The morning after my first encounter with the wolf in Sora's room, he waited until Kairi had left before he showed any sign he knew what had happened last night.
"Stay out of my room," he told me in a low tone. "You knock if you ever want to come in, and you wait until I let you in."
"What would I want in your room?" I asked, feigning innocence. "It's nothing to do with me."
"That's right. And don't forget it. Don't think I didn't see what you did last night."
"I was worried about you. Kairi wouldn't tell me why you did it, so I wanted to find out."
"It's none of your business," he answered bluntly, and left without giving me the chance to respond.
I ignored his insistence on keeping out, of course. As soon as I was certain he'd gone back to working on the hotel reconstruction, I went back and had another look.
Sora's never really been one for being tidy, but his room was unusually so for him. The bed was a mess, but nothing else was untidy.
Besides the bed, there was little furniture in the room. A desk under the window with several draws down one side, each one with it's own lock. A wardrobe on one wall, and a cupboard behind the door, but nothing more.
The draws were locked, of course. I could have picked them the way I had his bedroom door the night before, but the locks were smaller, and that makes it a little harder to do it without leaving some evidence. And I'm not really all that skilled at doing it.
His wardrobe seemed unused, having very little extra in it. I hardly expected to find any clues in there anyway.
There was a clear trail though, if you looked closely. There were small scratches on the top of the desk and on the uncarpeted floor. There were several deeper ones beside the bed, but there was no sign at all on the bed. Not even the tuft of fur I was expecting to find from the wolf.
It was as if the bed had been tided, then deliberately made a mess to make it look as if it had been slept in.
The answer was underneath the bed, rolled into a tight ball. Bedsheets, with various tears in. Laid out, it was fairly clear that something big had done it.
Everything pointed toward the wolf again, and with it came the continued implications that he was a werewolf. Or the werewolf. We'd been told he was the last one – but everything we'd been told suggested that werewolves would do anything to gain the upper hand, and that implied they'd inflict their curse on others at any opportunity.
No matter how many times that stared me in the face, I just couldn't see Sora being on of these barbaric, feral creatures. We were told that anyone who became one would lose most of their humanity and be more like a wild wolf than a human being, that they'd steal food rather than hunt it, or hunt it just to stop others from having it. Some said that they even ate other humans, when they weren't judged to be fit enough to become a werewolf in their own right.
But either this wasn't true, or Sora wasn't one of them. Either way, there was something going on, and I was determined to find out what.
I put the torn sheets back where I'd found them, as close to how I'd found them as I could. Before I left, I checked the window. There was a kind of lever on the inside that pushed it up and locked there until pushed again. It left just enough room for a wolf like the one I'd seen come or go.
I could have gone through the draws, but decided against it. I'd done enough in his room for now, I didn't want to leave him with any sign I'd been there at all.
I didn't have anything to do here yet, so despite his mysterious dislike of me, I went back up to the hotel and offered to help out again.
"How do you think you're going to help?" he asked me bluntly.
"Who did most of the work on our raft?" I reminded him.
"That was a raft. This is far more complicated."
"Are you trying to tell me something, Sora?"
"Fine. Help out. See if I care. Just don't bother me."
His distaste of me didn't carry over to the others working with us. Not after I'd hauled up some of the larger, heavier beams without any help. Sora stalked off muttering to himself after a few of these displays and refused to come anywhere near me for the rest of the day.
Word got around, and one or two residents seemed a little more wary of me because of it. When I took a break – not that I needed it, but the others were taking one, and I wasn't going to do their work single-handed – one of the families who'd heard about me passed by, the two adults throwing surreptitious glances in my direction. Their son seemed completely oblivious to it, however.
I poked about a little in the minds of the adults, and found they had been present when the Master had been defeated. Like me, they hadn't had a choice in the matter, and had welcomed the return to humanity.
My appearance here with the clear signs of what they'd left behind was not a welcome sight.
The moogle store was just opposite the hotel, and it was there they stopped. The mother of the child tried to watch me without being noticed while her husband did whatever business he had there.
Their son noticed this, looked right at me, then turned to his mother and asked something. She talked to him rapidly for a few minutes, shaking her head insistently.
"I don't believe you," he called out at one point. "I'm going to ask him."
"Isaac, no!" she called after him as he ran over the road to me. I'd been leaning against the outside of the hotel, but glanced down when he approached.
"My mom says you eat people," he said accusingly.
"She'd also prefer you didn't talk to me," I answered.
With that childish lack of fear, he stood there unafraid and asked, "Why? Are you going to eat me?"
"Of course not. I've never eaten anyone."
"Then why does she say you're nasty?"
Taking care not to do anything his parents couldn't see, I came down to his level, crouching. I noticed the mother hastily getting the father's attention, making him see, and he started to come over.
"Not everyone's made the same way," I explained. "There's something different about me that they know about, and think that makes me dangerous to be around. But just between you and me? I've got it completely under control."
"So you're not going to be nasty?"
"Not in the slightest. You don't have to worry about a thing."
"Come away from him, Isaac," his father called, having approached. He was watching me with a look of undisguised hatred. "Leave him alone."
"He's not going to do anything, dad."
"Yes, I expect that's what he would say."
"You know what I am," I told him. "And I'm not like that."
"Why should I be expected to believe you?"
"I trust him," Isaac said, but I shook my head.
"You ought to listen to your parents, not me. If they think it's better you stay away from me, then I'd go with that."
"But you're not bad. You said so."
"I know. But you should listen to him all the same."
He was taken back across to the store without another word, where his mother stared chiding him about being irresponsible and reckless. It seemed a little harsh to me, but I had other things on my mind. They did know what I was, and they saw no place for me here.
I hid it well, but their reaction to me hit me hard. It didn't matter where I went, if anyone knew what I was then I wasn't going to be welcome or liked, no matter who I was. It went with what I was.
Later, when we were all back at Sora's home, I kept to myself mostly, and turned in early that night. I didn't want to aggravate him any more than I already had.
The morning after, I stayed there instead of intruding myself on either him or Kairi. I heard them talking for a while, then Kairi told him not to slam the door, which he ignored.
Just after, there was a tentative knock at my door. I didn't bother to answer it, instead staying on my bed, trying to decide if it was worth pretending to sleep.
"I know you're in there Riku," she told me. "Are you going to let me in or not?" She weathered the silence for a bit, then let herself in anyway. My room doesn't have a lock on it, since it was originally meant to be a guest room.
"I guess Sora had something to say about me then."
"Not exactly. All he said was that you'd done something he didn't like."
"I already told him, I didn't have a choice in the matter," I sighed. "It's not like I wanted it."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"It's not going to solve anything, Kairi. Sora's just going to keep on being like this about me until someone persuades him to hear my side of it, and he's too stubborn to do that."
"I could talk with him for you."
"Don't trouble yourself over it. I don't want him to turn on you because you're trying to help me."
"He wouldn't do that, Riku."
"Maybe. I'd rather not chance it."
Kairi shook her head and left me alone again.
I stayed there for some time after I heard her leave too, then finally decided to satisfy my curiosity, and went to those draws in Sora's desk.
They were unlocked this time, and that made me immediately suspicious. I continued though, examining the contents of each in turn.
The top one was empty, and the second just had a few things I assumed were of some value to him.
In the third though, I found several sheets of paper loose, numbered so they were in order, with his writing on.
You can guess what they were. You've probably read it yourself.
They confirmed the signs I'd been trying to ignore, proving that he was a werewolf, and as I read I found a lot of my views changed. What I'd been told about their kind didn't seem to be as true as I'd thought.
I realised it had been him that I'd seen with the Master, and that it had been him who'd brought the Master down. I learned that Kairi didn't remember her time at the vampire fortress, because she'd been persuaded to forget.
After I finished reading, I set the pages back in order and put them away, thinking this over. Things were not quite how they'd seemed.
Then I heard the front door close, and quickly headed back to my own room flying just above the floor so whoever it was didn't hear my hurry back.
When I heard footsteps on the stairs, I opened my door a crack to peer out, and saw it was Kairi. I almost opened the door, but something told me not to, so instead I touched on her mind lightly.
She'd seen me, but she hadn't told Sora. She seemed just as curious about what I'd seen in Sora's room, and had even seen me put the sheets back in the draw.
I was torn momentarily. If I did nothing, then she might find Sora's account of what happened to him, and remember what she'd been made to forget. On the other hand, if I stopped her and Sora found out, he'd know that I knew about them. Not to mention that she'd just try again another time.
After a brief moment's hesitation, I reluctantly altered her memory slightly, so she believed that she had never seen me in Sora's room, and that it had been her curiosity about Sora's behaviour that prompted her to have a look.
Sorry about that Kairi, but I had to do something, and if Sora found out that I'd been poking around in his room... alright, so given what he was, and how he described the scent of vampires, he probably already knew or would soon find out I was there, but at the time it seemed like all I could do without shedding any suspicion on myself.
Kairi did find his account, and she read it. I don't know how exactly, but I felt her forgotten memories come back to her as she read the last of it.
Now I had a problem on my hands. If she took it as badly as she had the first time...
The door went again, signifying Sora returning home. Like I had, Kairi quickly stashed the account back where it had been and rushed out and down to meet him. I close my door, and hoped I could pretend I'd never left my room.
