Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts. I do, however, own the Standard Handbook for Secretaries, Eighth Edition by Lois Hutchinson--which informs me, among other things, that to split or not to split your infinitives does not determine the skill of a writer. I find this comforting.

Pairings: Riku/Sora main

Warnings: Rose-tinted 90's nostalgia, boy/boy situations, the use and abuse of several cliches, unreliable narrators, excessive presence of flannel, Riku driving, Sora expressing badass-ocity, grunge rock, recreational drug use and references to stoner culture, language, conveniently placed trees, cheerleaders in glitter makeup, people who know the alma mater, teenagers, smoking in the boys' room, fistfighting in the boys' room, and more to be added, probably.

Summary: It's about growing up, mostly. Sometimes it's about the guy you totally didn't kiss in the locker room and sometimes it's about the guy who climbed in your window. Sometimes it's about hockey. But sometimes it's about the difference between what's real and what's fake, between what you own and what you fight, between being a boy and being a man.

Casey would like you to note: In case anyone was wondering, this is what happens when you put all three of them in a room together. Also, Riku's family? Nuts. I love them.

And again--THANK YOU to everyone reading and reviewing and favorite-ing and alerting. You are all awesome.

4: Nearly Lost You

"What the hell are you doing?" Sora hissed after the RA closed the door behind him, and was pretty sure he'd said the exact same thing last night. He was still trying to remove the phone cord from its tangle around and between and underneath his arms.

"Thought I'd make it official." Roxas settled his boombox on the unused desk, the one by the window, and dumped his duffels on the floor next to it. His skateboard was already stowed in place by the door, with Sora's rollerblades, innocently taking up space on Roxas's behalf that had once been blessedly Roxas-free. "This way I have a place to stay, and you don't get in trouble for it. Two birds, one stone." He turned around to flash Sora another Christmas-morning grin.

Sora decided it was pure evil.

Once untangled, he remained on his bed for the entire process of Roxas ingraining himself into Sora's space, copy of Hamlet propped open on his pillow, dutifully taking notes and scribbling cartoons in the margins. Above and beyond all that, he watched Roxas haul piles of t-shirts and flannels and baggy jeans and cargos and pair after pair of Converse into the formerly-empty wardrobe, the lot disappearing inside, perhaps never to be seen again, with the state of mess Roxas kept his clothing in. Watched him carry an armload of hairstyling product into the bathroom and mourned the imminent lack of counter space. Watched him do it all in time with Alice in Chains (thankfully kept at a reasonable volume) booming out of his stereo. He'd set that up first, immediately securing it in place on the desk and plugging it in; the only thing Roxas had done prior to that was find a nook for his skateboard.

Sora observed his priorities, and filed this information away in the growing pile behind his mental couch.

Roxas finally paused and looked around the room again--duffel bags now empty and stowed atop the wardrobe, toiletries arranged in the bathroom, backpack neglected by the desk. Stacks of CDs taking over what little desk space remained and a small pile of books shoved just out of sight. Finally, he paused at the phone mounted on the wall, just aside from Sora's desk. There was a short list of phone numbers hanging beside it--Sora watched him scroll through them all. Mom. Grandma. Kairi home and Kairi pager. Flying Pie. There was a space just below where he'd almost written in Riku's name a few times, anticipating that one of these mornings or lunch periods or after-practice walks home, the boy was going to scrawl the digits on the back of his wrist in blue rollerball ink.

Roxas grabbed a pen off of Sora's desk and began writing. Something. Sora twisted around and finally sat up, peering around the bunk post to see.

Roxas cell, it said.

"You did page me from the tree!"

"Yeah." Roxas looked up from scratching out the digits, leaning back and recapping the pen in satisfaction. "Why, who'd you think it was?"

Sora shrugged a little, leaning back into the safety of his bunk. "Um. The tree?"

Roxas stared at him for a long moment, some level of open-mouthed bafflement painted on his face. "You're a weird kid, you know that?"

"Eheh." Sora attempted a grin, but it might have failed by way of embarrassment. He shrugged and reverted the subject back to what he'd originally intended. "You seriously have a cell phone?"

Roxas pulled it out of his pocket and waved it in the air, nothing fancy, some kind of silver flip-phone, in fact being flipped open at the moment. "What's the number here?"

Sora nodded to himself and carefully straightened, placing both feet on the floor, and leveled Roxas with a stern, not-really-intimidating-but-attempting-such stare. "Are you a dealer?"

Roxas met his glare, eyes wide for a moment, then narrowed and his mouth pulled into a smirk. "Nickel bags are twenty, dimes are double."

"What?"

"I know, inflation's a bitch."

Sora made a low strangled noise.

Roxas held his poise and smirk for a moment longer, then snickered and started laughing. "I'm kidding, Sora."

"Really." He drew the word out in disbelief, shoes scraping against the floor and scowled when Roxas just snickered again behind his hand, pressing some more buttons on his phone.

"I'm not a dealer, Sora." He rolled his eyes and tossed the cell over, Sora fumbling before capturing it between his hands. "Received call list. Check it out."

Sora frowned at the tiny monochrome screen, and it took him a few minutes to figure out how to scroll around through the list--most of it seemed to be taken up by a single number, with the odd notation 'Ax' at the end. Then one just labeled 'home line'. A couple interspersed with the cryptic title 'Z dorm'. Another from a Hayner, and then two from a Nami. More from 'Ax'. Olette, another home line, and yet more Ax. Nothing anonymous, but Sora wasn't entirely sure that proved anything.

"Number's there under the receiver." Sora mumbled it, handing the cell back. It was going to nag at him for a while, he was sure, but he'd let it drop for now.

Roxas punched some buttons into the little device and then flipped it closed, crossing the room again to drop it on his desk. Sora wondered idly what he'd labeled the number.

"Don't look so down." Roxas clambered onto the top bunk, then leaned over the edge, peering at Sora upside-down. "I thought you'd be cool with this, Sora."

He scratched out a line of misspelled notes with gusto. "What made you think that?"

"Because I'm the only one who knows the truth about you and Riku."

Sora flopped back onto his pillow, picking up the book to find his page again. "I don't think he likes you much."

"Oh?" Roxas didn't seem surprised to hear it (even upside-down as he was) but the question hung in the air and stretched nevertheless.

"He said you lived to make bad situations worse."

"Really." A strange frown passed over Roxas's face. It looked almost... contemplative. He disappeared from view and back onto his own bunk with a huff of mattress and boy alike. "Well, that explains something, at least."

"What?"

"Stupid shit that happened a long time ago. Forget it."

Sora didn't forget it, though. He filed it, very carefully, in the pile behind the couch marked 'What the Fuck is Up with Riku and Roxas?' Most of the piles seemed to be titled with questions like this.

If Roxas snored tonight, Sora decided, he was going to kick the mattress. He didn't care how soft it was.

"Hey, Roxas?"

"Hey yourself."

Sora shifted on his back, tongue wetting his lips and toes resting on one of the slats crossing the bunk above him. The headlights of a car crossed the room slowly. "So... your family's loaded or something, right?"

Rustle of blankets somewhere above. "...what makes you say that?"

"Well... you have a cell phone." Sora shrugged and figured it was matter-of-fact; that was just something you didn't see every day. He let his leg drop to rest on his knee, stuffing his arms under his pillow. "And a boombox with a CD player. And, like, fifty pairs of Converse."

"More like fifteen." Roxas made the correction in a wry tone, still and otherwise quiet on the top bunk. "And that doesn't prove anything."

"Whatever." Another shrug against the pillow and Sora kicked absently at the air around his foot. "I'm right, aren't I?"

Puff of air in the dark, something between a sigh and a huff. "...something like that, I guess."

"Oh. That's cool."

The silence lasted another few moments, and then there was a shuffling above, Roxas turning to face the wall, and that tended to be a sort of gesture that the conversation was over. Sora frowned, because he wasn't done yet.

He straightened his legs back flat on the blankets. "So. Um." He braced himself for either a retort or a pointed lack of response. "Did you get kicked out?"

For a few minutes he thought he'd ended up with the latter; then, slightly muffled by the pillow and the direction he was facing, Roxas muttered, "I left."

Sora frowned at the general space above him--at the mattress and the wood and voice beyond that. Because being kicked out and leaving pretty much amounted to the same thing, right? "Why?"

There was a sound like a breath, like a mouth opening to respond, but it ended before it got any farther than that. The blankets rustled, being tugged up higher.

"Roxas?"

Silence.

Sora let out a breath, and figured that was probably as far as he was ever going to get in his attempt at understanding this kid who inexplicably decided to worm his way into his life. He couldn't have been in any real trouble--the dorms required signatures and a reasonable explanation.

He could let it go, for now. "G'night."

He didn't expect to hear anything further, but after a moment when he had the blankets pulled up to his chin and was comfortably curled in his pillow, Roxas murmured, "Night, Sora."

This roommate thing might work out. Maybe.

The coach--in his usual manner of partial self-absorption and barely restrained epithets in a booming voice, pacing in front of his office like a caged tiger--was grilling them on the game tomorrow night. Something about school rivalry and defending their honor, waving his hands emphatically at his supposedly rapt audience of halfway dressed-down hockey players, most of them with skates still rolling against the tiled floor.

Sora wasn't paying much attention, mostly because Bactine stung like hell and the scrape down his calf was gritty with pavement dirt that didn't want to remove itself from his broken skin without a fight. So instead of paying attention to the coach and shouting in time with his team at the appropriate breaks in the speech, he was hissing and barely restraining epithets of his own.

It was at this point that the doors at the other end of the locker room opened and the swim team started trailing in.

Sora wasn't watching--not really. It was just easy, from his position bent over his leg, to cast a look over from the corners of his eyes. Watch Riku walking to his locker, dripping wet, goggles around his neck and towel limp over his head and absently rubbing at his hair. Nothing on him but water and a regulation black speedo.

He decided, at some point before that particular sight made his eyes cross, that there would be no awkward shuffling outside his dorm that day.

"EYES FORWARD, DAMMIT! Ogle your boyfriend some other time!"

Sora immediately became very interested in the injury on his leg, casting one apologetic look up at his coach when he rolled his eyes and continued with the tirade. A few of his teammates snickered. One of them, in the corner where the coach didn't have a good view, performed a ridiculous pantomime of making out with the air, others nearby chuckling silently.

It could have been worse, he supposed.

Riku seemed to like fences. Sora wasn't sure exactly why--maybe because they made a good surface to lean against. Maybe it was some kind of symbolic barrier he liked to place himself alongside, a protection against anything that might come from behind. Or maybe, Sora pondered while walking out of the locker room, gaze immediately finding Riku in his usual waiting place against the usual chain links--maybe he just liked the feeling of being on one side of it.

Or maybe symbolism was something that escaped him entirely. His English teacher would probably agree--but sometimes a fence was just a damn fence, and any fence that provided Riku's presence was fine with him.

He left his skates on that day, which made the walk that much more interesting. More like a constant attempt at some kind of compromise--sometimes Riku would have to run to keep up, and Sora would grin back at him and tell him to man it up and Riku would laugh. Sometimes Sora would skate in little circles around him as he walked and Riku would chide him for making him dizzy. Sometimes Sora would just hang on to Riku's backpack and let himself roll along from behind.

"You're heavy," Riku said, coming to a halt. Dormitory looming before them. Teasing smirk on his face. "You're too damn scrawny to be that heavy."

"It's called physique, Riku, I thought you knew about that." Sora let go of the backpack and expertly hopped up the stairs, wheels sliding to a halt at the doorframe. Looked back over his shoulder--innocently, he told himself, and it really was. "You coming?"

Riku looked baffled for a moment, and Sora didn't think he'd ever seen anything like it. His eyebrows went up and disappeared under his bangs, his eyes widened and his mouth dropped open into a silent O. He looked almost lost for a moment before it wore off, clearing his throat and shrugging nonchalantly, casually climbing the steps behind him. "Yeah, sure."

Sora opened the door and rolled into the foyer, smile beaming to the world at large.

"Mail for you, Sora," the dorm mother called from behind her counter, and then without fail her attention landed on Riku, closing the door behind him and following Sora inside. "Oh, hello. Guests are required to sign in, please."

Somehow, the entire building became instantly silent. The normal chatter from the common area ground to a distinct halt, muted shuffling the only indication that it was occupied. He was sure, the feeling nagging on the back of his neck as he rolled backwards towards the stairs while flipping through the envelopes in his hands (two public colleges and an army recruiter), that as many of them as possible were gathered and peering through the door to the foyer--watching as Riku scribbled his name into the guestbook.

He didn't bother looking up to see. He was tired of them--all of them, with their eyes and their knowing glances.

Yes, that's right. Riku is coming up to my room. And nothing is going to actually happen, but you can all talk each other's ears to bleeding about it for all I care.

Sora wondered, holding the banisters with both hands while negotiating the stairs on rows of wheels, when he'd become so defiant. He decided it had something to do with Roxas.

About the time he was curled over his desk finishing off the last problem on his trig homework, Sora started laughing.

Riku looked up from the spot he'd taken on the lower bunk, just on the other side of the desk, textbook in his lap and pencil twirling between his fingers as he puzzled through an essay question. "What?"

"I was just thinking how scandalized everyone downstairs must be right now."

And there it was--slow, small smile on Riku's face, followed by a low chuckle. "So long as you're amused." He set the book and pencil aside, leaning over between the bunk posts to rest his elbows on Sora's desk, arms folded and chin resting atop. "It'll be all over school tomorrow."

"I know." Sora finished the problem and set the pencil down, leaning over his textbook to mirror Riku's position. They examined each other for a long moment, before Riku moved, straightening just enough to reach out with one hand.

"I'm glad you're not so tense anymore." The hand landed in Sora's hair, ruffling through it in a slow pet.

Sora hummed to himself and closed his eyes, feeling fingers traveling to the base of his skull and partway down his neck, shivering, before returning upwards. It was nice, just like that. Really nice. He could stay here for a while--few years, maybe. "Yeah."

"Did something happen last night?" Riku's hand paused but didn't move away, and when Sora opened his eyes he was frowning--in a small way, eyebrows drawn together.

Sora blew a breath against his arm. "Well--"

He was going to tell him about Kairi. He really was--about her, and probably some about Cloud and his mom and maybe the things Kairi had said, although he wasn't sure he wanted to--it was all kind of girly.

Unfortunately, the door to his room chose that moment to all but explode open to admit one blond-headed blur at a dead run, who quickly skidded to a halt and slammed the door behind him, pressed backwards and spreadeagled across it (skateboard secure in one hand). There were a few bits of red crepe paper stuck in his hair.

Roxas took note of the two boys huddled intimately around Sora's desk, each giving him a startlingly different incredulous stare. Riku's hand was still wrapped up in Sora's hair, but he seemed to have forgotten about it.

Roxas raised one hand in a belated greeting. "Sup."

Sora couldn't come up with a response to that, so he just said the obvious. "You have crepe paper in your hair."

"That's possible, yeah."

"That wouldn't be the decorations for the pep rally tomorrow, would it?"

"Hypothetically it could be."

Sora felt his eyes narrowing, taking in Roxas and his crepe paper and skateboard and the evil half-smile on his lips. "What did you do?"

"Nothing illegal."

"Sora." Riku spoke for the first time since the sudden entry, hand slipping out of Sora's hair. He very nearly grabbed it and put it back in place, but Riku's mouth had drawn into a tight line. "What's he doing here?"

The words weren't accusatory, or even resentful--just a quietly worded question. But Roxas and Riku's gazes met across the few feet of space between the desk and the door, and something in the air crackled.

Sora coughed nervously, glancing back and forth between them, Riku coiled against the desk and Roxas still flat and holding the door securely closed. "Uhm. Roxas is kind of my roommate now."

Riku contemplated that for a moment, mouth twisting around itself into something unpleasant that was neither a smile nor a frown. "I see."

Roxas finally moved, tossing his head in annoyance and pushing away from the door with something like a muffled scoff. "Come off it, Riku."

"No, I understand perfectly. Just couldn't resist getting involved, could you?" Riku spurred to action as well, scooting to the edge of the bed and stuffing his homework back in his backpack. Finally muttering to the zipper, "I need to get home."

Sora stood up at that point, chair legs scraping against the linoleum and hands fisted at his sides, and suddenly two pairs of eyes were on him. And somehow, all the tension in the room drained away.

Riku climbed to his feet abruptly and said, "It's just that I need to be back in time for dinner, Sora," at the same time that Roxas waved his arms in something resembling apology and said, "Yanno, it looks like I interrupted something here, so--"

Everything fell to silence for a moment, then Roxas shuffled and looked back and forth between Riku and Sora before muttering, "I'll just... uh..." before ducking backwards into the bathroom, door swinging shut behind him. The faucets turned on.

Riku shuffled in almost exactly the same way, tugging on his backpack straps. "Sorry about that."

"What is it with you two?" Sora leaned against his desk, watching Riku and the way he shifted and the way he finally looked up when Sora spoke.

"He didn't tell you?"

"Not a thing."

"Oh." Riku glanced over at the bathroom then shook his head, pushed his hair out of his face and rolled his eyes. "It's nothing, really. Just stupid."

"That's what he said."

"Well, he's right." Riku moved forward finally, arm around Sora's shoulders and resting his chin against Sora's head. Stayed like that for a long minute, just there and warm.

Sora finally slid his arms around Riku's waist, hands grasping each other loosely at the small of his back. He noted, somewhere behind the warmth and the quiet and his forehead pressed against Riku's shoulder, that he still smelled like bar soap and chlorine.

"You have a game tomorrow, right?" Riku's breath ruffled in his hair.

"Yeah."

"I'll come watch."

Riku pulled away reluctantly, hand lingering in Sora's hair, down the side of his face to his neck before drawing back, apologetic smile quickly becoming that smirk. "Next time."

Sora blinked, feeling cold without all that Riku wrapped around him. "Next time what?"

But Riku just chuckled and walked out the door.

Roxas knew better--but that had never stopped him before. So after pulling the bathroom door closed behind him, he made sure it was ajar, just by a bare crack, because he knew better--but who could resist?

He couldn't hear what they were saying because of the water he'd started running--and prided himself on affording them that much privacy. Through the slit he observed--how they moved around each other, still a little awkward, still uncertain. He figured Sora was probably a virgin, he was just too much of a general dork not to be, and Riku... well, Riku was just cautious by nature. Eventually though they fell into a comfortable embrace, and then they just... stood there.

How boring.

Once he was certain Riku had left, and Sora had flopped bonelessly onto his bed to daydream about that close moment for a while, Roxas swung the door open and flipped the light off, leaning back against the frame with hands shoved in his pockets. "So, what. You don't kiss your boyfriend goodbye?" He grinned when Sora jerked upright and leveled him with a childish glare. "Lame, Sora."

"He's not--I mean, not really..."

"'Yet,'" Roxas finished when Sora's voice trailed off. "The word you want is 'yet'." He stalked across the room to the bunkbeds--he'd figured out how to get to the top bunk by launching himself from the lower one, and thus did so--jostling Sora and most of the bed structure in the process. "And you know, 'yet' is going to be a permanent factor unless one of you takes some initiative."

"And you're concerned about this why?" Sora poked him through the mattress.

Mostly, Roxas figured, because he owed it to Riku. He wasn't entirely sure why, most days, but that was the nearest explanation he could find. "Consider it my good deed for society. You know, community service to make up for all the juvenile delinquency stuff."

"Speaking of which." The bed shivered and Sora's head poked up over the side of his mattress. "What did you do to the pep rally decorations?"

"Nothing." Roxas drew the word out into a long string of vowels.

Sora made a disbelieving "buh" sound and dropped back onto the floor. "I have a game tomorrow, you know."

"Oh yeah, tomorrow's Friday. You've got a hot date lined up with Riku, right?" Roxas propped his chin up on his elbow and watched Sora pace around--remember he still had homework open on his desk, belatedly, and yeah pretty faces could distract a guy that way.

"I have a game, Roxas." Sora muttered it to the cover of his trigonometry book, like that should have explained everything; he'd never quite understood jocks, or how they had so much free time to devote to sports--Roxas spent most of his in detention. "And there's a swim meet on Saturday."

He added these statements up in his head. Sora plus game equals busy. Riku plus swim meet equals equally busy. Early to rise and early to bed, makes a man healthy but his social life dead. "So I take it this means no hot date."

"No."

"Okay, okay, fine." Roxas rolled onto his back and crossed his arms behind his head, smirking at the ceiling--Sora was just too easy to wind up. "You just go ahead and keep dancing around him if that's what you want."

Sora looked up at him with a glare, shoving textbooks back into his backpack before tossing it into the corner where his homework usually landed, sitting back down and paging through that copy of Hamlet again. Like he had last night, frowning in concentration. Sora didn't strike him as the studious type--he struggled too much with it and distracted too easily.

Roxas figured there was an explanation, then, for why he was so set on getting all that work done, every night. It would come up later.

"Hey."

"What." The annoyance was audible in Sora's voice, and Roxas realized he had a fantastic view of the top of the kid's head from his bunk. Right there at the end, the desk situated just below.

Too bad he had nothing to drop. "Tell you what, I'll take off for a while on Sunday. Invite him over or something, you can do homework together or whatever boring stuff you two do."

"...Okay."

Roxas took that as a truce, and pulled a paperback out from under his pillow. Just as he was settled in reading, though, Sora's voice drifted back up from behind his own book. "Hey, Rox?"

"Hm?"

"Wha'd you do to the pep rally decorations?"

Roxas offered a dark chuckle and nothing further.

Riku had never realized how fascinating spaghetti could be.

The part of his brain that was fully aware of himself and his surroundings knew, in fact, that the spaghetti was nothing special. It knew that Riku was only staring at it twirling around his fork absently because there were other, more pressing matters on his mind. It also knew that Riku's parents, who had been observing this behavior for nearly fifteen minutes, were now whispering to each other--and furthermore that Riku's little sister was making faces at him, and his older brother was preparing to launch a spoonful of peas at his head.

Riku himself, in the part of his mind that he currently occupied, was aware of none of this. His eyes were focused on the ropes of noodles and sauce spinning on his fork--around and around again--and his thoughts dwelt entirely upon the memory of touch. Of hair under his fingers and a warm body pressed against his, arms around his waist, and it would have been so easy... He was certain of it, that Sora's mouth would have been soft and pliant, that Sora would have clutched at him, whimpered a bit and pressed closer. He was sure Sora would taste like salt and bubblegum.

These were the thoughts Riku was having when a spoonful of peas smashed against his face, startling him enough that he all but jumped out of his chair.

He instantly cast a glare across the table at his brother, spoon waving absently with an innocent grin on his face. "Mao--"

"No fighting at the table, please. Mao, you can clean that up when you're done."

Riku's attention traveled to his mother, whose hands were folded primly over her plate, watching him with her head tilted to one side. Beside her, his father was rolling his eyes skyward and folding his napkin. At his side, his sister was offering him a brightly evil eight-year-old smile.

All their plates were empty.

"So, Riku." His mother smiled softly and leaned forward on her elbows. "What's his name?"

Riku paused, choked on nothing and reached for his glass of water.

His father shook his head. "Honestly, Risa--"

"Now dear, we promised we'd be supportive."

"I am supportive. I have nothing but pride in my second son, whom I love dearly." His father nodded to himself in mock solemnity, placing one hand dramatically over his heart. "I even got a bumper sticker to prove it. It's right between 'My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student' and 'Visualize Whirled Peas'." He paused here to rest his elbows on the table and tap his fingers together, staring upwards as though contemplating the mysteries of the universe. "What I don't understand is why this means he has to date boys."

Riku wondered if it was possible to drown oneself in a glass of water.

His mother was shaking her head and muttering something regarding the intentional idiocy of husbands in general, at the same time as his brother rolled his shoulders and held up his hands. "Not to worry, Dad, I can explain everything. You see, when two people--two male people--love each other very much--"

And during all of this, above and beyond it, his sister had taken up a beat, drumming against her plate with a knife and fork. "Ri-ku has a boy-friend. Ri-ku has a boy-friend."

Why. Why, why, why did he have to be born in this household? Or at all, for that matter.

"That's ENOUGH, all of you." His mother's voice brought the table to something approaching silence, until it finished with, "Now stop that, Haru, before you break Mommy's dishes."

For a few moments, there was blessed silence, Riku spending it poking at his spaghetti and plucking a squished pea off the side of his face. His dinner had gone cold, and he wasn't really hungry to begin with.

Eventually, though, his father pushed his glasses up his nose and sighed. "You know we're just giving you a hard time, son. It is our sworn duty as your family to embarrass you whenever possible."

"Sweetheart," his mother pressed, leaning even closer now. "What's his name?"

Riku groaned and slid down in his seat, tossing his napkin over the remains of dinner. "What makes you think--"

"Oh, nothing," Mao interrupted with a smirk, eyebrows waggling suggestively. "Just the way you stared so lovingly at your spaghetti. We were waiting for you to start a sonnet, you know--ode to a meatball--"

"You've been taking double lunches for the past two days." His mother nodded.

"And you've been playing that Bush song." His father pulled off his glasses and rubbed his forehead. "A lot."

Riku slid lower in the chair, folding his arms over his chest and hoping that if he held very, very still they would think he had vanished.

"Come on, Riku," his mother chided, like she was coaxing him to just try the brussels sprouts--because really, he might like them if he gave them a chance. No luck. "We don't have Mao to keep tabs on you at school anymore, so open up a little. What's his name?"

He pressed his tongue against his teeth, eyes traveling all around until they could settle somewhere safe--which ended up being a spot at the edge of the tablecloth to his right. Then mumbled, "Sora."

"So-ra." His brother drawled the name, rolling his eyes upwards. "I don't remember a Sora, is he an underclassman?"

"Transfer."

"Oh, wonderful." His mother folded her hands in front of her face, smiling brilliantly. "Tell me all about him!"

At his side, again, Haru tapped quietly at her plate and sang to herself, quietly, "Ri-ku has a boy-friend."

"Um." Riku balked at the stares coming at him from every direction, finding that spot on the tablecloth again. "He lives in the dorms. And he's on the hockey team."

"Hockey team..." His father repeated the phrase and trailed off, finger tapping at his chin. Riku could almost see the distorted image forming in his mind.

"Ri-ku has a boy-friend."

"Poor dear," his mother intoned at nearly the same time. "Why does he live in the dorms?"

Riku frowned, at himself this time, wondering the same thing. "I didn't think to ask."

"Aha." His father raised his hand and rapped it against the edge of the table in victory. "I've got it. Hockey player, big handsome muscle man, right? That's a bit overboard, even for me, but if it makes my second son, whom I love dearly, happy, then--"

"Ri-ku has a boy-friend."

"Actually," Riku said, and didn't realize how loud his voice was until the table fell silent. He cleared his throat and repeated, softly, "Actually, he's kind of small. Shorter than me, I mean, and kind of skinny. He's a speed demon on the court, though. You should see him." He rubbed the edge of the table with one finger, watching it move back and forth. "His eyes are blue. Like, really bright blue, and he has this amazing smile--"

Riku stuttered to a halt abruptly, realizing that he'd been rambling on while his entire family listened--and that he had an embarrassingly silly grin on his face. He rapidly replaced it with a grimace. "I mean--uh..."

His mother leaned back abruptly. "Haru, will you take the plates to the sink, please? And Mao--clean up the mess you made."

Murmurs of "yes, mom" passed around as everyone aside from Riku and his still-beaming mother stood and began clearing the table quietly. She stood up when they'd all disappeared into the kitchen, rounding the table to sit in the vacated seat at his side.

"You're absolutely adorable, Riku, you know that?"

"Mom."

"Invite him for dinner sometime." She patted his head gently, moving to stand and then leaning over his shoulder once again. "And--find another song to play, okay sweetie? It really is kind of annoying."

Riku groaned and dropped his head on the table, not sure if he was fully mortified yet or if his siblings still had further horrors planned out for the remainder of the evening. There was no way he was bringing Sora to this... insanity. His family. At least he didn't have to explain it to them--and they would never think to ask, and thank god Mao was in college now--that his supposed boyfriend was currently just a show. A farce to support each other until the rumor died.

And when it did--when it sputtered and died like a spent candle and faded into the collective student body memory, then everything would be real. If he was lucky... maybe sooner than that.

He still wasn't bringing Sora for dinner, though. There was no way in heaven or hell.

8/11/08 EDITED for: Accuracy in speedos and clarifying dry humor that was a little too dry.