Like Riding a Bike
You might fall hard the first time, but...after that, nothing can keep you down.
Chapter: 1/1 (one shot drabble-ish thingie...a one-drot?)
Pairings: implied Riku/Yuffie
A/N: Another Yuriku. It's a disease I tell you! I swear I'll go back to the Squffie...soon. I think I just need to write the Yuriku-ness out of my system before I can properly work on a new chapter of LoSLI. Enjoy.
He hadn't meant for it to slip out.
But whenever he was around her, it was almost as if he couldn't keep anything a secret. On the inside, he'd been itching to tell someone for years but couldn't, due to fear of embarrassment (and everyone knew that Riku simply didn't do embarrassed). Yet when she'd mentioned going down to the arcade by bike, something inside him snapped. He'd refused vehemently, saying that it wasn't that long of a walk. She'd insisted that it'd be much quicker. Suddenly, he blurt it out.
"I don't know how to ride a bike."
Being the kind of person she was, Yuffie would not - could not - stand for this. It was "inhumane" and "weird" and "just so freaking wrong" to be sixteen and unable to ride a bike. So after much laughter (at his expense) from Yuffie, the two stood outside in the hot, August sun.
Thus Riku found himself clumsily pedaling a creaky old yellow bike down the sidewalk with Yuffie running alongside him, keeping him balanced.
He cast a glance at Yuffie and immediately decided that he should get a hair cut. The wind rushing past them caused his hair to fly out behind him in silver waves and into Yuffie's face.
"Hey, eyes on the road, buddy," she warned.
Riku shifted his gaze back to the sidewalk before him, feeling the fear of falling rise up in his throat like a foul bile. He couldn't do this. Why was he doing this? Clearing his throat, Riku chose to voice his thoughts. "Why the hell am I doing this?" he demanded, wincing as his voice cracked over theword 'why'.
"Because," Yuffie replied, "you'll regret it if you never even tried."
"I'll regret it even more if I bust my ass," Riku said grumpily.
"It's a lesson my grandpa taught me when I learned how to ride a bike," she explained. "You might fall hard the first time, but if you can get up after that, nothing can keep you down. Except if, you know," Yuffie went on, "a truck comes out of nowhere and hits you, causing to you break your neck and to become a paraplegic...then yeah, that might keep you down for a bit."
"...thanks for the reassurance." He turned back to his right to pester Yuffie, but found that she'd let go. Pedaling uncertainly, he glanced back at her, seeing his friend running to keep up. In slow motion, as if he were watching himself from a different perspective, he noticed the bike tipping over, saw the ground rushing up towards him, and felt the jarring impact with the gravel.
She was always making him do things that he'd never do.
But in those moments following the crash, (despite the bleeding elbows and skinned knees) as Riku climbed to his feet, more or less in one piece, he realized that it was the thing he loved most about her.
A/N: I know, pointless-kinda-sorta-not-really fluff...so sue me.