that threaded adrenaline into his every muscle and made him dizzy and short of breath, those emotions that made his heart begin to pound and his thoughts race into every corner of his mind, every image possible, those things that happened to him inside and out when he was around Riku. But those feelings were not entirely alien—they were familiar in a way he couldn't define. The profound, cosmically aligned bond between the two boys had begun over a decade ago on the sandy shores of the main island, a pact made with clasped knuckles and laughter on a summer day before first grade, ice cream melting into a sticky mess lapped up with childish tongues, and the connection had only deepened into abysmal echoes of fate. It grew with every headlock, every joke, every argument, every race, every unspoken sentence exchanged through eyes instead. It grew with the opened door and the first long quest—whose heart was that one to save, anyway? Kairi's, his own, Riku's, all three? It grew unfathomably, lonesomely excruciating because of the distance, with the separation in Castle Oblivion and his nap thereafter, and the seemingly neverending war against the Organization and strength of darkness.
And it was published during the final battle against Xemnas, perfected on the shadowy beaches of a world opposite their own. It was finalized to the point where Sora knew it had always been there and would always be there, just like Riku himself. It was an affection, an adoration, a love so flawless that he couldn't accept it. It floated around in his body, unrestricted, free to terrorize him physically and emotionally because despite it all he still clutched some innocence, some pure naivety that made him oblivious to the truth beyond the physical attraction that agonized him so.
The lost time had been good to Riku. The younger boy had found it troublesome not to stare at his muscles before anything had changed, but holy God when Sora sprang up a few inches and found his skinniness becoming defined, Riku towered further than before, lean and built and peering down from seven delicious centimeters up. It made him feel puny, but oh-so delectable, oh-so swept off his feet. And when those ideas prodded his brain, he freaked out in surprised guilt, not wanting to ruin anything between the two for fear of losing him, this time for good and because of something so stupid as the phobia of boys' love. So the other day he let Kairi hold his hand (a meaningless sensation), and the next he let her play with his hair (it relaxed him; it always did), and a little bit ago he'd let her babble to him about her personal issues, girl-things like crushes, clothes, and other unimportant topics that he didn't hear competently (mostly because his mind was off on similar thoughts of his own), completely unaware that it gave them the classification of Potential Couple to students who had nothing better to do than pointlessly gossip of unnecessary and usually unreal matchmaking. Sora figured it was just what he was supposed to do, his escape from these suffocatingly dangerous thoughts that he had once executed three years ago. He still had the charm that symbolized it all, but at this point it was simply a star that resembled Home and a best friend.
It was comfortable, this safety upon the islands after the peace had been restored throughout the worlds, and sometimes he even forgot the things that happened, living normally with his friends and his feelings and his schoolwork, afternoons of excavations upon their play island or within the city, shy reveries at nighttime in his bed that he kept locked in his heart, indulging in every moment around his argentine-haired best friend and not sure why it sent him into such bliss. He was coy and typical again, and that was fine how it was.
Sora paused outside the closed doorway of his math class; a sign posted beside the plaque read Geometry: Shape the World. Lips bitten together in a sick grimace, his heart thundering within his chest, he felt his flesh grow clammy again. What if someone in the school had found the quiz? What if they'd already spread it around school? What if someone in the school had found it and that someone happened to be in his math class, or someone found it and told someone else and that someone who'd heard about it was in his math class, or—
Why in hell did he write his name on that motherfucking quiz?
Swallowing, Sora cautiously opened the door, leaning in a few steps to find the gaze of his teacher. A chaste, sharp fear made his stomach sink as his childish mind fabricated an even more maddening scene—what if someone in the school had found the quiz, spread it around, and his teacher had found out about it?
If she had, she didn't show it. She met the tardy boy's deer-in-headlight stare with risen brows and her marker in hand; offering him her usually mousy smile, always amused when turned upon him, the Geometry teacher Mrs. Coskun inquired, "Pass?"
"No."
"Sora," she sighed in disappointed exasperation. "Again?"
"Sorry," the brunette grinned sheepishly, closing the door and slipping to his assigned desk. Beside him, his classmate held his own textbook out in explanation and the woman near the front of the room turned to the desk to mark his demerit.
"Page ninety-four."
"Thanks," Sora murmured, tugging the text from his own bag and letting it drop to the surface in front of him. Slumping down, toes of his shoes scuffed on the desk's metal legs, the brunette dropped his cheek to his knuckles and flipped to the directed page number. Being a sophomore sucked. He hated Geometry and it showed in his grade of a D; he liked Algebra much more, and wished he could just be a junior already so he could be in Algebra 2 like Riku...
The worlds were at a balance, and placid normalcy ensued.
NOT ANY MORE.
...and peered at it curiously, sea-green optics flicking up and down along the printed and handwritten words. Finally realizing what it was, a jaw fell gently slack and an incredulous chuckle passed on the wind; adroit fingers carefully folding up the slick sheet of paper, the same black-banded hand shoved the paper of interest into his back pocket, and he turned the corner and started up the hill to school.
Riku had an energy drink in his fingertips, the condensation trickling down onto his knuckles. Why he was drinking it as the sun went down, Sora wasn't sure, but it had been his recent choice when Sora in turn bought a soda pop at the convenience store near the docks, and upon the play island they leaned on the curved trunk of their proverbial paopu tree silently sipping their designated drinks and watching the twilight. It cast a warm glow on the little island of memories, heating the land even in it's descent; Sora chanced a glimpse beneath his lashes to his left where Riku stood with arms crossed and shoulders propped on the smooth bark, can of caffeine dangling from his slim, adroit fingertips. The brunette's ankles were hooked, tennis-shoed heels digging into the sand and frame otherwise supported by the constant stability of the tree. The respectful hush was somewhat suffocating—or was it because he wanted to step over and lean against Riku's sculpted arm but was too afraid to? There was no excuse for it now; he was no longer eleven years old. Though the white sleeves of the uniform shirt, rolled up after the release of school for the day, were tight on the biceps in use, and it looked so comfortable, so inviting—
"Oh, shit," Riku suddenly choked out mid-sip. Licking his lips, he straightened up, casting a disappointed gaze down to Sora's inquisitive one. In response to the brunette's perked brow, he motioned idly to the right, and when Sora followed the gesture he peered over the side of their favorite bluff to watch as Kairi trotted girlishly along the beach path, soon twisting his head to the left to watch past his shoulder as the girl hurried daintily over the bridge in their direction.
Blue eyes flickered up to examine Riku's reaction; he was frowning softly, lashes lowered, watching the water, but at Sora's quick, worried glance, he side-glimpsed in return and curled up into a split-second smile, shoulders rolling in a shrug of apologetic inability. It was always the same: the two of them and then Kairi, Riku losing his openness and genuine affability as soon as she arrived and Sora gaining it to ensure the girl didn't feel left out. Neither viewed her as an outsider, but things were oddly uncouth when she arrived, easily shattered from one temperance to the other.
"Hey, you guys!" Kairi panted, throwing her arms over the sloping trunk and hoisting herself up to sit between their shoulders. It was quite the effort, actually inciting fervent snickers from Riku, shaking his head after she hooked a leg on the tree, wrestled herself up, and finally tossed the other leg over—all in her little skirt, her purse victoriously battering her upper thigh. Sheepishly, Sora laughed in turn, offering her a sip of his Coke. She obliged, drawing some pop from the straw in a delicately princess-like fashion, her default disposition of fragile femininity that was often, when around her two closest friends, relaxed into klutzy tomboyishness; the brunette boy absently used the hem of his shirt to remove the lip gloss from the edge of it before taking his own sip.
A silence fell, two boys staring in opposite directions and a girl gaping straightforward with ankles crossed, the breeze dusting deliciously along three equally relieved bodies and creating a background music in the way it drifted through the resilient leaves of the palm trees and other foliage.
"Riku," Kairi suddenly chirped. "What are you doing for the dance?"
"I'm going alone," Riku dismissed curtly without looking at her. Sora's brows furrowed and he shifted his gaze hastily to Kairi; the girl peered back at him with a pinched frown, and then both pairs of optics drifted back to the tallest of the trio. Heart racing in an excitement Sora didn't know the origin of, he opened his mouth to comment, but the mahogany-haired girl beat him to the punch.
"Sora, go with me!" she cried, almost desperately, the bet with Selphie resonating in her mind. She leaned forward, swinging her legs innocently, turning on the charm and the puppy-dog eyes and hoping to God that Sora wasn't too oblivious to notice it.
"Ah," he sighed out in surprise, brows furrowing further. His heart was too munificent; he couldn't deny her for the feelings he couldn't even decipher. Finally, he swallowed on a constricted throat and grudgingly murmured, "Okay."
Riku tossed back the last of his energy drink and dropped the can to the dirt, pivoting roughly. Sand kicked up by his heels, he shoved his hands into his pockets and spat, "What a fucking girl." as he strutted around the base of the tree, striding across the bridge with set shoulders and keen steps.
"Ugh, Riku," Sora called after him in agitated chastisement, stooping down and picking up his litter before turning and watching over the trunk of the tree as the silver-haired boy hopped down to the ground beside the little shack, trudging along the sand. Kairi slumped, frowning culpably at the forsaken look on Sora's visage, his parted lips and big blue eyes clouded with confusion, innocently forlorn and distraught.
And that's when she figured out why she'd always known he wasn't into her that way.
