Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts. Like, seriously, stop asking me.

Warnings: This fiction contains and is not limited to boy/boy moments, the use and abuse of stereotypes, hints at original pairings, very despicable people, emo-Riku, lustful teenagers, underage drinking, a mix of the last two points, questionable situations, morally ambiguous choices and a few, occasional and really shy attempts at humor.

Reviewers:

- Theblackcoat: I admit that the quick look at the two families was kind of experimental, I was not sure it would have been well received. I'm glad you liked it because there's a lot more coming up.


Chapter 14: The Shadow of the Light

Riku yawned noisily after a restless night, populated by small imps with Sora's face that had kept on pestering him. With his mom's voice.

He shivered at the thought, resignedly dragged himself out of his bed and towards the kitchen to finally get a well-deserved coffee.

"Welcome, sunshine." Rei greeted his son in the kitchen. How did she always manage to be so lively at that hour of the morning was beyond his comprehension.

"M'ning" he muttered, most of his mind still half-asleep. "And don't even start." he precised a second later. "I know what you're going to say..."

"...how about next week? Tuesday?"

"I'm not going to invite Sora for dinner!"

"Wednesday would be better, though." she kept going on, completely ignoring his son. "Even Thursday could do..."

"I'm not going to invite Sora for dinner!"

"Dear!" Rei suddenly shouted in the general direction of the second floor. "Wednesday or Thursday?"

"Tuesday!" the answer came a few seconds later. "Tuesday we could leave them the house after dinner."

Riku's mother smiled at his son, who was trying to disappear into his chair. "Aww... Your dad is so thoughtful sometimes."

"Riiight..." Riku forced himself to put up a smile instead of throwing up his breakfast. "Have... to go, now." he quickly added regaining the safety of his room where he established a new record time in dressing himself. Anything to get out of that house as soon as possible.

He was stopped on the doorstep, of course. "Tell him that we'll wait for him on Tuesday."

"Bye mom." he quickly answered before closing the door behind him, not giving his mom the time to counteract.

'Like I would ever bring him to this crazy house.' he thought while getting on the school bus and taking place to his usual place, in the last row. 'That would be the day Sora would definitively want to stop seeing me.'

And there he was again: for all his efforts, that irritating brunet was keeping on popping up in his mind. Not that Riku minded anymore. In fact, he was so caught up in his thoughts that he didn't even realize that, after a couple of stops, a couple of familiar looking guys had gone up the bus and were now approaching him.


"Heeey, Rikky!" Sora chirped while waving a hand towards the silver-haired boy. He had clearly expected to find the upperclassman there.

"If you want to exit the bus on your legs, don't ever call me that way again!" Riku admonished him quietly. The little smile that had appeared on his face the moment he had spotted the brunet had given him away, though. Roxas grinned internally.

He didn't fail to notice that the silver-haired boy's smile disappeared as fast as it had manifested when he caught sight of the blond boy hidden behind Sora. "Oh, you're still not dead..." he exclaimed in all seriousness. "Which... is a good thing. I guess." he quickly added when Sora glared at him, as to remember him that just the day before the two of them had called a truce.

Roxas waved a hand timidly. "Hi, Riku." he said, pretending not to have heard the other boy's comment. He was dead set on not losing the occasion that Sora was giving him to patch things up with his ex-friend.

The two boys took place next to Riku who, surprisingly enough, didn't object. Roxas took care to let Sora sit between the two of them, though.

"When do you think we'll get the results of the Struggle tryouts?" the brunet asked, out of the blue.

Roxas rolled his eyes: what was so funny about that 'sport' was beyond his comprehension. Then again, he was curious too to know how the two of them had scored.

"Usually it takes a couple of days, I guess we'll have them before the end of the week."

Sora smiled and Roxas couldn't help but think how beautiful his smile was. "That's great. This means that we'll have the weekend to celebrate!"

"You don't even know if we'll be chosen for the team." Riku quickly objected.

"You'll both be taken." Roxas spat out instinctively, earning a glare from Riku. "I... I mean, you did great for someone who has never taken a bat into his hands..." he stopped: why everything that came out of his mouth when Riku was around could be seen as a sexual metaphor?

"Not to say you beat me and Seifer, and we already were on the team. That should count for something." Sora concluded, involuntarily helping him.

...or, maybe, voluntarily?

An innocent doubt crossed Roxas' mind. Sora was an amazing guy: funny, smiling, spontaneously able to draw everyone to him.

But that was the point.

'Spontaneously...'

What if Sora's mannerisms were just a facade? A ruse of sort? What if he wasn't like he presented himself? But if so, to what purpose?

That idea, who had manifested completely out of the blue, made him feel extremely unease. He shook away those uncomfortable thoughts and focused back on the discussion, at least until the school bus had reached his destination.


The table at the center of the cafeteria was getting emptier as the day passed. From the eight people usually sitting there, their number had now reduced by a quarter, with now only six of them still there.

"Is it my feeling, or we're getting fewer?" Axel asked innocently, stating the obvious.

Seifer gave a look at the three boys crowded in the small table in the corner of the cafeteria. Differently from the others, he knew that Sora wasn't spending time with Riku because he liked or appreciated him, which meant that it wasn't like he preferred to spend time with that loser instead than with them.

What really bugged him, was that it seemed like he had managed to get Roxas closer to Riku and Seifer hadn't forgotten that the two of them were best friends until last year.

His plan was clamorously backfiring: instead of bullying, isolate and, finally, humiliate Riku, the boy seemed to be gaining a new entourage.

Then again, all he had to do was waiting until Larxene's party and then Riku's life would definitively be over. Just one more week. The blond boy smiled and let himself fell in his chair. After all, the higher you climb, the harder you fall.

"What's so funny, Seifer?" Larxene asked, just vaguely interested.

"Oh, nothing." he answered, badly faking indifference. "I'm just savoring the pleasure of crashing a little insignificant bug."

She blinked. "Sucks to be you."

Everyone at the table, except for Hayner, laughed.

"Seriously." the girl added a second later. "For someone as insignificant as you pretend he is, you think a little too much to Riku."

Of all the people there, Seifer had always liked Larxene the least, what with her bad habit of opposing him. "Men stuff, you can't understand."

"Oh, so you consider Riku a man, now?" she grinned.

"A man... I'd say a male at best." Hayner intervened. A second later he let out a not really manly cry. "What the hell, Axel?"

The redhead looked as surprised as one can be. "Oh, I must have kicked you by accident, my bad."

Kairi, that until that moment had observed silently the situation, interrupted abruptly. "I can't help but notice that, as of lately, you have started to defend Riku quite a lot, aren't you?" she asked Larxene in an accusatorial tone.

Larxene looked at her with a completely indifferent expression. "So what? Are you jealous? I thought you ditched him a year ago."

"He left me with no choice!" she cried, in a nearly pathetic way. "He humiliated me!"

"Now, now!" Axel cut short the discussion. "We won't discuss about it anymore, what has happened has happened. Let's focus on the party, instead. We've yet to decide who will be in charge of the food, right?"

'Hypocrite!' Seifer couldn't help but think. He knew very well that Axel had tried multiple times to reconcile with Riku, the last time just a few days ago during the Struggle exhibition match, that same Tuesday. More than that, Axel was pretty close to Roxas, who looked like was getting back on talking terms to Riku. Then again, maybe that fact could turn out to be a boon in disguise. He just needed to realize what was the most efficient way to exploit that weakness.

'Just a week' he kept on repeating on himself.


On the interval between the second and third hour in the morning, Roxas found someone with familiar flaming hair waiting for him outside of his class.

"Hey there, I was wondering if I had not miss you!" Axel greeted him.

"Hey, Ax." Roxas smiled. "What's the occasion, we don't have same classes today."

"Just felt like talking, wanna take a coffee?"

"Uh... sure." Roxas answered, just slightly hesitant. It was quite unusual for Axel to pop up like that just to 'drink a coffee'. He probably meant to discuss something, likely the fact that he had stopped taking breakfast with them.

"So... how are you doing?" the redhead calmly asked on the way to the cafeteria.

"Pretty good, thanks." he answered politely.

"Some news?"

"Oh, yeah. My parents bought a goldfish."

"And that's the biggest news you have to tell me?"

"Well, it's a really huge goldfish."

Axel couldn't hold it anymore and let out a laugh. "Oh, Rox, you're too smart for your own good. Come on, seriously, I've noticed that you've taken breakfast with Riku. Twice now, what gives?"

If someone else had asked him that same question, Roxas would've thought that it was just a way to mock him. Not Axel, though. He was one of his closest friends, one of the few people that he had managed to open up to, if just a little bit. It was the guy that knew how bad Roxas had felt for what had happened between him and Riku and had never insinuated anything.

"Well, there's not a lot to tell." he said quickly. "Sora forced him to invite me."

"But Riku didn't break your face."

"Yet."

Out of the blue, the voice of Saïx reached them. The two of them turned to see their friend walking towards them, his usual calm demeanor transpiring in every of his actions.

That caught Roxas by surprise. He stopped walking and looked at him, inquiringly. "What do you mean by that?"

"Only that Riku will grow tired of you sooner or later." The way Saïx was saying those words wasn't mockingly or malevolent: he was simply stating a fact. "And then you'll end up alone." he concluded, looking the blond boy up and down. "That's what you really want?"

"I... You..." For as many efforts as he was doing, Roxas just couldn't form a coherent sentence in his mind, figure in his mouth.

"What the hell, Saïx!" Axel exploded in Roxas' stead. "You can't just come here like this and say something like that!"

The two boys glared at each other for a few moments, then Saïx talked again. "Every second you spend with Riku, you put yourself at risk." Even if he was still glaring at the redhead, it was clear that he was talking to Roxas. "People will start noticing that the two of you keep on spending time together. And then, what do you think they'll conclude?" he asked, finally turning his eyes to look at the smaller boy.

"Wait... wait a sec." Roxas finally forced himself to stand up for himself. "It's not the two... it's the three of us, actually. It's... it's not the same." He had to admit to himself that that last sentence sounded a little whiny, though.

"This isn't about Sora." Saix objected. "What will you do the first day that Sora won't be there? You'll tell him that you can't sit with him because people could start getting the wrong idea?"

Roxas had to admit that he hadn't thought to that. The thought of being labeled as gay by spending time with Riku had crossed his mind, but Sora's presence had made everything feel so... natural, so right, that he hadn't given it much thought.

"Don't listen to him, Rox!" Axel intervened once more. "Why should you care if someone would talk shit about you?"

"He should, because both of us know that Riku is too fickle for keeping him around too much and if he doesn't want to be targeted from the others, he'd better reduce to a minimum these frequentations."

"What about Sora, then?" Roxas nearly cried. "What about him?" he repeated a second later. "Did you tell him the same things? He spends as much if not more time with Riku than me."

Saïx looked at him with a strange expression, one that Roxas couldn't really understand. "Stop thinking about him and start thinking about yourself." he simply said. "I have to go, now. See you around."

And as soon as he had pronounced those words he was gone, the same way he had appeared just a few minutes earlier.

"Just... what was that?" Axel scratched his head after taking a full ten seconds to understand what had just happened. When he realized that Roxas was still standing next to him, in a nearly catatonic state, he turned towards him, just a slight trace of worry in his voice. "Hey, Rox, you okay?"

"Sure." he answered, a little too fast to sound sincere.

"Man, don't let what Saïx said get you down, alright? Riku isn't that kind of person." the redhead said, trying to guess Roxas' thoughts.

But Roxas didn't like that. None, not even Axel was allowed inside his head. "I... gotta go too, sorry. We'll take our coffee next time, alright?"

And before Axel could add anything else, the blond boy had already disappeared into the crowd of people.


End Notes: Well, this it. This was originally the last chapter before I started reworking on the story. Which means that from this chapter onward it will be as-yet-unreleased content. Hope you'll enjoy.

Preview: The weekend is getting closer and, with that, the occasion to let loose a little. Sora is in, what about Roxas?

Next Chapter: Truths and Lies