Title: Night Heat

Wordcount: 2332

Pairing: Riku/Yuffie

Rating: T

Notes: Leon always gets incredibly disturbed when it comes to Yuffie and Riku's little misadventures. :) While this definitely isn't my favourite, I do like how it turned out.

Night Heat

If there is one thing about the Destiny Islands he never thought he'd miss, this was it.

Destiny Island and the surrounding area, including his home town, is notoriously hot during the days, but the evenings are crisp and comfortable and the nights cool. It is wonderful - cool enough to go to bed with a blanket but hot enough that you don't roast. Riku generally didn't like that temperature - it was almost too cold for his tastes, as someone who loves the warmth like nothing else. He had hated it, sometimes.

But now, he wants nothing more than that comfortable temperature, perfectly moderate.

Traverse Town, apparently, has that hot city heat all night.

He paces his room restlessly, the fabric of his t-shirt clinging to his skin in a disgusting sort of way, his body heat acting like some sort of glue. It is disturbingly hot, and the glow of the streetlights outside do nothing to help, straining through the old lace drapes covering the window, leaving a musty light to highlight everything. His bare feet slap the green carpet, finding it only warm and scratchy.

Letting out a frustrated sigh, wide awake and in a hot sweat, his bangs plastered to his forehead and his eyes open, Riku scowls. Ugh. Ugh.

Deciding that he'd rather be walking around than pacing his room for hours on end - it is terribly boring at three in the morning - he opens his door and heads down the hall.

The house the four coexist in is small, cramped, but fairly comfortable. Yuffie had told him shortly after his arrival that, she, Leon and Aerith had saved for years to move into an actual house, not the single-roomed shack they had lived in for a short while, or the hotel rooms before that. An honest, actual, REAL house, that was their place to live "forever 'n ever" where she has her own bedroom. Leon and Aerith share one down the hall. His is a tiny, temporary bedroom usually used for storage, but now it is his. For the time being, anyway.

Hoping the living room - cramped like every other room in the damn house - will offer some sort of solace from the heat, he seats himself on the couch, yawning. It isn't any help, though the room was darker than this, and, somehow, a tiny bit cooler. Moonlit-born shadows creep under a doorway to his right, and without having to look at the childish scrawl on the door, ("The Greatest Ninja Babe EVER Sleeps Here" isn't a story he knows, yet, but he will eventually) he already knows who is behind those two inches of wood. He waits, fingers silently drumming the couch's beaten armrest, listening for something to signal to him. No noise. None at all.

It is scary to think that a house with Yuffie in it is a house that has quiet, no matter what hour of the day.

So he does the only thing logical to his slightly-heat-deranged mind at that very moment.

He pushes the door open.

Yuffie doesn't look up for a moment, as she is more occupied with other things. There is a lollipop in her mouth, and a book in one hand, and her headphone are on and blaring so loudly that Riku can almost make out the, "Lalala" currently drowning Yuffie's eardrums in upbeat dance music. Sprawled on her stomach like a cat, one elbow propping her head up, she flips the pages of her comic book, skimming the words and focusing more on the pictures. Riku notes her attire - a loose-fitting camisole and boy-cut panties, and can't help but blush.

After a few moments, she feels his eyes glued to her, and using one thumb, she unhooks a headphone from her ear. Riku's eyes wander from one ear to her eyes, to her mouth, her lips and tongue stained red from the candy. She looks straight at him, music still going in one ear, and says, "What's up?"

"I can't sleep," seems like an awfully lame excuse, he realizes, so the next best thing is a laid-back remark of, "It's hot and I'm bored."

She rolls over onto her back, book flopping over, the other headphone falling so it hung from her neck. Riku can easily make out the words of her music like that, and she stares at him with wide eyes for a moment.

"So you invade my room?" she says, grinning, looking at him upside down, hanging off the edge of the bed. The book falls to the floor as she rocks the mattress, springing up with a grin and waltzing over to link an arm with him. "Y'should have let me know earlier... I wouldn't have sat around bored to tears on my own. Let's go bake cookies or somethin'!"

Riku doesn't particularly like cooking. But with nothing else better to do, he allows himself to be dragged off, and five minutes later, he finds himself not at the counter, but on the floor, with a ring of ingredients around him, the mixing bowl on his lap. Yuffie kneels in front of him, cheerfully cracking eggs and dropping them into the mixing bowl with a slopping noise, pausing to pick out chips of fallen shell.

"Butter?" he asks, and she crawls around him to grab it from the dish by his hip. He stirs the batter endlessly, the wooden spatula scraping the sides of the metal bowl. "Geez," he adds, "are you sure this is sanitary, being on the floor and all?"

"It's cooler down here," she retorts, "and besides, it's not like we're making it straight off the floor... and we do wash the floor, y'know."

The cookie dough is mostly complete as she dumps a chunk of butter in, and a giant cupful of sugar. Measuring takes too much time, Yuffie thinks, so she never bothers counting ouch each number. A bit here, a bit there, she doesn't think she needs to, though Riku notices that there is so much sugar in there that someone's going to be diabetic sooner or later.

"Heh", he chuckles back, "I hate cooking, so don't mind me."

She raises one eyebrow, two stray locks of dark hair falling over one eye. "Hey," she asks, "then why'd you say yes?"

"'Cause it's better than nothing and you didn't give me a choice," he teases back, and she prods his nose gently.

"Of course!" she grins.

Sticking her fingers straight in the dough and stealing a handful, she plops it down in a sticky mass in the middle of the cookie tray. Riku does the same, cheerfully shaping them into smaller piles, instead of letting it mass into one giant cookie dough mound, refusing to let it become a cookie pizza. Yuffie's nimble fingers shape out stars and hearts and ninja weapons, while his become clubs and spades and diamonds to match her hearts. As the sheet fills, balanced between their laps, Yuffie scrapes a bit of dough from the side of the bowl, and offers it to Riku. When he declines, she pops it into her mouth with a grin.

"Don't like cookie dough?" she asks coyly, fingers grasping a bit of dough, offering it again. When he can't lie and say, "No," he grins and takes her hand by the wrist, picking the dough off her hand with his other hand, popping it in his mouth.

"It's okay," he says, she laughs and licks her fingers clean in a catlike sort of way. "Kairi used to bake stuff for us."

"Really?" Yuffie says, leaning back and staring up at the ceiling, tilting her head back. Riku likes the way her neck looks like that, smooth and exposed, not covered by scarves or collars. Kissable, really.

"Yup."

"Miss her lots?"

He doesn't like those sorts of questions, the really obvious ones that grate at his mind and make him feel guilty over the things he's done.

"Yup."

"She's cute. She stayed with us after... well, y'know. She was really nice and sweet, and while she was too girly sometimes, she was fun," Yuffie says, and before she can launch into a ramble, as Yuffie is prone to do, Riku cuts her off.

"Yep. Kairi's pretty awesome."

"Y' like her?" Yuffie asks, and that question sticks and nags at him. Who wouldn't like Kairi? She was spunky and fun, and she was always there for people. Riku looks away from Yuffie's violet eyes to wander elsewhere, trying to hide how vulnerable he feels.

"Yup," he nods calmly, his eyes meandering to examine the curve of her hip, the faint crease above her panties going down her abdomen. She's so skinny, he thinks, and he continues, "She likes Sora, though."

"Yeaaaah, she talked about him loads," Yuffie shrugs, and reaches one messy hand over to him to ruffle his bangs, giving a wink and a grin. "But don't be jealous of him, you'll always have me."

Have her?

So he does the only logical thing, which would be to ignore Kairi's face in his mind and lean over the mixing bowl and the tray, to press his lips to hers and cup her chin with one hand, pressing her against the side of the counter. He knocks over the carton of milk, but he doesn't care.

She giggles, then, before he can react, snatches an egg from the carton, and smashes it on his shirt.

He gasps, shocked, and holds his shirt away from his skin, the viscous egg blob sliding down his front. Yuffie's laughs, amused but not entirely malicious, make it all the more irritating, but he brushes it off and pulls off his shirt, throwing it aside. And, as she clutches her sides and snickers at him, he seizes a bottle of vegetable oil, and empties it over her head.

Her laugher dies to be replaced by his, and she lunges at him, nearly upsetting the mixing bowl, pinning him by the shoulders to the ceramic flooring, and grabs a bottle of vanilla extract, spraying at across his shoulders. She continues laughing.

Arming himself with a handful of flower, he ruffles it into her hair, and she lets out a yelp as it sticks to the vegetable oil. She is quick to grab baking powder and blasts it into his face, and he wipes the powder from his eyes with the back of his hand, both still laughing hysterically.

Clambering to their feet, they round the table, faking rights and lefts, here and there, circling like feral animals. In Yuffie's right hand is a whisk, in her left, she clutches a bag of chocolate chips. Riku finds himself armed with a tea-towel and a spoon, and as he fakes a right, she slides to his left, and catches him over the head with the chocolate chips.

The floor slippery, Riku skids on the wet, slick ceramic tiles, and he grabs onto Yuffie so he won't fall. Dragging her down with him, she lands on top of him, and she sticks out her tongue at him in mockery as he acts as her pillow. A bonk on the nose soon puts her in her place, though, as he taps her with the spoon and rolls her under him, pinning her easily.

"No fair, lemme up!" she giggles.

"Hey, you started it!" he manages to say between gasps for breath, laughing hysterically, Yuffie beneath him laughing so hard she's almost shaking, and Riku runs a hand through her food-coated hair and she takes his hand to teasingly lick off a speckle of cookie dough. He nips her on the neck, gently, then kisses away the dough plastered to her chin. He's incredibly thankful that Aerith and Leon are heavy sleepers - he and Yuffie are noisy enough to wake the universe, he thinks, and Yuffie voices the same thing only seconds later.

Still breathing deeply from their romp, exhausted, Riku collapses to the floor next to her, ignoring the fact that the spot under his shoulder is damp with spilt milk and the small of his back is resting in a pile of flour. Yuffie yawns, closes her eyes and falls asleep, right there, next to him on the kitchen floor. Riku looks at her for a moment, then grins.

Well. Maybe there is an upside to the night heat - it does make for good cooking.

-x-

-x-

-x-

-x-

Leon shrugs on his housecoat, fixing the covers to cover Aerith. With a yawn, he pads down the hall, and pauses when he sees the kitchen lights on. Going over with a grave sense of impending doom, he stops when he's close enough to see in the room. All he sees is dried egg pasted onto the cupboard doors, and the side of an abandoned, empty mixing bowl.

He doesn't want to get closer, because he knows it's going to be trouble.

But he does anyway.

He takes a moment to take in the kitchen ceiling, which has stalactites of goopy brown matter clinging to it. On the floor, sugar feels gritty between his bare feet and the tile, and his eyes wander over the scattered chocolate chips. The overturned bottle of vanilla extract. The thin, dusty white layer of flour coating almost everything. It is absolutely terrifying, his kitchen.

And in the middle of the floor, half under the table, he lets himself see the pile of human flesh, two figures snuggled together, wearing nothing but underwear and various food ingredients.

Sigh.

His eyes fall on the cookie tray, loaded with shapes of dough, and then on the oven, already preheated and ready to go. Picking up the tray and popping it in, he punches in the timer numbers for twenty minutes, and pads back to bed.

They'll deal with it when they wake up, and then, they'll be grounded, punished, and will never hear the end of it.