Chapter Nine
Naminé coughed again, leaning heavily against her seat, a deep, pained sigh leaving her lips as the coughs subsided.
"Are you okay?" Riku asked her, pointless as it was. She was not okay, he could see that perfectly well on his own, but she didn't even look on her way to death, and if she felt like that he would have actually wanted to know.
"Yes. It's just a cold," she snapped at him, voice feeble and coarse. An unwilling whisper.
"Do you want to switch with Terra? You could lay down and sleep in the back."
"It's fine," she said.
Riku waited a moment, stealing a glance in her way, and then he asked, "It's fine as in you want to switch or it's fine as in you should mind your own business, shut up and keep your eyes on the road?"
"You should always mind your own business. As a general rule," Naminé murmured, and even if it didn't sound like a joke, Riku had the suspicion it was supposed to be one. "But I meant it as it's fine, I can stay here, I'm not in too bad a shape."
Naminé had been asleep for three hours, laid out on the backseat, her light snores offering a nice background sound that was sweeter on Riku's mind than the motor of the car rumbling all around him.
The trip from his mother's house – all the way out far into the city, in some hidden corner of the Hoster suburbs – to Poppytown was long and boring. Mainly interstate roads and splattered in tunnels here and there that crossed the mountains.
Riku didn't like the world outside of Poppytown. He had been born there and his town had always been the only thing he had known.
That was not to say that he liked the world inside of Poppytown. Not at all, actually, but it was familiar and, in a way, Riku valued familiarity more than likeability.
"The Corner House is a dangerous place, Riku," Terra said, voice lower than ever to not disturb the sleeping beauty riding in the car with them, expression meek and somber, eyes hardened in the thousand lights coming in from the road. "How many chances do I have to change your mind?"
"Zero," Riku told him, managing to find the decency to feel guilty and ashamed for it. "Kairi is in there."
"Don't think I don't appreciate the love you have for her. This is not me trying to tell you to forget about your best friend or anything. I'm just worried for you."
"I know. I'm worried for me too. For us. And for Kairi." He took a curve tighter than necessary and one of the wheels whined loudly. He breathed harder, for a moment, and steered himself, reminding his body that no matter how much adrenaline was pumping in his veins, there was no logical reason why he should or could kill all of them off in a car accident. Not even if it would have made everything easier for everyone involved in this clusterfuck of a situation.
Terra murmured, "You told me you weren't doing anything dangerous." And Riku heard all the pain in those words. It cut, deep and blistering and cold as ice. "I wanted to believe it for a little longer."
"Kairi is my priority."
"And that's beautiful," Terra said, nodding slowly, "but your own safety should matter a little more to you than it does."
Riku let those words swim around in his head for a while, thinking about his entire life in under two minutes. It was no small feature. "I do care about my safety," he said in the end, but it sounded weird and stilted in his own ears. "I just care about her more," he added, because it made a lot more sense than leaving half of the statement unsaid and unheard.
"It's–" Terra choked only a little. "It's really noble of you. You're a good person, Riku, and I'm proud. I just wish you could care for her without putting yourself in danger."
The rising sun found them still on the road.
Naminé didn't know how to drive – and, anyway, she was asleep – but Terra did and sometimes around four in the morning he had switched places with Riku to let him sleep off the adrenaline drop that had made him jumpy as hell and had left him shaky like a leaf.
Riku hadn't slept much, though. Maybe two hours, maybe less.
When the sun peeked through the clouds, irradiating his face and stinging his eyes, Riku was already awake, but Naminé wasn't.
He couldn't really shut up that part of his brain that feared she would end up just like her brother. That she would simply never open her eyes again and he would end up every month, always the same day, visiting her not-quite-corpse.
But no, Naminé would wake up. She was probably catching up on all the sleep she had lost during the month Kairi had been missing, and the cold and the lulling motions of the car were probably helping her staying under the spell of sleep.
"We're stopping for breakfast. There should be a diner around here, somewhere," Terra informed him. That sounded quite right.
No, it sounded like the best fucking idea since toothpaste had been invented, actually.
Riku was starving.
Inside the diner, the air was hot and smelled like food. Riku's stomach grumbled, impatient, and he read the menu faster than ever.
At his side, Terra was playing with an empty container of napkins, the hard plastic tumbling rhythmically against the table top.
"Will you stop that?" Naminé snapped at him, brushing hair out of her face. She was sitting right in front of Riku, and he could see the red of her eyes, equal parts tiredness and cold-induced tears.
"What can I bring you?" a waiter asked them. His hair was long, longer than Riku's, and carefully tied in a bun on top of his head. ""Have you chosen yet?"
"A coffee and some pancakes for me, please," Terra answered, incredibly polite.
Riku wasted a moment too long to stare at his brother. There was nothing honest in Terra's carefully neutral expression.
Nobody knew them, on that interstate, and the news barely covered what went down in Poppytown, so small as it was. Nobody knew that Terra was an ex-con and currently primary suspect of murder – at worst – and kidnapper – at best – and his brother seemed intent on making it stay like that.
"Sure," the waiter said, scribbling the order on a notepad. He then looked at Riku and Naminé, waiting patiently.
Riku supposed, knowing himself as well as he did, he could never work in retail. He hated putting on fake politeness and a kind voice. He wasn't cut to deal with people.
"The same for me," Naminé said, eventually. Riku wondered if he was dissociating, because the time was simultaneously static and flying past him. It was unreal.
"Me too," he told the waiter, because he didn't remember anything he had read on the menu and his stomach couldn't decide on anything it wanted to eat, after all.
Nothing he could have ordered in a diner, anyway. He was daydreaming of his mother's stew and his father's favorite pizza, with toppings he hated with a passion but still ate the leftover slices of, the morning after, before going to school.
Or maybe he was simply trying to find excuses to think about his parents and the food he associated with them seemed like the safest option.
He wondered if he would ever see them again.
The food came to them after a long stretch of silence. Or a short stretch. Time was still being capricious to Riku and he couldn't seem to remember he had a phone in his pocket that could tell him exactly how many minutes had passed since they had set foot inside the diner.
The pancakes were spongy and delicious, melted butter covering them generously and drowning in maple syrup. Riku tore through them like he hadn't eaten anything in the past month. Maybe he hadn't, not really. Not substantially. He had had a weird, irregular schedule since the day Kairi had disappeared, both in sleep and in nutrition, and he didn't blame himself for the ferocity he reserved to his plate.
When he finally managed to take his cup, the coffee was tepid and unsatisfying, but he drank it anyway.
"Are you okay?" Terra asked him, touching his arm with trembling fingers. Or maybe it was Riku that was shaking, he couldn't tell.
"Sure," he reassured his brother, sitting up straighter in his seat, back touching the orange plastic, finding only the littlest bit of comfort coming from it. It was real in a way time and thoughts weren't being, in that moment.
Maybe it was still the drop from adrenaline, maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was the entire situation, his entire life.
Riku didn't know, nor did he care.
The one certainty he had was that he wasn't okay by any means. He was having an attack of some sorts, an episode of some undiagnosed mental illness, or physical illness. His heart started beating faster, and then it stopped, almost, and Riku didn't understand if he was just confounding himself with all the thinking he was doing.
"Riku," Naminé whispered at him, calling his name in a way she hadn't done for years. "Whatever's going on in your head, stop it," she ordered him, staring hard into his eyes. He focused on her blue irises, light and shiny and red rimmed and beautiful. He thought of Kairi and the Corner House, and his hand found Terra's under the table and he gripped tight.
"Sorry," he told her, but he didn't feel sorry and he wasn't sure he could stop whatever was going on in his head. He wasn't even sure if there was actually something going on. Something different than normal. "I'm just tired."
"Bullshit," Naminé and Terra said at the same time, in the same worried tone, and Riku wondered if that was how Kairi had always felt, whenever they worried about her, and if it was, he felt incredibly sorry for putting such an ugly feeling on her already burdened shoulders.
There was no need for his brother and Naminé to worry about him. If he was broken he would pick himself together in a few minutes, as usual – if anything was usual at all, in what he was going through – and if he wasn't broken then he was fine and there was no reason to be concerned, was there?
Terra paid, exchanging quiet, small talk with the woman at the register. She was just old enough to give Riku and Naminé both the creeps.
Who could blame them for their repulsion for old people, though?
He wondered if the woman who had kept them from their families ten years prior was okay. If she was still alive, if she ever thought about them and if she ever planned her revenge in that little moldy house of hers.
"Let's go. We have still a few hours to drive," Terra told them, wrapping an arm around Riku's shoulders. He snuggled close to his brother, nestled and protected in his shadow. He could have fallen asleep there, if he hadn't been required to walk to the car.
"I can take first turn," he offered, but Terra waved a dismissive hand towards him.
"Don't trust you behind the wheel like that," his brother told him, sounding much kinder than his words actually were. Or were they?
Was it worry? Concern? Was it spite, mockery?
Riku had to confess, at least to himself, that he didn't know Terra enough to read too deep in his tone.
Terra wasn't easy to understand like Kairi was. Like Naminé was.
He was much more sly with his honesty, keeping it hidden and feeding the world only the barest bits, to keep it going but never satisfied.
Riku was pretty sure he wasn't projecting on his brother, but he might have. It was something he was renowned to do.
He could project his existential crisis on a rock and prove to hell and back and everyone around him that said rock was sinking into despair.
"Care to explain what was going on?" Kairi asked Xion once she was sure they were alone, Sunshine and Thirteen gone off somewhere to sleep away the traumatic experience.
Well it had been traumatic for Kairi, but maybe it was a normal occurrence for the people in the Corner House.
"No," the girl said, and she was trembling hard, shaking like an earthquake.
"I'm here," Kairi said, but it didn't make any sense as a statement on its own, so she added, "I'm in the House too, I have the right to know how this place works. Especially if it's such a controversial thing." Her voice came easy from her lips and she wondered why she couldn't make an argument all in one piece. She had to shed some reservations she had.
"You're a player only in theory. You don't even have a weapon yet. It will take a while before you enter the Battlefield proper."
"Wouldn't it be better to make me enter it with some kind of deeper knowledge about what I'm getting into? What I already got myself into? Because you asked me to help and I came but now you are not using me to help. You're not even telling me things I think I'm supposed to know."
"Do you have any living relative, Princess?" Xion asked, and it sounded like a change in topic but maybe it wasn't if Kairi was to give any meaning to the girl's somber expression.
"Yes," she answered. Her dad, and her mom too. They were alive. And maybe Aqua was, too. She didn't know. She couldn't believe anything she had ever thought was true. She couldn't very well believe Terra had killed her sister, not when he had insisted over and over about Aqua being in the House.
Not when Kairi knew that it was possible for Aqua to be in the House and for the policemen to not have found her body anyway.
"Do you love them?" Xion inquired, staring straight into Kairi's eyes, only for a moment.
"Yes," Kairi told her, feeling shivers on her nape, tap-dancing on her skin.
"Then don't get hurt."
"That doesn't line up," Kairi lamented.
"For you, maybe," Xion snapped at her. She wasn't watering plants in that moment. She was staring at flowerpots with intricate decors and even more intricate flowers inside. "For us it makes perfect sense."
"You want me to just– just take that at face value without even explaining to me?"
"I'm tired. Really, really tired. Let's move this conversation to another time," Xion whispered, but Kairi didn't want to move the conversation to another time. She didn't want to move the conversation at all. She wanted answers.
"Let's not," she said, shaking her head. "I only need, like, ten words out of your mouth. You can't be too tired for that."
"You will ask so many questions, Princess, so many." Xion sighed and she didn't look resigned, but she didn't look angry at Kairi either. She just looked tired.
"I swear I won't. You explain what happened, I let you go and if I have question I'm gonna bring them up to Sunshine tomorrow."
"To heal you a Caster steals shards of life from your living relatives," Xion said with the voice of someone bracing themselves for a very long and very taxing conversation, but Kairi kept her word.
Poppytown was even colder than the interstate.
The endless fields helped in making the town a sheltered refrigerator, and Riku shivered in his coat. It didn't mattered that he had three layers of wool and two of cotton on his skin, he was freezing and his teeth chattered.
On any other time, he would have found it a relieve. Hypothermia hadn't kicked in, yet, and he was probably going to keep all his fingers attached to his body and functional, but in that moment he longed for a hot bath and a cup of steaming cocoa – the kind only Naoki could make to perfection – and possibly a few days of uninterrupted rest.
He supposed he deserved that, at the very least.
In the light of day, they didn't dare to venture in the town proper. They parked the car in the fields and moved from there. Naminé leading in a merciless march of pure focus.
But Riku couldn't do the resolution she could, and he picked his phone out of his pocket, swearing to himself he was going to text Kairi just one last time.
One last time before he gave up his life completely to save a dickhead who couldn't even hold on long enough to let him save her from herself.
One last text, Kai. One last text before I enter the Corner House. Willingly. For you.
Have you noticed I always do the shittiest things for you? Because I noticed. I noticed a lot and I really hate you and myself both for this.
(I don't really hate you, though. I just miss you so much. Hating you comes easier, lately. I think Nami thinks the same, but you should probably ask her for confirmation. I renounced my Naminé Expert badge, after all)
"You said you weren't doing anything dangerous," Terra repeated, and Riku noticed what were possibly tears in his voice. Or maybe it was the cold. Maybe it was Naminé who had infected him with her germs.
Or they were actually tears, because Terra was a good brother and he cared for Riku. Had always cared for Riku, even miles away and locked up.
"Did you ask dad not to bring me with?" Riku asked, ignoring his brother's words completely. He had already explained himself thoroughly and he knew he understood his reasons. Terra was probably tasting how bitter denial was.
Bitter and useless.
Kind of like Riku himself.
"To the prison," he added as the silence stretched on between them.
He stole a glance at his phone screen, the message still only half written, waiting for his focus to return, for Terra to say something.
"Yes."
"Thanks. Misplaced worry and opposite results to what you surely wanted to accomplish. Don't do that again."
"Excuse me?" Terra asked, turning just a little to stare at him. The sun was cold, and sooner or later they would step in the House's shadow. Riku looked forward, Naminé was a spot of white in the red fields and she looked angelic and righteously furious. She missed wings, though.
"Don't keep me away from the people I love again, Terra," he said, eventually meeting his brother's cold eyes. "I know you did it to protect me and I appreciate it. I know you worry about me endlessly, maybe because I'm the only person you have left whom you care for, or maybe because I've always been loyal to you. And I know you were trying to spare me the cruel realities of the world. But don't try to shut me out again."
"You're my brother." For a moment, the statement didn't mean much to Riku, since he had spoken words without thinking too much about them as he was prone to do in highly stressful situation, but finally it clicked in his head and he gave Terra a warm smile, his hand reaching beside him to squeeze his brother's one.
"Blood is not everything," he murmured, and he didn't leave time for Terra to get offended by his words or to misunderstand him, "but for us it's enough."