Chapter 29: Close

He adjusts the knot in his black tie, wishing with everything he had that he could retie the crooked thing into a proper Windsor knot. But Riku knows that he has no time and he settles on just fixing it out of sight and making it look like he had tied it right. A faint buzzing echoes in his ears, making the man pause for a moment and take in a few deep breaths.

He needed his medication.

Riku flexes his fingers into a fist and then curls them back out, his other hand conducting to a melody he was hearing in his head. The two hands wave together, delicately moving to the sweet and gentle music in his mind. His entire body sways to the rhythm for a moment before he slaps the two hands down to his side, forcing himself to stop.

He needed his medication.

Schizophrenia. That's what they had decided Riku had, when he told them about how he felt there was something in his head that didn't work right. The minute that he had been put on his medication, he had felt a thousand pounds rip from his shoulders and he had begun to cry, feeling himself be whole again.

He needed his medication.

Riku sets his head down heavily into his hands, feeling the buzzing get worse and worse, turning into a blinding headache. The tears trickle down his cheeks as he feels the little hand on his leg, pulling on his pants shyly. Riku looks down at his son, who was holding a large white bottle in his hands.

Haru gives him a shy smile before putting the bottle down in front of his father and looking up expectantly at Riku's lawyer, obviously waiting for praise. Even so, the little boy's body flinches automatically in a way that made Riku's heart break from the implications. Rayna had hurt him, she had hurt his child. So he put his hand down onto the little boy's head and playfully ruffled the mass of silvery white hair into a series of messed up spikes.

"Thanks, little guy," He tells his son with a big smile and he allows the little boy to climb up into his lap. Haru presses his head against his chest and Riku begins to remove the top of the bottle in order to get to his pills, even as the headache got worse and worse. Soon, he would be practically ripping the top of the bottle off with his teeth just to alleviate the pain thundering behind his eyes.

The lawyer coughs slightly, attempting to get Riku's attention. "We should probably be getting ready," The man tells him quietly before adjusting his already perfectly aligned tie a little more. Riku blinks once before nodding, hooking a few pills out with his fingers.

"Of course," Riku mutters softly as he shoves them into his mouth and chokes them down without water. "What exactly do we need to do?" He asks in a louder voice as he turns his son around in his lap, straightening the boy's clothes before bothering to begin with his own. Haru flinches at the touch but soon sits still, a big smile constantly flitting across the solemn expression he was trying to keep on his face.

He is so obviously pleased with how his father was giving him attention and that makes Riku smile. It is a simple task to make his son happy and to keep on furthering the connection between them. He finally has something to live for, even if little Haru didn't know it yet. Just the idea, just the idea of having that home with his son back on the island is enough to make Riku want to fight and to keep going.

He wants to introduce his son to Sora, to make Sora and Kairi and even little Xion smile again.

Riku smooths down his son's wrinkled shirt before retying the small red bow tie around his collar. He nods vaguely to the directions as the lawyer tells him to be pleasant, to be courteous to the ones letting him have an appeal, and to answer every question as honestly as he possibly could. All the while, he keeps fixing Haru's clothes, making sure that the little boy's slightly too big suit was as nice as possible.

He then fixes his own black tie and holds out his wrists to be hand-cuffed.

A moment before the cold metal could snap around his arms, Haru blurts out a question. "Daddy, if you have dose, you not goin' to hold my hand?" Riku looks down at the little boy in his lap and then back up at the guard.

Haru sometimes had trouble saying words with the "th" sound, and often forgot to say "are" and "am," a strange little quirk that Riku discovered after he kept coming back to see him. But now the little boy keeps staring up at him, the strangeness of his speech conveying his secret wish to be able to hold his hand in the courthouse. It seems Haru had somehow related going into court as the same as being led to the doctor; the child wants to hold his father's hand in order to show him that he would be alright, much like how his grandmother held his hand whenever he went into the doctor's office to get a shot.

Riku feels his lips turn up into a smile before he carefully deposited his hand back into the little boy's, allowing his lawyer and the guard to help him up without the cuffs.