Suburbia
'Down-bound Poem-wound'
Perhaps Riku should have been angrier than he really was. No doubt he was angry-- upset on some level, at the very least-- that Roxas had shown up just like that. And no doubt he was angry-- upset on some level, at the very least-- that Kairi had gone and called him in the first place, notifying the guy of Riku's none-too-coincidental collapse that rode up alongside his medical disobedience.
Retribution didn't end with confrontation between Riku and Kairi or Riku and Mayako even. No, apparently it even stretched to Roxas, now. Riku felt like kicking himself in the ass. And he was still half asleep. He dreaded his future... wakeful... wrathful kind of self.
And so, as it came to pass, Riku and Roxas stared at one another rather awkwardly for a few good moments before Kairi had sense enough to usher them all outside the guest room and downstairs where she promised they could all talk it over with breakfast. The idea was no longer strange to Riku-- Mayako was gone and Kairi was a fill-in housewife. To escape the blow Roxas put in his daily routine, Riku sought some kind of solace out in the backyard, away from both him and Kairi. Out there on the porch, though, was a greenhouse hellhole and a sweltering heat that only made Riku more tired, more drawn out.
...More passive than aggressive when he heard the door slide open and heard the sound of sneakers on the wood.
Roxas stepped out onto the verdana, hands in his pockets and head tilted back. The morning crickets killed the awkwardness because they filled the gap and screamed loud in a way so you knew it would fade soon-- crickets don't have much for endurance. So maybe it was because of the crickets that Riku only waited a brief moment before patting the seat next to him. Roxas sat down, the plastic squeaking slightly in some futile attempt at protest, and then quiet was left to the crickets once more.
"Do you know any Indian poetry?" Riku eventually asked.
"No. Why?"
"No reason," he said. "it's just nice, sometimes, to hear."
Casting the guy a sideways kind of look, Roxas nudged Riku in the shoulder gently. His sleepy look was kind of disturbing and Roxas didn't quite trust Riku not to pass out all over him. So, thinking conversation would keep him alive and awake, Roxas asked, "Do you remember frosh year? Our history class we had together?"
"Yeah."
"And do you remember how the teacher... he... he had this habit of giving us all nicknames? I remember yours."
"Heh, well, the names don't mean anything."
"Are you so sure? 'Voice of reason--'"
"'--in a sea of confusion.'"
Riku had taken a course in European history before he'd studied world history overall. Because of that, he'd been crammed in a class with mostly run-of-the-mill sophomore kids who thought they were hot shit and who thought Riku was an ignorant asshole to be a junior and be taking World History II. To them he flipped to bird-- fuck all of them, he figured-- all of them except Roxas. Roxas was one of the few select sophomores who could pull off maturity and still be a good time.
Surprisingly enough, their teacher had seen this, picked up on this, and had them seated side by side for the entire year. A good teacher he'd been, Riku remembered. A bit eccentric. A bit out there. "For the good of the order," he'd said, "we're going to discuss current events today!" And very little learning would actually get done until the superintendent of something-or-other came in to see what an extraordinary job his teachers were doing.
It was all an over-the-top act that Riku and Roxas were all too happy to participate in. "Riku, you're the voice of reason in a sea of confusion!" he'd said. "Yes, Riku-- my voice of reason in a sea of confusion-- what is your answer to the question?"
"It's not supposed to be taken seriously, Roxas. The nicknames, I mean." He snorted a laugh, considered whacking Roxas on the back of the head, but then decided that it would seem too friendly, too nice for what they had become. "Dork," he just said, and left it at that. And when Roxas had nothing to say to that, Riku let it go dead quiet for all of five minutes before asking, "Why are you here?"
"Naminé asked me to come."
"Why didn't she just do it herself?"
"She can't. Her parents had her enrolled in this-- this summer art... institution thing. It's a university program. She couldn't leave."
"So you listen to everything she tells you to do now?"
"She was worried."
"Well you weren't worried when I was back home."
"Riku--"
"Shut up."
Roxas eyed Riku was a gaze Riku would like to have labeled thoughtful. Both eyebrows arched in the expression, one raised just slightly high than the other so it skirted the fray of bangs there. And his face hovered like that for a moment-- 'hovered' out of instability and not much else-- before returning to its usual indifference. "Well," he said. "You're wrong. I did worry."
Riku's first impulse was to bristle, insulted somehow. His second was to smack the impassiveness off Roxas' face, and his third-- the impulse he finally settled on-- was merely to do nothing at all. If Roxas had come seeking salvation, forgiveness in its highest form (the forgiveness only Riku, surely, could offer)...
"Man, and here I was expecting something."
Riku blinked. Roxas rose to his feet. And though Riku wanted to hold back the words he instantly knew sounded childish, they'd up and tumbled out before he could stop them, a furious little torrent of: "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"
"Whatever you want it to," Roxas said. He then seemed to think better of it and moved to revise his words with a shrug of his shoulders. "If you still want to think the world is out to get you, even after all this, I'm not gonna be the one to stop you. I'm just not... qualified, you know? I mean, you already know that, Riku." Roxas' sigh came expectedly-- Riku had had a thousand serious conversations with the kid before. It just so happened that this one had a slightly different feel to it. One that seem to imply that it might actually avoid the crash-and-explode ending that tended to take their 'serious talks' up to the level of full-blown arguments.
The blonde was toeing the ground and Riku was wondering if he could interrupt. It seemed like Roxas had more to say, but Riku wasn't entirely sure if he wanted to hear it. The likelihood that it would make him feel better was slim, at best. Still, he couldn't think of anything to interrupt with that wouldn't be lame ("Look over there, Roxas. A pig on a pogo-stick.") and so he was simply thrown backwards into a silence that broke underneath him when Roxas got his words together and made another dogged attempt at conveying a point.
"I'm not here to change you," he said. "I never could. I'm here because there's a whole sea of people you don't believe in-- with feelings for you that you don't believe in... Yeah." Roxas sighed. "And all these people you don't believe in," he said, "elected me to make sure you're alive and well. As well as you can be, you know."
"...If that was your attempt at a joke..?"
"Yeah."
"It was pretty lame."
"Hey, I'm the observer, not the comedian."
"You never did have a good sense of humor..." Riku said it like it was read from a textbook, a grain of information to be stowed away, to be learned and relearned and engraved into the walls and layers of his brain. 'You will be tested on this,' it told him. And then there it was, a flash of insight or a mental spit-up-- Riku didn't know.
"There was this place we all used to go to after school..." he said slowly. "It was back when we were kids. There was this dock in the sand where the water had receded. And we must have been six or something and we were playing hide and seek."
"And I hid under the dock and you couldn't find me."
Riku laughed, but it sounded too dry and too forced to really pull a smile from Roxas. His own mouth twitched at the thought, at the pathetic hopelessness of the who damn thing. "I thought you'd abandoned me or something," he said. "Or you were playing a joke."
x x x
"Roxas! Roxas, come on! Where are you? ...It isn't... it isn't funny anymore, Roxas!"
Little kid Riku with his hands all in fists, he doubled over on himself and his knees his the dock and-- mother, but he could feel the wood snap and prickle and his skin. And there was something behind his eyes and it was hurting and there was dirt beneath his nails, he knew, but he couldn't see them anymore. His nails, no more, his hands, no more. He couldn't damn well see anything anymore and he was so small and so stupid that he couldn't even begin to understand the concept of crying real tears of a real loss.
Roxas was a real loss. At that one instant the boy was a thousand and one corpses in a thousand and one scattered locations among the island and the sea, perhaps even one in the air in which Roxas' world was believed to have suddenly and inexplicably inverted and gravity was certainly pulling him up-- only him, only him-- and he was falling up and would never come down because he was moving towards the gravity of the sun and even little kid Riku knew that the sun was far, far away and if you went into the sun you would never come back, just like that man lost his son to the sun.
"If your father's name is Dedalus, how can you be Icarus?"
If you go too close to things too bright, you die, you die. And Riku panicked and understood this and cried and heaved and couldn't stop. He couldn't stop picturing Roxas dead, Roxas dying, Roxas falling up towards the end.
"Roxas!"
x x x
"You cried."
"Shut up."
"You know I didn't abandon you, Riku. It was just a game."
"Just shut up, okay?"
And for all of a split second, it looked as though Roxas had decided to do just that. He still towered over Riku-- something that was ironic in itself, since the younger boy was usually so short beside him. But then Roxas was talking and Riku could think of nothing better to do than to listen. He started off softly, like speaking to a child, a child with a disability of some sort, a child whose mother would sigh, would apologize, would cup one hand to the side of her face and whisper, "It's not his fault, the poor dear, he just doesn't understand..."
"We never abandoned you, Riku. I never abandoned you. I just didn't know--" But God, how Riku wanted to shake him, to scream--
"You still don't know! You don't know anything! You don't understand what it's like and you don't understand that this isn't something you get over. And it affects everything, Roxas. People learn you're sick, you're sad, you're a fucking orphan and they go soft, Roxas! They go so damn soft it's like they're rotten! Like they're fucking rotten and you don't get that, Roxas, okay? You don't get that."
Riku's chest was heaving, but if there was a pain there, he couldn't feel it and by that point he would've damned every doctor to hell and back again. He wasn't trying to kill himself, for crying out loud, he just wanted to be heard, to have his words hold some significance other than that of a dumb little teenage boy in a cotton candy shit-hole.
"No one has treated me the same," he said. "They're cloyingly fucking sweet, they're forcibly oblivious, they're anything but the way they were before." The old Roxas would never have come. The old Naminé would've trusted me to take care of it. The old Mayako wouldn't have care. No one used to give a shit and now they do and now it hurts. "They're anything... but the way they were before," Riku said again, stupidly.
"And you just want things to go back to the way they were," Roxas said.
And Riku's mouth was open in a flash, anger with a NO on the tip of his tongue, but... that was where it stayed. Is it really that simple? The truth of the matter? Yes. It was really, truly, just that simple. All of it amounted to change, the change that resulted from the death of his parents, the change of the move, the change of the people, the tone, the feel of the world. It was dulled down-- with or without medication-- and there was no other way for Riku to express that.
All Riku wanted was for things to go back to being the way they were.
And yet if he could dig up the graves, roll back the wheel, return the corn dog and lie back in his bed-- if he could look at his mother and say "How about tomorrow, if we go to the faire tomorrow, not today? What do you say?" And if she would say yes and if she would be okay... It would still never amount to being what it was. Riku knew too much now. And it was with some sort of fascinated horror that he realized he was then crying right there in front of Roxas. Not heaving or gasping or shaking or trembling, but simply leaking out his eyes.
"Riku..."
"What." Go on, fucker. I dare you to bring it up.
But Roxas didn't. He just frowned a little, shrugged a little, and said, "Nothing."
Riku stalked angrily back into the house, Roxas sighing and following along behind. Kairi was in the kitchen making pancakes. "Pancakes," she informed Riku, "will cheer you up right away!" And as Riku practically threw his pajama-clad body on the island stool, the only half-civil words he could think of saying to Kairi were:
"Kairi, your shirt's on backwards."
"It looks the same both ways," Kairi said.
"Well, yeah, but this way it has a tag and the other way it doesn't," Roxas said. Thinking Roxas was trying to suddenly agree with him in some pathetic attempt of being all buddy-buddy, Riku threw the kid an angry-as-all-hell glare before sliding off the stool and flinging open the fridge. Two sodas in hand, he gave one to Kairi and kept the other for himself, ignoring Roxas' blank stare as he glugged down carbonation like nobody's business.
Meanwhile, Kairi sipped her Fresca obediently, flipping pancakes and listening to the painfully noticeable silence behind her. Flip, flip, flip, flip. Four pancakes on a plate and over the plate went to the island counter. Riku pulled the plate over in front of him and reached for the happy little stack-- only to be suddenly stopped by a stab-attack from a certain someone with a spatula.
"OWW. What the fuck, Kairi?"
"Share."
Kairi went back to flipping pancakes. Riku went back to wishing wrath on everyone's head. And Roxas... ate a pancake in silence.
"You know, every time I drink soda, I want to puke," Kairi said.
"So don't drink it," Riku snapped. And maybe he would've continued, would've tacked on some thought about how maybe if she puked enough she'd be skinny enough to even wear pajama pants Riku would never be able to fit into... maybe he would've said it if it hadn't sounded so lame. Or if Kairi hadn't suddenly gone silent herself, her back to the boys and the pancakes behind her, frozen over the stove and listening to the sizzle and burn of the batter on pan.
"...Kairi?"
"Sora's not speaking to me." Bam. Back in motion, Kairi flip-flip-flipped the pancakes and drummed her nails against the countertop. "I went to see him yesterday at the bookstore, but Cid said he quit." Flip, flip, flip-flip-flip. "Why would he stop working at the bookstore, Riku? He loves the bookstore... All those stupid books." Another plateful of pancakes and Kairi turned off the stove and nearly shattered the plate when it came crashing down on the little island top.
"It's just..." And when the tears started coming, Riku was ready for them, on his feet and looking pointedly at Roxas, waiting pointedly for Roxas to leave.
"Roxas."
"I'll be... walking. Or something."
"Or something."
And so the friend of the son of the two dead folk which started the whole mess-- that friend, that sex buddy of yore, that pal of olde-- he set out on a journey into a world he didn't know. He set out oblivious to the neighborhood and its perfection and Riku's displacement and Kairi's resentment and Sora's absence. For, in fact, Roxas set out to find Sora. He wasn't sure how the idea had wriggled its way on into his blonde brain, but once the thought struck him, he knew there was no other option. He remained oblivious to Riku's displacement and Kairi's resentment, but Sora's absence he understood all too well.
Remarkably enough, Roxas was not only blessed with a gutsy gusto for this sort of search-and-rescue mission, but he was also blessed with a keen and observational sort of memory. "Why would he stop working at the bookstore, Riku? He loves the bookstore."
He rounded the corner, he ambled, meandered, and drew his way around the suburbs. He got lost, got found, asked for directions and eventually found himself in strip mall wasteland that housed his little destination. If I'm going to find Sora, he thought, this must be a good place to start, right?
It turns out Roxas might very well have been wrong, but none of us will ever really know seeing as-- while the going was rough and tough and rumbled and rolled-- Roxas did eventually get what he needed. He did find out where Sora was. But for your own personal amusement and for the proper documentation of the story at hand, we'll include the deep and dark details of Roxas' Infamous Encounter With The Used Bookstore Man-- i.e. Cid.
"Um. Excuse me."
"Huh?"
"Do... do you by any chance know where I can find Sora?" Roxas asked.
"What the hell do I look like? A fuckin' mapmaker?" said Cid.
"Um," said Roxas.
"And what the hell makes you think I know where some kid wastes his life away?"
"Um," Roxas said again. He swallowed thickly and tried to square his jaw, but he wasn't entirely sure how to go about doing that, so instead he just opted for standing a little straighter. He said, "I was told he worked here and I need to find him..." Deciding this sounded a bit lame, Roxas tacked on, "It's important," for good measure.
"Well I can't give you his address, kid, but I can tell you where he lives." Roxas blinked. He wasn't entirely sure how to respond to that.
"Uh. Okay," was as far as he could get.
"You go back to the intersection at the top of the hill and take a left across the street, then you go downhill until you reach the spot where the guardrail pops up alongside the road. Five blocks past that is Honeytree, and one after Honeytree is Wooden Spoon, and if you take a right on Wooden Spoon, you're at the goddamn rec center and you've gone too far. So take a left on Wooden Spoon, go down the third cul-de-sac on your right, and then into the private cul-de-sac after that one. Sora lives in the goddamn blue house."
Roxas blinked. He knew what the answer was before he asked his question, but he felt he had to ask anyway, just to be sure.
"Could you possibly write that down?"
"Hell no. Now unless you're gonna buy a goddamn book or something, I'd suggest leaving."
"Look, I'll buy ten books if you can just write it down for me."
Cid frowned and the toothpick in his mouth snapped clean in two. Or rather, not so clean perhaps-- Cid's shouted "FUCK!" was a bit too loud for there to not be splinters involved. "Fine, ya fuckin' brat. Five hardbacks, five paperbacks. You got two minutes."
For all that the bookstore looked ratty and unkempt, Roxas had at least figured out how the place stayed in business. Cid must have terrified every single customer into buying out whatever didn't sell. But two minutes might be enough to at least get one stupid thing I'll read, Roxas figured. While Cid sketched out his bizarre directions on a half crumpled (and most likely used) McDonald's napkin, Roxas roamed the aisles piled high with books, fingertips trailing along cracked, bent, and occasionally busted and torn spines. Towards the back there were cardboard boxes overflowing with still more books-- a residue of Sora's departure, Roxas figured.
Eventually he settled with some random interesting titles mixed in with the teenage basics-- some cult classic medley of Heller, Salinger, and-- yes, Kerouac. Perhaps there was a tingle in the pages of On The Road that pulled the kid to it, some kind of passionate magic-in-the-making left over from Sora's all too eager fingertips which had no doubt fondled the hell out of the thing. Kerouac's beatnik bible and Roxas remained clueless as ever. He'd read the guy's poetry, read the guy's biography, read about the guy in history class, for crying out loud. And sure, he'd read On The Road before, but he'd lost his copy on a late night bus, lost his senses along with it and never had the foggiest idea of the importance of that book.
Few people have an even slightly unfoggy idea of the importance of that book, so really, no one should frown on Roxas. Fate favored the kid and he bought the book all the same.
"You took ten fuckin' minutes," Cid snapped.
"Sorry," Roxas mumbled.
Attacking the bar code scanner with a sort of vengeance Roxas had once thought only existed in rabid axe murderers, Cid eyeballed the books as they passed through his hands. Whether he was being critical or simply ensuring that he entered ever number correctly in order to get the perfect profit-- well, Roxas didn't know. But Cid most certainly did take a pause when the book following Catch-22 proudly read--
"Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch."
"...It sounded interesting."
"Your money, kid. Not mine."
"Thanks." In exchange for a ten, four ones, and a nickel, Roxas received ten books and a napkin. It all balanced out quite well, really. And yet as he turned to leave, made it to the door and was just about to nudge it on open, Roxas heard from behind the gruff and bitter voice.
"Hey!" Cid shouted. "If you find the kid, uh..." Roxas waited. Cid went quiet. He changed his mind and shook his head and shrugged his shoulders and bit a toothpick through anew. "Ah, nevermind," he muttered.
And Roxas left.
By this point in time he was feeling like quite the world-traveler, but like all world-travelers, the feeling of being beat down and wrung out was really starting to weigh pretty heavily on him. He was a bagman bumbling along streets foreign to him-- Where's the sand? Where're the waves? The boardwalk? The beach bums? Bums period-- for God's sake. Is everyone here a sleek beltway bandit or does the world really, truly, and honestly revolve around them? More than that, had Riku thought the same thoughts before Roxas?
No, Roxas figured. Riku would never think things like that. Not Roxas' Riku. Roxas' Riku was too self-centered. Roxas' Riku didn't know how to care-- not about himself and sure as hell not about anyone else.
A honey tree and a wooden spoon later, Roxas was standing outside a blue house, bagful of books in each hand. He wrestled one fingertip towards the button beside the door, pressed it in, and stood back to wait. Really, Sora's house wasn't all that special looking. Two stories, nine windows, single car garage. The symmetry of the lawn was unappealing, the greenness of the grass pointed towards the artificial side, and Roxas simply found the entire structure and its surroundings to be annoyingly under-bearing.
It bothered Roxas because it was so normal. He'd been expecting more of a climax. He'd been wanting more of a climax. His journey and his mission called for more of a climax.
And then the door swung open and he instantly forgot whatever he'd been thinking because he was staring at the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in his life and she was smiling at him and making him want to giggle.
"H-Hi." He coughed, he choked. Maybe they were giggles in disguise. That was an unnerving thought.
The woman before him smiled and when she tilted her head her neck reminded Roxas of a swan's neck-- this beautiful, long, white thing that was so curved, so stretched, so perfect that he just wanted to wrap both hands around it and see how soft it felt.
Roxas was a weird kid.
And the woman was talking to him and it took him a moment to process her soft little "Hello?"
"Uh... is... Sora here?" he asked.
She smiled and a tiny pair of crow's feet stretched from each green eye and Roxas wanted to giggle again so he coughed-- then realized he didn't have a hand to cough into and decided to do nothing for the sake of politeness. "Who might you be?" the woman asked.
"I'm a friend of his." Screwing up his face, Roxas blinked. "O-of Riku's, actually. And... and Riku is a friend of his. Erm." The woman frowned and Roxas panicked. Her frown made him want to cry. "We just haven't seen him around lately and we were wondering if he was... sick."
Like a shot it was different and the woman was smiling again, her confusion and suspicions completely erased when an ounce of caring was brought into the matter. She stepped to the side and the movement made her skirt sway and brush against her legs and her arm stretched out and for a moment Roxas thought she was going to touch him and he always swung the bags of books around like some hell-crafted maces from the hell-library (which most certainly exists, yes). But she just crooned and caressed the air with this sweeping gesture, motioning Roxas in.
"How thoughtful!" she said. "Sora's upstairs-- come right on in, I'll go get him right away!" She turned and Roxas watched her walk towards the stairs. He decided that her beauty wasn't so much a sexy beauty so much as it was a lovable beauty. That, he thought to himself, is the kind of beauty Naminé and Kairi'll have. And again, he wondered if Riku had thought about that sort of thing-- the kind of beauty girls would grow up to have-- and he decided on a 'no' once more.
His Riku remained firmly homosexual and uncaring. Of course he would never think to care about an aging girl and her impeding beauty of whatever sort.
Roxas was a weird kid who didn't think too highly of his Riku.
"So-ra! A friend of yours is here!"
"A friend of a friend... really. Not... not exactly a..." But Sora was pounding on down the steps before Roxas could clear his name and he just stood there stupidly when the kid came into view. Mussed up hair and obscure-indie-band-tee, Sora stared very, very blankly at Roxas for a moment. "Hi..." Roxas offered lamely.
"Hey..." Sora said. The most beautiful woman on earth left the room all smiles and charm and elegance, her heels clicking softly against the hardwood. Roxas thought it might be a good icebreaker if he told Sora he had a beautiful mother, but then he thought about it again and decided that was probably more freaky than it was endearing.
A good way not to make friends is to tell a guy their mom's hot.
"So, um. Riku..."
"Who are you?"
"Roxas."
"Uh huh."
"I'm a friend of Riku's."
"Riku doesn't have any friends."
"Except you and Kairi-- I know. But that's here. Not, not back..." Roxas sighed and cut himself off. He would talk himself in circles if he wasn't careful and there was something about the way Sora was studying him that was just more than a little unsettling. "Look," he said. "Can we just... level or something?"
"Level?"
"About Riku."
"Level about Riku."
"Yes, level about Riku. We need to talk, okay?"
"Okay, but I don't know who you are."
"I'm Roxas."
"And a friend of Riku's, yeah, I got that part." Sora's head moved in that tilting manner of his mother's and he cocked his head. Roxas studied his neck silently while Sora asked, "But why're you here?"
Having decided that Sora's neck was more like that of an ostrich, Roxas decided that eye contact would probably be a good idea for that conversation and he pulled his own eyes back to Sora's famous baby-blues. Maybe it was the ostrich neck or the intensity of those eyes-- Roxas wasn't sure. But suddenly he didn't feel warm, he didn't feel fuzzy. He felt desperate and cold and the initial rush of determination he'd felt at the beginning of his mission came flooding back in.
"From what I gather," Roxas said, "you're the kid who gave Riku the goddamn brilliant idea of stopping his meds in the hopes he'd get better. What kind of common sense it takes to reach that kind of conclusion-- I don't know. But if you could just really try to follow me for, like, twenty seconds..."
"Umm...?"
"I'm Roxas, okay? Roxas. And you are Sora. I've known Riku for as long as I can remember. Until he met you, Riku would've never been the kinda kid to not pop the pills he was told to pop."
"I know..."
"And... and that's not saying it's your fault, it's just..." Roxas sighed. "Man. This is hard."
"Well, it might help if you told me what you were trying to say first, then said it."
"That doesn't even makes sense. Once I told you what I was trying to say, that would mean I'd already... Okay, forget that. Look, Sora. I just..." Sora had been moving while Roxas had been talking, and Roxas suddenly found himself outside Sora's front door, the boy beside him guiding them down the stoop, down the walkway, back towards the street-sides. Roxas followed because Roxas didn't know what else to do-- not to mention he was hardly done talking with Sora. So he spewed at the words as they came, matching stride with Sora and trying to mentally tell the boy that he was not afraid-- that for all that Roxas had his countless issues with Riku's character, no one fucked with his first and got away with it.
"Riku's already blocked us out of his life," Roxas explained. He thought he saw Sora nod, but he wasn't too sure. "As long as he has a life--" Roxas continued, "--that's one thing. But I don't want to be forced out of his life just because there's no life left. Or..."
"I know, I know, and I'm sorry, okay?"
"So why aren't you supporting Riku? How come you're bottled up in your house with your mother as a guard dog, for crying out loud?" Furrowing his brows, Roxas hurriedly added, "Not... not that I'm calling your mother a dog..."
"How long was your flight?" Sora asked.
"Long," Roxas said.
"Jet-lagged much?"
"Much."
Sora led them along a winding road-- one Roxas didn't catch the name of because he'd been too busy taking in other things to notice street signs. Really, it would've been easy for Sora to cackle maniacally and run away, leaving Roxas lost and alone and defenseless against the suburban atmosphere. But somehow, Roxas didn't think to worry about this. It wasn't that the thought didn't occur to him, it was just that the thought chose not to linger. Sora, he believed, was not a guy likely to leave a guy like Roxas in the middle of nowhere to die.
Roxas' assumption was only confirmed as he watched Sora's face scrunch and fall into this contemplative sort of thing-- brows furrowed, lips puckered, teeth biting anxiously at the flesh inside his mouth. The summer sun was starting to draw out just the tiniest beads of sweat from the boy and they gathered around his eyes and around his temples.
"I don't know how to help Riku," he confessed. "If it was my fault in the first place... No, it's like... These things that upset Riku... and set him off... and make him so unhappy he could die. I..." Sora let the words fall away, but his message was still clear and real as anything hanging in the air. Those things that set him off, that upset him so, that get him so goddamn worked up and deadly-- what if I'm one of them? What if I become one of them?
"Dirty," Roxas said. Sora blinked.
"Huh?"
"Your water here's dirty."
The sidewalk had bent and led them around another patch of guardrail, just hanging above a rather sad looking creek that appeared to contain more sludge than actual water. Dead leaves drifted lamely along the surface and a rather peculiar stench wafted slowly upwards in the summer heat, some sort of combination of dead rodents and cow manure. Sora smiled.
"Yeah," he said. "People fertilize their lawns and the fertilizer messes up the water."
"Okay."
Roxas moved to sit on the rail, under the shade of some bizarre kind of overhanging tree. Sora couldn't object-- it was damn hot outside just like it had been every other day of summer. The sky was cloudless-- no rain would save them that day. And he watched the heat making the road shimmer and he thought about what Roxas had just said--"Okay"-- and thought about what a stupid response that was to such an insightful piece of information.
If Roxas had half a brain, Sora figured, he would've gotten the meaning behind the statement. The over-fertilized suburbs stinking up the creek-bed.
"Did... did anyone ever tell you about the rocks?" Sora asked.
"...The rocks."
"And... you know, it's like... when you throw a rock in a creek, or in any water... you throw it in and for a while the surface goes all crazy around where it hit and there are ripples and little waves everywhere, right? And, and afterwards, like, a while after, the water's smooth again. But the rock's still there and the water'll never be the same." Roxas was staring down at the creek and listening to Sora talk. He was registering every word the boy said and trying to process it in his mind, trying not to get distracted by the way the thick water seemed to ooze around its own rocks and pebbles hidden under the surface.
"Did anyone ever tell you about that?" Sora prodded. And Roxas shook his head and watched the water, shook his head and watched the water.
"Well, someone has now."
"Are you one of those people who believes that everyone effects one anoth--"
"No, that's not what I'm saying." Sora's brows furrowed and his fingers clenched tighter against the rail, but Roxas saw and registered none of this because he was still staring at the water. "The things that happen to us stay with us, okay?" Sora said. "And me screwing up Riku-- that's going to stay with me. When you do something wrong-- when you step out of line-- you get punished. And if you don't get punished, you have to punish yourself by knowing you did something wrong and always reminding yourself of it and always... looking what you did and seeing how... How it was just stupid."
"Where did you hear the story about the rocks?" Roxas asked.
"Xena Warrior Princess."
"Really?"
"Yeah." Sora slumped a little and the quiet around them bore down and demanded a killing. He looked to the side and spied a familiar pair of bags, a familiar sight inside. "You went to my bookstore, too. Are you a stalker?"
"Probably. That's how I found out where you lived."
"You read Kerouac."
"Yeah."
"So why don't you understand?"
"Understand what? Understand you?"
"I don't know. You should just understand, it's like." Sora leaned down, pulled a book from the stack and attacked its pages with a well-rehearsed kind of vengeance. "It's like here," he said, jabbing a finger at the words beneath his hand.
"'Some'll go mad with numbers, some'll go mad with words, some'll pretend to lose reason, and lose reason anyway,'" Roxas read.
"Do you understand yet?"
"No." Ignoring Sora's sigh, Roxas swung both legs over the guard rail, bags of books forgotten on the sidewalk. "Here. C'mere," he said.
Sora blinked, obeyed, and found himself awkwardly tugged in front of Roxas, his back to the boy holding his shoulders and leaning just so in order to speak into his ear-- "Now look. You just stepped over the guard rail. There's nothing left keeping you from falling in that nasty creek. Do you want to really understand the rock story, Sora? This is the rock story. You run into people in life and you affect them. You might not believe it. I do. You've affected Riku and you're affecting me right now. That down there is my soul. And this up here is you."
And with that, Roxas shoved. Hard.
Down Sora went, a tumbling wreck of squeaks and skin and brown to land in the muck and mire and filth of the creek. There was a sludge and a skitter where his hand fell through the water-- he was certain there was something living there-- ten thousand little somethings that panicked and fled when he landed on them like some bumbling hell-bound giant taking a step out of the sky. And for a moment he didn't know what to do because it felt like his eyes were rolling around their sockets all on their own accord and when he pulled them straight and back together, it was only to glare. But Sora couldn't glare all that well, so really, it was only to pout.
"Before you get angry, Sora," Roxas said, "I should tell you that poetry doesn't make you smart. It makes you look thoughtful and it makes you look creative, but what I need now is straightforward. And poetry is rarely straightforward." Sora hesitated, but finally looked up towards where Roxas stood, feet planted a shoulder-width apart, arms folded across his chest. "Tell me, Sora," he said. "Why are you afraid of Riku now?"
"He's like Hayner," Sora responded dumbly. Meekly. Roxas had him beat. Roxas had pushed him down. Sora was dirty and it was sophomore year all over again.
"Who's Hayner?" Roxas asked. Demanded. Roxas had him beat. Roxas knew it. Roxas was in charge and it was rare and it was powerful and he had to check himself to make sure he didn't bask in it and roll in it rather than use it to his advantage wisely. Wisely, wisely, that was key-- that thing was key as Sora opened his gaping hole of a mouth and no sound came out and-- wisely-- Roxas waited.
"He's just like Hayner, okay? He's... he's better than Hayner, but I let Hayner--" Sora's mouth was screwed up into this twisted little frown and when he tried to force it out, he stumbled and bumbled and settled on a mumbled: "I... I screwed up, okay?"
"What happened to Hayner, Sora?"
x x x
Kairi smiled and slid a scrawny arm around Sora's shoulder. She listened to him cry and felt so pleasantly needed, so in demand that she stayed there the entire night. It wasn't evil or selfish. It was simply human. And she could tell from the pulse beneath his skin that it was her Sora was still there for, it was her he had anchored himself to so completely and so fully. Forget Hayner. Screw Hayner, she said. And maybe he said something, but it didn't even make sense to her at the time.
He let you down, she whispered. It's okay, baby. Hey, hey, it's okay.
The next day, Sora was hit by a school-bus.
x x x
Sora didn't have the sense to move from the creek-bed as he talked to Roxas. It didn't click or register quite properly in his head that he was up to his knees in foul-smelling runoff water. He was just standing stupid and reciting the events of last year, events he'd pushed away so much that it felt like some sort of deja-vu, some sort of twisted dunk and splurge into a past life.
He spoke about his sophomore year. When Roxas and Riku had been palling around in World History, there, in another part of that world they studied so goddamn diligently, Sora was living up with the life he had and nearly getting that life smeared on the underside of on-coming traffic. Why? Sora told Roxas that, too. He told Roxas about Hayner, about Kairi, about the bus, the hospital, and the hell the high school had become thereafter. And when he was done he slumped back in the water, spent and tired and self-conscious beyond all belief.
"You probably really think I'm lame now, huh?"
"Nah. You're not lame."
"But how can you...?"
"You're just not. That's all." Roxas shrugged. "You're a cruel, petty, vengeful, loving, and honest person." And with that, he reached down and stretched one lone little hand out to a smelly, sopping Sora. "I can see," Roxas said, "why Riku is attracted to you."
"Really?" Covered in muck and reeking like the underside of a fermenting trash bag, Sora beamed like no other, hands clasped behind his back. It was at that moment that Roxas registered just what kind of a flaming queer he was really dealing with. He almost wanted to laugh. ...Almost. But that would've ruined the bad-ass impression he'd made on Sora. And Roxas just couldn't have that.
So he said, "Yeah, really," and picked up his books, a bag in each hand, just as before.
"So... how do you know him anyway?" Sora asked.
"We go way back. We were... We were good friends back on the islands."
"You must know each other really well."
"I guess... ...You know, you should tell him."
"Tell him what?"
"About Hayner. He worries about you."
"And you worry about him."
"We all worry about each other."
"I don't think everyone does. There are some people who just don't care."
x x x
It was Mayako's idea for them to go to the therapist--the psychologist--the shrink--the nut-doctor-- the next day. That day Roxas would still be there. He could possibly 'provide an insight' to Riku, she said. He could 'help them.' He could 'explain.' Roxas didn't say anything over dinner, when Mayako brought it up. It wasn't exactly like he could say anything-- he was staying in the woman's house after all, and good manners seemed to win out over the idea that Riku might possibly be capable of hating his guts even more should he go along with it.
That had been Roxas' last hope, really. That Riku would get angry, throw a tantrum, pitch a fitch. But Riku seemed fed up with the entire thing-- the entire fighting thing. He resigned to it that evening and slunk up the stairs to the guest bedroom after the meal. No fuss, no nothing. Roxas found the quiet of the house and its awkward inhabitants completely disturbing-- completely alien when held up against the life he'd seen Riku living the past thirteen years Roxas had known him.
So when he went upstairs and when he inched the door open for himself, he wasn't expecting to find Riku-- his Riku-- sitting cross-legged and waiting on the bed.
And, not knowing what else to do, Roxas sat beside him.
And, with nothing left to do, Riku started speaking slow and sluggish, letting words drip off his tongue and roll down his chin like caring was a foreign concept.
"It's funny, you know," he murmured. "The fucking doctors sent me here to get away from the stress. I come here... I move all the way out here, away from everything. A blank slate, for god's sake. But it's like, once you start giving a fuck about people, you get stressed anyway." Why is that?
"You know, Riku. The thing about humans is that they kinda... have a tendency to be human."
"Ha. Ha."
"Seriously. We've all got faults and problems. The doctors didn't have you move in with your aunt and uncle because they thought the people here would do you good."
"So why'd they do it?"
"Maybe they thought... that if you were away from the things that reminded you of your parents for a while... it would get better."
"Doctors don't know shit."
"They try."
When Roxas moved closer, he did so slowly, deliberately. It was obvious when his breath shifted, when he heat shifted, when his weight shifted. The bedsprings creaked lightly and Riku felt the weight of the smaller boy pressed against his side, warm, familiar, and somehow sapping him of every ounce of will he'd forced behind his frown. His expression was neutral when Roxas leaned up, impassive when he felt the ghost of a breath across his cheek, and blank when the gap was closed and Roxas was pressed finally, fully, and firmly against him.
Riku was only really wakened into responsiveness when Roxas had pushed him backwards onto the bed, when Roxas had dug his fingers into his hair like he once had. When Roxas had breathed something Riku couldn't hear and when Roxas had breathed something Riku could-- "Are you okay then?" In some kind of determination to prove he was, in fact, perfectly damn fine, Riku tugged Roxas back down with a jerk at his shirt, forcefully slipping his tongue into the other's mouth and watching Roxas' eyes snap shut. It was like a mechanism and the predictability of it all made something in Riku ache for the way things used to be once more.
The bulge in Riku's jeans was all Roxas really needed as any kind of indicator-- if he'd been two years younger, he would've felt that surge of giddy hormonal "I did that, I did that!" pride that had once stirred and swelled his little teenage heart. There were a lot of things Roxas and Riku had endured together. This, Roxas figured, was just another one of them. It would be some thing-- one thing-- possibly the last thing that they would endure, but Roxas was determined to make this one count, to make this one safe and okay and pushed behind them like the rest of their adolescence.
So when Roxas finally did figure out the button, figure out the zipper, Roxas jerked Riku off slowly. He watch the other's face carefully, seeing the hate and the resentment and the bitterness dissipate to nothingness. With his free hand he cradled Riku's knee, pressed his palm against the bone and thought, How thin his legs've gotten-- he hasn't been running-- he wouldn't even be in shape for blitzball anymore-- not even Struggle, maybe-- he's just here now-- they don't do those things here, I guess-- Riku won't do those things anymore.
"Riku..."
"W-what?"
"Did you ever love me?"
"No..."
"Do you love me now?"
"N-nn..."
"You can say it," Roxas said. "It's okay. I don't mind."
"No."
And when Roxas was sure that Riku had been reduced to a state of blankness, of emotionlessness, Roxas let him go.
Of all the people who knew Riku, Roxas was the only one who would have truly understood what to do at that moment.
"You're gonna fix it, right?" he asked in the dark. But he knew Riku heard because he could just make out the ripple of air that fanned around the other boy's eyelashes as they moved up and down in wide-eyed blinking fashion.
"Yeah," Riku said.
"And you'll fix you 'n Sora?"
"Yeah."
"Hey man... Look..." Roxas rolled on his side, nudged Riku's arm, tried to keep him awake while he said, "Look out for Kairi, too." He licked his lips and wondered if he should say more-- if saying anymore would be crossing some boundary that he as an outsider shouldn't even think of crossing. "Take her out to dinner or something."
"You do it, if you two're so 'tight.'"
He watched Riku roll away, face away, chest toward the wall, back toward Roxas. And, more than anything, Roxas felt the sudden need to kick Riku in the head. Instead, he just side and left the imaginary line uncrossed-- toed, but still uncrossed. "Maybe I will," he said dumbly.
"Just go fuck her already. You want to. She's probably waiting."
Roxas laughed. His back fell against the wall with a thunk and a socked foot stretched and prodded Riku in the side, accompanied by only the most jovial words of: "Screw you, asshole."
"Whatever."
(x) (x) (x)
Yeah, Roxas. Way to dominate. Oh, you sexy devil, you. Wearing the pants in the plot. Go you, go you.
Again, I have to keep apologizing for the horrific delays in updates. I've said it before but I'll say it again: college essays eat souls. Bear with me for another month or so-- please-- and I'll be back on some sort of normal schedule. Thanks again for reading! Many questions answered in the next chapter. Er. Hopefully.