But Words Can Fucking Kill You.

"But as far as what soothes me, what inspires and moves me,
honesty behooves me to tell you your hate doesn't move me.
See, like the darkest of clouds my heart has a silver lining,
which does not harken to the loudest whining,
but beats and stirs and grows ever more
when I learn of the things you're actually for."

- Taylor Mali, Silver-Lined Heart

Riku went to bed at eleven o'clock, and by eleven twenty he had kicked his sheets off his bed in a huff, because even in March it was too warm on the islands. He stood up, peeked outside his door, to see how awake the rest of the house was. He was the youngest in his family, and most of his brothers were in college, but one of them was home for some reason Riku'd forgotten - he might be up.

But the house was entirely that bluish nighttime color, and to Riku, it seemed like everything was drooping. The house was sleeping.

Are you tired too, house? Can you sleep in all this heat?

He sighed and plodded back into his room, pulling down the nightshirt that had been riding up his hips. With a flop, he landed back-first on his bed, staring at his blue ceiling with his blue eyes, and holding his hand in front of his face. His hand looked blue, too. He wondered if anybody would hear if he turned on some music.

Riku thought about this, but he decided there wasn't any music he wanted to listen to, anyways. He snorted. He didn't understand these bands that everyone loved so much. These people that moaned and groaned and complained about things, well, at least they were trying. But, at least on the Destiny Islands, what was becoming popular was music with vague lyrics and even vaguer titles, the kind of songs that fooled people into thinking they were deep and that the people listening to them were deep, too. But Riku knew that these artists, these jackasses who wouldn't know lyrical poetry if it slapped them in the face with a napkin, didn't know what they were talking about any more than the people listening to them understood them.

Riku thought it was pretty funny, in a sad kind of way. Everybody thought they were the only ones who didn't understand them, so pretended to anyway. And the musicians thought the same thing, so kept saying things that sounded smart, things about torn hearts and drowning in seas of loneliness and dead people, and hoping they'd be accepted by the other musicians. Riku knew that if just one of them was honest about the whole thing, everybody else would fess up and they'd start writing things that actually made sense.

He laughed out loud, hoping that nobody would hear him. Yeah, he thought. It really is funny, if you're looking at it from the outside.

He didn't know when he fell asleep, but when he looked around and saw a grungy city and a huge gap in the earth, he assumed he was dreaming.

Everything was brown, the musty sort of brown that colored the air and the streets and your thoughts and the half-pueblo things covered in graffiti, that Riku was separated from. They were all on the other side of this huge gap, see, that he was standing on the other side of. The space separated Riku and the city by a good ten meters, and when he turned around he saw one big, industrial building, lined with aluminum, and someone had painted it so that it looked the door he'd come out of was a mouth, someone had painted a giant mouth that Riku didn't want to get swallowed up by again, again.

Instead, he looked back to the huge crack in the earth with the smooth, sandstone walls stained with brown stains. He looked down into the huge sandstone crack in the earth with walls stained with brown stains. It went so far down, the bottom was swallowed up by smog or mist or whatever. It was wispy.

Leaning over the edge a bit, something in front of him zoomed by, and it sounded like a car or an electric scooter. As soon as you noticed it, it was swelling rapidly, and as soon as you waited for it to get closest it was already zipping off in the other direction.

He scrambled to his feet, backing up against the mouth somebody had painted on an industrial building like it wanted to eat Riku up even though he'd just escaped the big industrial building.

And then there was another zooming sound, but it wasn't so much like a car and it wasn't so much like an electric scooter, but it was a smoother sound, like a clarinet.

And in came somebody, like he was surfing on the air or the smog or what-have-you, his feet balanced on a dictionary that was as big as it was open as it was red, just like his feet were red just like they were yellow just like the book was red, just like he was surfing on the book on the air towards Riku wearing only red and yellow stripes like that stupid circus performer on that stupid sweatshirt that he remembered.

And it was the logo, the dream demon, the what-ever it was called. But it was Sora too. Sora, in red and yellow stripes, surfing a red dictionary on the air towards Riku much slower than that first book-surfer. And he stopped in front of Riku and hovered.

All of him was covered in those stripes. His hair was pointing out in all directions, and his face was red and yellow, and only one strip around his eyes was Sora-skin with freckles and pink.

"Oh!" he said, sounding surprised and shifting his weight on his open book like he hadn't stopped in front of Riku on purpose. "It's you!"

"Yeah," he replied lamely.

"You're hovering, Riku! Riku, you're hovering!" Sora said.

"No," Riku told him, and dream-demon-Sora looked surprised for another second, then frowned. "Oh," he said again. He shifted his feet again and, quite suddenly, it seemed as though the spine of the book bent a bit underneath him and his foot slipped down with a sort of krrssshhk noise as he looked absolutely horrified, scrambling for safety. Riku grabbed his hand and pulled him up again.

"Careful," he said. "Those are slippery."

"Oh, yeah," Sora agreed absentmindedly, staring at him with an intense glare like he was angry for being saved. Then he brightened noticeably.

"You wanna try?" he offered, holding his hand out this time.

Riku shook his head. "I can't," he said. "It's Tuesday," he said.

"Right," Sora said again, giggling. "I keep forgetting that." He laughed at his own silliness.

Behind him, a few more dream-demons zipped by on their own books. Dream-Sora looked thoughtful, and smiled.

"Riku?" he said, tilting a little closer, still flying on his book. Riku took another step towards the edge of his side of the gap, so that they were only a foot apart.

"Yup?" he asked, even though he hated people who used words like 'yup'.

And then Sora was leaning in towards him, and had his arms draped around his neck in a lazy sort of a way, in a way that could really easily be misinterpreted if you decided to misinterpret it, but Riku was mind-drunk on fog and dream and Sora's eyes and Tuesdays, so didn't care too much either way.

"Hey Riku?" Sora asked again. "Do you like me? Tu m'aimes, Ri-ku?" He looked down when he said it, sort of lazy and sort of shy. And still not looking at Riku, he bit his lip and shifted his hip, and pressed theirs together in a way that probably would be misinterpreted by anybody.

"I dunno," Riku told him.

"Don't you like me?"

"I dunno," Riku told him.

"Hey, Riku?"

"Yeah, Sora?"

"Do you wanna touch me?"

He didn't mean it in a perverted way or in a sexual way, and that much was obvious even to Riku who was drunk on fog and dream and Tuesdays. He meant it in the same way a guy might say "Do you wanna know what the picture on my sweatshirt is?" just to see if you do, because it won't cost either of you anything and he kind of wants to tell you anyways.

Sora backed up a little and held out one striped hand, wiggling his long fingers that looked like they didn't have any joints, were just points.

Riku reached out and pressed his thumb to the pad of Sora's middle finger.

Then he woke up.

"Shit," he swore softly, wondering why all of his dreams were either of flying books or, less commonly, Disney villains. Like most people, he forgot his dreams by the time he'd eaten breakfast, and he wasn't one of those people who kept a dream journal or anything.

It was still blue in his room, but it was a lighter blue now, the kind that happened in Riku's room a few hours before the sun really decided it was daytime. Squinting his eyes, he looked at the alarm clock by his bed, which informed him he'd woken up about two hours before he needed to as a cold draft blew across his stomach.

And glancing down at himself, he noticed that not only had he shifted in his sleep, but he'd managed to halfway kick off his sleeping pants and had somehow unconsciously pulled his nightshirt most of the way up his abdomen, perhaps in a self-preservation-inspired attempt at cooling down.

He swore again, digging the corner of him palm into his eye, like pain might wake him up. All he succeeded in, however, was in apparently wiping loose a stray white eyelash.

"Che," he snorted. He kicked off his pants and stood up again, and his bed made that same non-sound-blue-sound that it made every time somebody sat on it, because it was a futon, not a mattress, and only used at night.

He looked out his window, at his neighborhood which was half pueblos or thatch-roofed houses and half normal, shingled things. He looked at his neighborhood and smiled, thinking how wonderful it was, to be up at four thirty in the morning staring out at a sleeping town and being the only one awake.

And then he laughed, which sounded like a bark, and turned back to his bed with his arms crossed, flopping on his back and thinking how absolutely hateful it was to think that he was the only person up at this hour on an island with a population of tens of thousands. How self-centered. Riku just hated things like that.

He watched his blue ceiling getting lighter and lighter as the sun rose, and he thought about all of the things about people that he hated, that he was starting to hate more and more. He was a little disgusted with himself, for finding this many things wrong with humanity at five in the morning, half-dressed and delirious from exhaustion. Riku hated how people always talked about eyes, like they were more important than any other features. How someone's description was always 'blond hair, blue eyes' and never 'his upper lip is a little thinner than his lower' or 'his nose is small and pointed' or 'big ears' unless they were deformed. How people talked about eyes like they were windows, which they weren't, and how they were windows to the soul, which they didn't even know existed.

Around five thirty Riku Tepes gave up thinking all these horrible things and thought about his dream, instead, which he still remembered quite well. As if his dream-memories would disappear if he moved around too much, but having only walked around a bit and lay back down, it was only blurry around the edges.

"I can't, it's Tuesday." Riku snorted at the endless stupidity of his own damn imagination. It felt good to call it that. His own damn imagination. The words went together, in his mind, like gears of a watch.

"Do you like me, Ri-ku?" Riku frowned.

"Do you like me?"

He thought about dream-Sora's behavior. Not only was it kind of girly after the whole slipping thing, it was like he'd been...

Sora pressed their hips together, lazy.

Well, something.

The more he thought about it, the more Riku realized that he had had as close as his mind would get to a sexual fantasy.

He wondered how much he should be worried that he'd had one about another boy. And he crossed his legs, tapping his foot in midair like he was trying to touch the ceiling. The almost-white-again ceiling.

And after a few minutes, once the vividness of the dream had faded and its intensity diminished severely, until he could no longer see the strip of skin around Sora's eyes or feel a finger on his thumb, he figured that his mind must have been so relieved to have its owner not reject another human being that it was finally releasing any minor amount of sexual energy it'd had.

Riku wasn't too big on sex for a teenage boy, but he was glad to have figured that out. Because thinking on it, he didn't see anything attractive in Sora. He was a boy of average height, with a mildly nice face. He was skinny and he walked with a teenaged slouch, just like Riku did, and he didn't think himself too attractive. He wasn't a narcissist.

No, even if he looked at Sora as a sexless thing, as someone in whom gender didn't matter, Riku felt nothing but maybe a bit of platonic...non-dislike.

He realized, in his line of thought, that he sounded like he was in denial. That these were the things a person might say if they were trying with all their heart to not admit that they might be attracted to somebody of the same gender.

That's another thing Riku hated about people. Even if you did want to deny something, if the answer to your question was assumed, any answer you gave meant what they were looking for. Because if you said 'yes', they were proud of you for being honest. And if you said 'no', you were in denial, automatically. And if the answer really was 'no', it didn't matter.

Because if Riku was completely, brutally, horribly honest with himself, he would kind of like to like somebody. But he didn't. What a goddamn lonely person Riku Tepes was.

Just to be fair, though, when he saw Sora getting dropped off by the same hybrid-owning guardian that'd picked him up yesterday, he tilted his head to the side and looked at the boy's bum while he got his backpack from the back seat.

Riku didn't know what to look for in somebody else's backside. But he felt nothing, in all honesty. He gave a little half-sneer to himself, not quite understanding this whole big deal about bums. It was probably another of those hateful things that nobody would like if it weren't for everyone else pretending to like them.

With a snort, he turned back to the school, and tried not to imagine a big mouth around the doors, trying to swallow him up.

He glanced at his watch. Neh, he had a good twenty minutes till class started (damn buses). He sat down at the wall and ignored the way the school looked more and more like a fat, hungry head, tried not to think of the students trickling in as clueless mice.

Sheep is more like it.

He got a cheerful, smiling nod from Zack Fair, to which he didn't respond, and soon one of those full-arm waves from a girl he thought might have been named Kairi, the kind that made her look like she was frantically trying to pop bubbles five feet above her head.

He stared at Kairi, who calmed down a little and smiled wider before Riku just snorted and turned up the volume of his music player.

But he felt the other kid come up behind him, with that same prickly-neck feeling he got whenever somebody was going to try their luck on the petrified Riku statue.

"Riku Tepes," Sora said, sitting down next to him on his wall with a thunk. "Why don't you have any friends?"

Riku frowned and pulled his eyebrows together, staring at Sora dubiously. "What?"

"I'm not saying you're the most fascinating person in the world, but you're not boring, and there are people with lots of friends who try way harder to be socially adept than how hard you'd have to try to get as many friends. So, fess up. Why no friends?"

He stared at the shorter boy, mostly disbelieving and a little disgusted that someone one level above stranger on the social totem pole would be asking him this. And Sora stared right back at him, daring him to stare him down, to actually put effort into it. Riku noticed, absently, how pleasant the breeze felt - the air itself seemed the same temperature as his skin, and all he felt was movement with no substance. He could notice these things during a stare-down. He was the zen master of stare-downs.

Riku shrugged. "I don't see the point."

Sora made a sound, a sound that must have been a guffaw, if it weren't for the fact that Riku thought nobody guffawed anymore. "You don't see the point in having friends? What, there has to be a gain?"

He felt a little insulted that this new kid, the one who didn't have any roots here who didn't know anything about anyone here, least of all about Riku, would be acting so much wiser. A little ticked off. It bothered him when people assumed things about him.

Riku hated that.

"I...haven't met anyone for whom just being their friend was enough," he sounded like he'd hung a question mark on that sentence. "Besides. It's just high school."

"Nobody's good enough to be your friend, huh?" Sora giggled. He sounded like dream-Sora, just enough to be disturbing. "What, I'm not good enough to be your friend?" before Riku could respond, "So it's you against the world, Riku Tepes? Who do you actually think's gonna win?"

Riku stopped inside. He didn't know what to make of this situation. He didn't like to think himself pedantic, and he'd listen to views or explore two opinions on the same thing at a time and then make a perfectly educated decision - . It wasn't that he didn't change his mind.

He just didn't want other people to change it.

He supposed he was horribly hypocritical. Making fun of all the people who only listened to other people when he only listened to himself, but Riku didn't trust anyone else to have a valid opinion.

"Whatever."

Sora laughed. "Oh, come on, that's no kind of answer."

Riku shoved off of the wall and entered the building, squeezing his mind shut as he walked past the first set of doors and trying not to feel as if he was in the belly of the beast for the second time that day. He was followed.

That's right, little mice, just follow the bellwether. That'd probably be Sora. Sora the pied-fucking-piper.

"Ri-ku!"

"Tu m'aimes, Ri-ku?"

"Give me a good reason why you're always so mean. Nothing in the world worth being nice to?"

"Give me a good reason you're so curious," he half-hissed. "What's my social life to you?"

"I like to know these things," Sora protested, tugging on his sleeves and walking next to Riku. And when Riku started to walk faster, Sora jogged a little so as to stand in front of him and walk backwards. "I'd just...like to know."

Today Sora wasn't wearing a sweatshirt. He was all...primary colors and fingerless gloves. And yellow shoes. Who wore yellow shoes? There were strips of gauze wrapped around three of the fingers on his right hand.

Riku hated people who thought that they were making a statement by dressing differently, like your clothing really mattered either way to people who made real statements. He just hated those...people.

The gauze, though, didn't look decorative. That was all Riku noticed before -

"Well?"

"In the...grand scheme of things, I don't really think it matters."

Sora stopped, standing right there in front of him with this big goofy grin, moving to the left when Riku tried to walk around him, and to the right when he tried to walk around him the other way.

"The grand scheme of things?" Sora rocked back onto the balls of his feet, his eyes bright and shiny.

Shiny?

"So what is important in the grand scheme of things? I'm not talking personal happiness, because social interaction's necessary for that no matter who you are, so you must mean universally, right Riku? So what's important for you universally, huh?"

And Riku just stared at him, like he couldn't believe this was happening, like it was impossible some French kid he'd met less than a day ago was confronting him right now at seven fifty in the morning about all his beliefs like he was some kind of philosopher, and like Riku, too, could just automatically answer it.

And, even though it hurt to say it, "I don't know. I don't know what the universe cares about, okay? Can you move? I have to get to - " he paused, his mind blank. "Class."

"You don't know?" Sora looked ecstatic, the same ecstatic a teacher might look when he's gotten the answer he wants from a student. Not the right answer, but the one that gives the teacher a chance to show off.

"So if friends aren't important to you, and nothing else is important enough to you," Sora said, with his eyes still twinkling, his Goddamn oughtta-be-sky-eyes. "Why are you still alive, Riku Tepes? If the universe if so pointless, why didn't you just kill yourself when you realized it?"

"That's not what I said! I never said that!"

"You about did. C'est la même chose."

"Sora-"

"What the heck, you can't just expect a guy to answer the meaning of life at eight in the morning when he's got to get to English?"

Riku sighed, and Sora let him walk around, let the two walk side by side as Riku headed for the history wing. "Y-yeah." He winced at his stuttering. He knew there were flaws in Sora's argument, but he just said all of it with so little room for pointing out the flaws that Riku had given up.

"Okay, my pretty friend. You have until lunch."

Riku frowned at him and Sora just grinned. "What, is it the pretty part, the friend part or the lunch part?"

And he just sighed and turned down one hallway and pounded up the stairs like maybe if he rain hard enough and fast enough he'd push the stairs back, down, make them slip and carry away the bottom of the world with it. How convenient that would be.

But Sora just bounded up the stairs with him, maybe panting a little harder, not picking up that Riku didn't care how much he was questioned or ridiculed or how much his eyes were opened, he didn't want to be questioned when he didn't see the validity in any of this conversation. Why was Sora acting like he was some...some deep goddamn guru or something? His questions were riddled with holes. Riku was just too tired to point them out as thoroughly as he ought to.

"Well?" he asked, still following next to Riku.

"All of them, I guess."

"Hey, I'll explain at lunch when you tell me the meaning of life."

"Sora," he said, half-exasperated, and then half-horrified at how familiar and downright...teenaged he sounded when he said that.

"Ri-ku," Sora said back, tilting his head to one side, then the other. He smiled and leaned forward, then back, shifting on his feet and staring at his right hand. He wiggled his fingers.

"Did you know," he said quietly. "That there's a suicide every forty seconds?"

Riku started. He'd been staring into his classroom, just to take stock of how many people were in there, just to see if he should be worried about being late. He glanced at Sora, who was still looking at his hand with the three gauze-wrapped fingers, the rest of it covered by fingerless gloves, who was still rocking back and forth on his feet.

"What?"

"Every forty seconds. Somebody kills himself. From the time that you start your first period to the time it ends? Ninety kids have died. From the time school starts to the time it ends? Six hundred and thirty kids," and Riku was right, his eyes were shiny, shiny the way they became shiny if you thought about dead things or hateful things or hurtful things.

"Sora..."

"What?" he looked back up to the taller boy, indignant. "What? I'm just saying, it might help you answer my question."

I don't want to answer your question, Riku thought, a bit viciously. I don't think it's a valid question. I think you're just being vain, thinking that you're some kind of damn genius when all you have is a tongue and a fact and basic math skills.

The warning bell rang, the one that screamed in monotone you have five minutes to get to class, that shouted get a move on, that invaded the privacy of a person's mind. Sora winced, and stared at Riku with his big, oughtta-sky eyes that were shiny and a little red, and tried to smile like someone was pulling his mouth up with string.

"Do you know how much it pisses me off that people take their own lives when so many people are missing people that died on accident?"

'On accident.' Real Sora was so much...different from dream-Sora. So much ess eloquent.

But he was already half jogging down the hall to his class. Even though he'd followed Riku up to his, Sora's class was probably on the opposite side of the buildling, knowing him.

Not that Riku did.

Riku liked his history teacher. She was very...good at what she did.

She was a small woman, shorter than many of her students, and when she spoke she spoke so softly that you had to strain to hear what she was saying. And because of that, everyone wanted to hear what she was saying. Nobody had ever heard her raise her voice - oh, there were rumors that it happened, but nobody had seen it happen.

So Riku always paid attention to what she had to say, first period every single morning.

"Would someone please tell me what the homework was yesterday?"

There was a silent sort of rustling where everyone expected everyone else to sacrifice themselves. That perpetually selfish attitude of people, of asking other people to do things you won't do yourself - Riku hated that, too.

Finally - "Yes, Zack?"

"We just had to outline section eight point four."

His teacher nodded, and looked at the class. "And I hope everyone did that. Get out your binders and a pencil, we have an open notes quiz."

Riku tried not to snort too loudly. Open notes quizzes were so...pointless. Just check if people did the work or not. It always took the class twice as long as it took him, too.

So of course he had fifteen minutes to sit there, staring at a wall and considering Sora's stupid question.

"Why haven't you just killed yourself, if there's nothing worth living for?"

He hadn't said that. He didn't say he had no reason for living. He'd said the universe didn't care who you were friends with.

And at the end of class, as he walked into English, Sora's second stupid sentence poked him in the gut. Who tells a person something like that?

From the time you start your first period to the time it ends? Ninety kids have died. Krsshk. Killed themselves, said a Sora in his head.

He sighed and took a seat in the back of the classroom, already waiting for the day to be over, counting down the three-hundred-sixty-some-odd minutes until the release.

And of course, of course, Sora would be in this class. Riku wondered to himself how he hadn't noticed him yesterday, but then realized that in his chronic state of ignoring anyone near him, especially in English, it wasn't remarkable. Sora wasn't that remarkable a kid, after all.

But then he sat down next to Riku, and for once he was glad that he'd somehow gotten landed in English class with the infamous Mr. Reno who was quite possibly the scariest shit in West Destiny Islands High School. Because if you tried to talk in his class, he didn't send you to the principal's office, he had you stand up and recite the Oath of Shame, which he gave everyone a copy of at the beginning of the year. Mr. Reno was intense, but one thing Riku appreciated about him was the fact that he at least enjoyed the things he taught.

Things happened in Mr. Reno's class that any person would think were rumors, because you couldn't believe a teacher could be like that and still teach in a public high school.

Fifteen minutes into the lesson that day, Kairi raised her hand.

"Okay, think about it, Holden's not calling her and he not-calls her like fourteen times in the beginning of - yeah, Kairi?"

"Mr. Reno, can I go to the bathroom?"

And Mr. Reno started, and narrowed his eyes. He walked up to Kairi's desk, put his hands on it, and leaned forward. It was like a snake trying to stare down a bunny.

"No, Kairi."

"But-" all things considered, it was remarkable that she could even say that much. Riku'd been on the receiving end of that stare before. Mr. Reno tried a little too hard. Riku didn't like him that much, really.

"Why can't I let you go to the bathroom? Because you're bored. And you don't really have to go to the bathroom, do you?"

Kairi winced. "Um-"

"I'll ignore this little incident if you don't do it again, hm, Kairi? Don't want to start your Tuesday repeating the Oath of Shame, do we?"

The smaller redhead winced.

And the whole class went like that, and Riku couldn't help but feel that it was so pointless. How school just kept going when peoples' lives were getting interrupted. When Riku had so much to think about - and no, little of it about Sora - he was stuck in a classroom with the crazy English teacher listening to Catcher in the Rye read aloud, one paragraph at a time, one kid at a time.

"Okay! Okay! Wait, I totally forgot! Sorry, Sora, you'll go tomorrow." Mr. Reno stood up and shook his head. "Um. Essays! You have to all write essays!"

Stunned silence. Not that it was unusual in his class.

"Personal essays! What makes you. Whatever. You get it. All that...shit, just, whatever! Nobody move I left the copies of the outline in the copy room!" Mr. Reno dashed out of the room frantically, and Riku sighed. Mr. Reno, it seemed, tried too hard to be quirky sometimes. He didn't seem to understand that it was only endearing if it was completely sincere. Riku really didn't like that about him.

This was one of those moments that just wasted his life. Completely unnecessary, to him.

Next to him, though, Sora was frozen stiff.

"Um. Riku?"

Riku didn't say anything. He wasn't very fond of Sora any more.

"Riku, uh, I'm not good at essays."

Riku rolled his eyes. Sora didn't get that you weren't supposed to talk when Mr. Reno wasn't in the room.

"And?"

"I mean, it's just using...a lot of English words, and...and I'm bad at spelling, and Riku he said it was a personal essay -"

"I don't see how this is my problem."

Sora made and 'erk' sound and stared at him with wide eyes. "Okay, fine, smarty-pants, you really just don't want any friends - "

"Not in this high school, no."

"So what, in college you'll be a social butterfly?"

"Yeah, sure. Whatever."

Sora laughed, and Riku realized with a start that they were the only people in the class talking. He hoped Sora lowered his voice.

"That'll work out. Get no social experience whatsoever and just, what, rely on beginner's luck when you graduate? Job interviews? You don't need anybody until they'll stay for a long, looong time."

What a goddamn lonely person Riku Tepes was.

"Come on, just help a stranger out with his essay."

He didn't even really have a right to be.

"You like angst? I can tell you angst. I've got lots of angst."

"Sora..." Riku sighed. "Shut up. Whatever. Yes, I'll help you, okay?"

And in the same way nobody seemed to be paying attention, nobody seemed to take note of this completely off-base and ridiculous happening, nobody was definitely going to tell their friends about it at lunch, nobody wondered what the hell Sora had that they didn't, and nobody wondered why Riku had said more than three words that day.

"Thank you! See, you don't know it, but I just helped you out with a future job interview. I bet you're just socially awkward."

"...I don't like people," Riku said. And he was mildly disappointed to discover that this did, in fact, completely sum up his thoughts on people as a whole. That was the problem. He just didn't like them.

"So, if you met people you liked, you'd be friends with them?"

Riku didn't say anything. That was another thing about Riku Tepes. If he wanted a conversation to stop somewhere, the conversation stopped. He just wouldn't reply any more.

So Mr. Reno came back and went on a little rant about personal essays, and when the kids groaned he glared at the class collectively and told them it was practice for college applications. And that if that didn't satisfy them, they could make up their own damn reasons why this essay was a good idea, because the whole junior class had to do them anyways.

And Sora just sat next to Riku and smirked, and smirked, and smirked. Riku found himself growing rapidly tired of this boy who thought he'd made it past his defenses, just because Riku figured out that talking back at him made him go away faster.

I don't need any friends. And if I did, they sure as hell wouldn't be French, and they wouldn't be philosophical at eight in the morning, and they wouldn't ask me for help on English essays, and they'd know the difference between intelligence and just asking stupid questions.

Sora followed him into the lunch room, too. Riku didn't say anything.

"Prickly guy, aren't you? What, did I piss you off? Haven't you ever thought you might be wrong about something?"

He was like a little child, is what.

"I didn't really expect you to have an answer for me by lunch, you know. Heck, when somebody asked me what reason I had for living it took me nine months to figure out an answer that satisfied me, and I couldn't even tell the guy since we weren't in contact any more."

Riku hated the lunch room, too. How every group of people always sat at a specific table, and if they found someone sitting at "their" table before them they acted like it was the biggest social affront a person could commit. But when Riku sat at a table, you either found someplace else to complain or you shut the heck up and ate your food. That's what lunch with Riku Tepes was. Silent.

"But hey, nine months after I got asked I gave birth to a big 'appy epiphany!"

"So you're just asking this question because you already know the answer." He hated that, too. The way people would ask something like 'Hey, do you know what radiolarian ooze is?', even though damn near nobody outside a marine biology lab knows what the hell 'radiolarian ooze' is, because somebody wanted to act smarter than you.

"No." Sora frowned at him, sitting down at the nearest lunch table.

And Riku was all set to pull a Riku and walk right on by him and let the conversation end right there.

But Sora pulled what Riku would later refer to as a Sora and grabbed his wrist, yanking him down onto the seat next to him.

"I just think, well, it helped me get through a lot of stuff, so it might help other people. And you look like somebody who could use a little help, you know?"

Riku stared at him. Behind him, he could feel the beginnings of a glare from whatever group's table they'd ended up sitting at.

"Ow," he said definitively, yanking his arm from Sora's hand and fishing his lunch out of his backpack. It wasn't like he had any place better to eat a turkey sandwich.

Sora snerked, but got up to go buy his lunch, leaving his backpack next to Riku and returning a few silent minutes later with a big grin.

"You know that Zack Fair guy, he's an okay guy."

Riku stabbed at his yogurt with a spoon.

"Well yeesh. I thought the guy who just moved here was supposed to be the introverted one."

How generic Sora was. How boring. How disappointing. How absolutely God-awful uninteresting he'd become in a few short minutes. He'd become another goddamn Zack.

"Hey, can I share my epiphany with you, Riku Tepes?"

Riku snorted and stabbed at his yogurt again. "What, this life-changing meaning of life thing?"

"Sort of. I mean, you're referring to what I'm talking about."

"Fine. Whatever."

Riku wondered if he could really justify how much he lashed out. He was wary of being just another angry teenager, versus a guy just sick of the world. Which brought up Sora's stupid, pointless question again. Why keep living? Was he just afraid?

Dammit, if I'm going to think deep thoughts, I want to think them myself!

What a selfish person Riku Tepes was.

"I've figured," Sora said quietly, "Living is basically the best form of revenge I can take. You know? Screw you universe, you kill - you pull some stupid stuff, I won't even let it phase me! I'll just...just be upset and, and keep going! You know? Screw you universe!" Sora laughed.

Riku felt a little pang of guilt. He didn't really know Sora's story. He probably had to tell somebody that. Made sense it would be Riku - who was he going to tell? His betta?

So all Riku said was "Oh," just as quietly, and not harshly (as much as he could manage).

"Is that an 'oh, I think that's pretty dumb but obviously the kid's in a fragile state so I'll just placate him' oh, or is it a different one?"

"I think..." He was tempted to stop his sentence there when he looked over at Sora, who had his chin in his hand and was absently spearing pasta with his plastic cafeteria fork. "That's actually pretty good, for a kid our age."

"Yeah?" Sora smiled. "I kinda hoped so. It's kinda been my, um...devise. What's it? Motto."

"Been through shit?" He didn't know what made him ask. Maybe it was that look in Sora's eyes that said he wanted somebody who didn't care to ask him about it.

"I shouldn't really tell you."

"Yeah, sorry," Riku agreed, leaning back to toss his trash in the nearest dumpster.

"But, um," Sora brightened. "About that English essay thing. Are you free today? Could you, um, come over to my house to brainstorm? I usually get picked up but Tuesdays I walk home. It's only about half an hour away. And I'm not good with the...writing thing. In English. Even in French, it was my worst subject. So?"

Riku frowned. He hated going over to peoples' houses. You never knew, exactly, which rooms it was socially acceptable to go into without a host, how comfortable you could get on the furniture, and if they had pets...well.

"Riku."

"Sora."

"Say yes. I can seriously guilt you into doing this like you have no idea, and it'll make you even more uncomfortable than you are now. I swear to God." And he looked so serious that Riku almost burst out laughing, were it not for the fact that it would have been completely unlike him. He couldn't remember laughing so hard he couldn't breathe.

"How so?"

"It has to do with therapy," Sora taunted him in a sing-song voice. "Oh, hey, when does lunch period end?"

Riku sighed. "...twelve fifteen."

"And that other thing? Man, you would not believe my house. It's so ridiculous. My foster mum is insane, I'm telling you."

Foster mother? Riku didn't bother mentally asking himself if Sora's parents were dead, then. It would have been too stupid for words, like those people that ask 'Where am I?' after waking up, no matter how obvious it is you're in a hospital.

So he hoped he wasn't saying it out of pity when he said "Fine. If you need help with your essay." That seemed like a valid reason to ask for help. Riku respected that. Asking for help when you needed it.

So Sora's pros may have had a lead on his cons, but another kind of people Riku hated, he hated people who made unreasonable assumptions when all they had was right-now information.

He hated those people.

A/N: If you ask me if Taylor Mali is...

a) a musician

b) a woman

c) dead

I will smack you on the nose.

Anyways.

So, credit goes to Mr. Mali for the poem at the beginning, and I can give you a link if you want to see the whole thing or some of his other poem texts (or just google his name, his website comes up first thing).

Non-Mali-things:

Also vaguely referenced here was 'Suicide Notes' by (oddly enough) the Suicide Kings, which is probably the most depressing spoken poetry I've ever heard in my life. Anyways. That's where the 'living is the best form of revenge' thing comes from. I think I'm not conceited enough to actually put my own philosophies on here and have characters be like 'ooh that's smart'. I've seen people do that. 'S friggin annoying. And doesn't it bother anybody else when fan fiction gets deep like that? I read fan fic to enjoy myself. I wanna think I'll read a book. So don't take any of this seriously unless you want to.

But I'd love to hear good or bad thoughts so far? This is pretty different from what I usually do, Nitlon-standards.