A/N: Well, here's the new second chapter. Not all that different from the unedited one, but it's worth replacing. It's short, but believe me, the chapters will be getting longer as this story decides to go somewhere, okay?? Have fun ;D


Chapter 2: Remembering Before

You dream when you're tired; intent on the flight of imagination filled with ambiguity and twists so enthralling, so stimulating, twilight and the half-light non existent, reality unreal (unreal being the reality?). Adventures, pure adrenaline-fueled adventures where you could fly and be the hero with the mythical Keyblade, or where you could be trapped in the winding corridors of mysterious, forbidding, long forgotten places, running in the sloth-like slow motion of a dreamer being pursued. It was supposed to be easy, so freaking easy to go to that dream world when you were tired, so why wasn't Sora dreaming? Or sleeping, for that matter?

Oh, he knew perfectly well why he wasn't sleeping. He just didn't get why. Thoughts could get a little muddled when you were so tired your body was aching, sure, but it didn't explain what he was thinking, why he was thinking it, not even why, of all times, he had to be thinking it now. Now, when all he wanted to do was forget about the stupid day and rest for a while.

But of course, the little part of his brain that Sora liked to call his conscious gave him answers that didn't make sense, and the even smaller part of his brain that Sora didn't know what to call gave him answers that froze him to the core, because these answers were different, out of his element; or maybe, more correctly, in the element that he didn't want to touch, not then, when his mind did the best thinking and had the worst timing. Like coming up with ridiculous thoughts about why he liked Riku (not that he did).

Riku was on his mind. Everywhere he looked, something lead to something else that lead to Riku. His mouth was so dry that Sora couldn't swallow, nerves taking their toll on his body, slowly incapacitating everything they could get their hands on. Fingers of insecurity and wonder and something that made him feel like throwing up were twining around his chest, and maybe it was just his imagination but it was really making it hard to breathe.

Sora wasn't used to thinking about guys, wasn't used to the feelings that swelled in his chest; scary little feelings that made him run away from his heart. So when he thought about Riku's eyes or the color of his hair or even the sound of his voice, and when his heart pounded in his chest, Sora didn't know if it was normal.

Does it really matter if it's normal or not? A voice questioned him, and he was relieved to find that it was not, in fact, one of the voices of his non-friends.

Mm, dunno. Maybe.

But thinking like this wasn't rational. Sora had just met Riku … four hours ago. He didn't know what type of person he was or if he was nice or what he liked. So it was only obvious that Sora could not like Riku; not his hair, not his eyes, not his voice; nothing.

It was impossible.

Tired and unable to think properly, Sora blocked out his thoughts and turned onto his back, watching as a car headlight streamed across his ceiling before trailing the opposite wall and disappearing. His thoughts were always go jumbled and inconsistent when he was tired, like he was seeing them through blurred glass. Maybe if he could just get to sleep, have some rest, maybe these 'feelings' (or whatever they were) would go away.

Maybe.

And maybe if Sora were to see Riku again, the answers he looked for would greet him along with the item of his thoughts (he found himself thinking, even though he was quite insistent on dropping the subject and going to sleep). But as soon as Sora thought this, images of long, silver hair popped up into his head, running fingers through that hair because it looked so touchable and imagining how it would smell if he put his nose up close, and he felt his heart quicken its pace and the fingers of insecurity and wonder squeeze at his stomach.

Sora mumbled, punched his pillow until it looked reasonably cushiony and rolled onto his side. He completely gave up on blocking out his thoughts; he was just too tired to continue fighting when it was one thirty in the morning and, no, he hadn't gotten any sleep, and spent the early hours dreaming about trailing silver hair and hypnotizing aquamarine eyes.

* * * * * * * * *

Breakfast tended to vary for Sora's family. Sometimes it consisted of a McDonald's hash brown and a milkshake, other times it would be something along the lines of home cooked bacon and eggs accompanied with toast dripping with margarine, and then there was the plain, rightly underrated cereal everyone knew and loved to hate.

To the relief of his growling stomach and throbbing head (symptoms of lack of sleep) he had smelt bacon and eggs when he woke up (which resulted in him rushing to the table and eyeing the food in front of him). Sora lapped at his food with a great amount of enthusiasm, savoring the rich taste of the bacon and guffawing down the eggs while they were still dangerously hot because he just didn't have enough restraint to wait for them to cool. He saved the toast for last, pools of margarine glistening in the florescent light of the kitchen and he nearly choked on the drying toast when he decided to swallow it down just as he had with is eggs.

"Mum, he's doing it again," Amanda sniggered from across the breakfast table, all too lively for so early in the morning. Her face was cute; cheeks stuffed with eggs, bulging, so she wasn't able to smile or even speak properly. Hypocrite.

"Stop him before he chokes," Sora's mum shouted a reply from inside the fridge (searching for more orange juice because Sora had drank it all). "I don't want my son choking on perfectly good food. Do you hear that, Sora?" She laughed. "At least chew your food before you swallow."

Sora made a half grunt, half choking sound that Amanda and his mum new all too well to be a Sora reply. He was too busy eating to make any kind of retaliation.

When Amanda finished eating she offered to do the dishes. There weren't many to do, but the dishwasher hadn't come in yet and their mum had left to post the mail before the Post Office had a chance to (fully) open. The dishwashing liquid was still in one of the boxes, not to the surprise of Sora but much to Amanda's dislike, so she was rummaging through one of the boxes, now, arms deep into its confines and hair falling down on either side of her face (she kept blowing it away but it didn't help).

"Why does the dishwashing liquid always end up on the bottom?" Amanda sighed, pulling out the yellow and white bottle and stiffly standing up. Sora decided that it was a rhetorical question and didn't need his answering.

Then she was walking to the sink, bottle dangling at her side, but she halted half way, turned to Sora but didn't look at him and said, much to his surprise, "Um, you wanna help me with these?"

Sora's eyebrows shot up. There was a pause, and Amanda was biting her lip and Sora was blinking and the whole situation was very uncomfortable. "Sure?"

She nodded slightly, then turned and continued to the sink. Sora noticed the hand that was holding her thumb. The sinking feeling in his stomach had nothing to do with the digestion of his breakfast. He stood (the squeal of the chair against the hardwood floor made him cringe) and followed Amanda to the sink and started the water.

A long period of silence followed, only broken by the patter of water against dishes, the swish of soap and sponge and the wipe of dish towel against the wet surface of cutlery and dinner plates. The air was heavy around them, and as Sora finished drying the last fork off he found his movements feeling as forced as the silence was.

By the time the dishes were put away Amanda hadn't said anything. Sora knew with certainty, knew it in the pit of his stomach that she needed to talk about something, let it off of her chest before it made her crack into tiny little pieces of Amanda. Knew it, but he didn't say anything, instead waited till Amanda was as comfortable as she could make herself. Amanda was pulling at the hem of her dress and the hand holding her thumb was too preoccupied to continue the involuntary habit.

Sora was starting to feel uneasy. The look that was on Amanda's face would have done that to anyone; trembling lips and expression slowly turning to a depressing omnipresent feature, countenance gradually turning whiter until it was like she had died right in front of him and what he was seeing was her ghost, smile forced, desolate eyes without the honey sweetness. Sora had the sneaking suspicion that she was going to suddenly walk through a wall and disappear.

Amanda sighed, then, and grabbed the sponge and started to clean the sink. She coughed a little, and even though her face was turned away Sora could see that she had turned so much whiter, porcelain pale, and that wasn't good at all. Sora only remembered one other time Amanda had looked like that, and it was when she was in a hospital bed in California after the "accident" (the police had called it that, but that was only for cover; everyone who needed to know knew how she got hurt, and that it was no accident). Sora started to really, seriously panic. Whatever the hell Amanda was thinking was not doing her any good at all.

"Hey, if you have something to say, say it," Sora encouraged, silent beg of a big brother. He couldn't just wait like this any longer. He just couldn't.

And then Amanda deflated, literally, her shoulders slumping and her head dropping to face the ground and she dropped the sponge so that it made a silent splash against the tiles. Sora jumped.

"H-hey!" He exclaimed, running to Amanda because she looked as if she were about to collapse; her knees shook and she clutched the counter like it depended on her life, and then her chest heaved, freaking heaved, like she wasn't able to get enough air.

Sora wrapped his arm around her waist and pried Amanda's shaking fingers away from the counter. Her frame was shaking from head to toe, now; so dangerously fragile, and Sora lead her over to the kitchen chair, cooing "Hey, you're okay. Let's just sit you down," all the while thinking that crap his sister was in it bad, and crap he didn't know what the hell to do about it, and crap he was such a careless big brother for letting her get like this.

Sora realized what was wrong with Amanda when he heard a shaky sob rise from her trembling lips. She was crying. Amanda was crying, and he had no idea why but right now he wasn't sure if he cared or not, only sure that watching his little sister cry was worse than anything else in the whole freaking world and he felt like crap when another cracking sob made its way through Amanda's lips.

She sat down, rocking back and forth and clutching her stomach, and Sora did what he thought was necessary. He lied. Told her, "It's okay, Amanda. It's all right. There's no need to cry," cooing and reassuring and cradling her on his chest, rocking back and forth, protecting her from the horrid things she was thinking with his dream-Keyblade and his words.

Amanda looked up at him so suddenly, then, albeit reluctantly, and her clouded honey brown eyes met his. They windowed something like fear and something larger than worry. Sora gulped.

"What's wrong?" He asked, and even to him it sounded more like a command coated in a shaking voice than the genuine concern he felt.

At first there was no response from Amanda, only the heaving breaths she took, the repressed sobbing, the loud silence between them when she turned her gaze onto the tiled floor and broke, slowly and painfully and quietly, there being rocked in his arms. But then she sighed, calmed down a bit so that she could speak coherently, breathed a little slower.

"Sora …"

"Yeah?" Sora encouraged, rubbing Amanda's back with his thumb in tiny, continuous circles.

"I'm sorry," she hiccupped, biting her lip.

"Hey, there's nothing to be sorry about."

She paused, just for a second, shaking her head vigorously like she was trying to deny what he said, and Sora strongly thought that she was, and then, "I … Sora, really, I can't keep doing this," she whimpered, sniffling, holding back choking sobs by gritting her teeth. "We can't keep doing this."

Sora winced.

Oh, no.

He knew what was wrong, had actually known all along but it never occurred to him to be the problem right now. He hated it, loathed it, despised it and wanted to punch it and make it pay, but he knew he couldn't do anything about it and all that was going through his head was shit, they were going to face it now and he wasn't ready.

"Sora …" Amanda whispered, clutching his hand in her own and shaking with a scary consistency. "Sora, I dreamt about them again last night." She looked up at Sora, honey eyes pleading.

"Yeah … I know." And he really did, because sometime in the early hours of the morning while he dreamt about silver hair he heard her crying again.

"I miss them."

Sora shifted his knees against the tiles and knew that he was squirming.

"I miss them too."

And to Sora's surprise Amanda smiled; little, weak, slightly shaky, but it was genuine, and she grasped his hand tighter and sat up, nodding her head and looking down again.

"I want friends again," she whispered, licking her lips.

Sora froze, blinking at her, running thoughts through his head that didn't even make sense because he was so confused and this conversation was just going so fast that he couldn't keep up with the fact that Amanda wanted the pain. No went through his head, pounding with his pulse, over and over again. No, this wasn't happening. Nonononono.

Kneeled beside her, he sat still, no longer comforting her, but feeling as if he was the one who was going to need to be comforted. All these thoughts, they were … painful, so freaking painful, and he knew he wanted to stay away from them, push them under his mental couch and let them gather dust and rot there as punishment for all the pain they caused him, but it wasn't working. They crawled out from the dust with the help of Amanda's words and they were haunting him again, not that they stopped, really. But now it was worse. Like before. He could hear their voices, menacing, challenging, "Look at us, Sora. Come on. You can't ignore us."

"Don't, Amanda," was all he could manage from his tightening throat. He didn't want to. He didn't want to do this. Amanda had to understand that. "Just don't."

She looked as if Sora had slapped her. Sora cringed, but that was all he offered as an apology.

"Don't what, Sora?" She asked him, tears clinging to her lashes, and guilt wrapped Sora up in its lethal arms when he realized that he was making Amanda cry. "Don't cry? Don't love? Don't freaking feel anything because it hurts too much? I can't do that," she gritted her teeth, turning to Sora and fisting her shaking fingers into balls at her sides. "I've tried Sora, and you have too. But it doesn't work like that."

"Then how does it work? Does it work every time we move to a different time zone and leave behind our friends or when there's no one to leave behind?"

Amanda grimaced. "It's better than being alone."

"We don't know that." Sora whispered.

Amanda's gaze fell to the floor. No one moved. No one spoke. The only thing Sora could hear was his own labored breathing and the sniffles of his little sister, clutching her chest.

He could feel the old wounds, imagined gaping crevices in his chest, imagined Amanda picking at the scabs with long, desperate fingernails and now they bled again, fresh, raw, stinging. Sora knew he shouldn't be angry, knew that, yes, this day was going to come, but he wasn't thinking rationally and every part of his brain was screaming agonizing pain and that just felt like shit.

Through it, though, through the pain and the anger and through the walls he'd built Sora knew that they couldn't just block themselves out from the rest of the world forever. And he didn't want to keep up the walls, not really. He wanted to believe that love and friendship was worth the pain.

"I'm sorry," Amanda broke the silence with the tortured whisper before doubling over and shaking.

Sora realized why she had apologized before, when they had started the conversation and he still didn't know what the hell was going on. Amanda knew how much they were both going to hurt. And Sora felt bad, then, felt terrible, because she sincerely just wanted her life back, wanted it so bad, and Sora knew exactly how she felt and right now he was acting like a hypocrite. And truthfully, Sora knew that deep in his heart he wanted the exact same thing Amanda was begging for. He didn't want to be alone.

"I'm sorry too." He whispered, hand still massaging soothing circles on her back.

"Really?' Amanda asked, body still scrunched up and huddled together but she had stopped shaking now, at least.

"Yeah," Sora said. "It's not like I don't want friends as well or anything. But you know that it … that we …" Sora sighed and tried to gather his words so that he wouldn't hurt Amanda by saying something he didn't want to say. It gave her enough time to stop crying and just huddle there, under his hand. "Look, friends just don't work out in our situation, okay? When we leave, we have to leave them, too. That's just too much to handle, Amanda. You know that."

"Then let's not leave."

"…What?" Sora asked, bewildered, because a suggestion like that was going to get them killed. It was going to get them killed and there was no exaggeration in his words, none at all, but when he looked at Amanda she had turned her head to look at him and there was a certainty in her eyes, a promise that it would be okay, like she knew nothing was going to happen.

Amanda took advantage of Sora's obvious shock and rambled on. "We don't even know if he's still following us, Sora. We've been running away for so long that we've forgotten the reason why. So why don't we just stop for a while? Why don't we rest, catch our breath for a couple of years, no, better, for a couple of decades, you know, see where it takes us? And if he comes back we can leave." She paused, took a breath, stalled for a second to gauge Sora's reaction, saw shock and indecision, and she continued. "I don't want to sacrifice friendship for nothing. I want to be certain that there's a reason, and right now … we're not certain. Not even mum."

If anything, Sora had to agree with that mum part.

Mulling over things, Sora admitted, was a specialty of his. He didn't need quiet to think, didn't need air or time or structure. He would hypothesize and analyze and consider and weight his options and look a both arguments and he'd make up his mind, tie his opinion in a knot and hand it over.

"Wait a sec, okay?" He asked Amanda, only a whisper, because he needed to think, now. Amanda nodded, and she definitely wasn't crying anymore, and Sora took that as a sign of her calming down.

So Sora mulled over what Amanda had presented to him, feeling the searing pain that continuously burned his chest, examining it, comparing it to the happy and sad memories he remembered from the little amount of time he was able to have friends. Was it worth it? Was friendship worth hurting for?

He remembered the time a certain brown haired girl in pigtails had shown him a small pond off the coast of an Island he had once lived on, long ago. The name Destiny Islands seemed to pop in his head. It sounded right.

Sora was the only person she had shown it to; it was a secret pond, magical, surrounded by small palm trees and wildflowers and a fallen palm tree that made a great place to sit and talk. He remembered without blocking the memories and he felt; felt the way he was liked, the way he was trusted, the way he felt as if he was special to someone who didn't have to like or trust him. Didn't have to, but did. The kind of acceptance you could only gain from a stranger.

The girl smiled at him, bubbling and full of radiance and she said, "You can't tell anyone, okay? It's our secret." His heart swelled with happiness and love and something that made him feel different, like he had a big responsibility.

Then his memories turned to the day he had to leave Destiny Islands. The brown haired girl was crying, tear streaked cheeks shinning in the intense sunlight. She was clutching the hem of her mum's dress, not tall enough to reach any higher but tall enough to lay her head against her mum's thigh.

"Don't go, Sora. Don't go, Amanda," she had said, and Sora remembered it clearly, remembered the tone and the way her voice caught at the end of his name and the way you could know she was crying without even looking at her. He remembered the voice of his mother, replying something along the lines of, "They have to, honey. We have to," and Sora didn't understand why they had to leave, and he was angry, so angry, his little fists shaking at his sides and his innocent little mind not registering how important it was to leave everyone behind, because it was a grown up problem he wasn't allowed to know about.

Before he knew it Sora was back in the present time, staring at the yellow kitchen wall as if it held all the answers. He blinked, slightly befuddled, cracked his neck because it was really stiff and that was painful for him, and looked over at Amanda, who was staring at Sora; waiting, watching.

"How long was I out?" Sora asked, swallowing, knew he failed at lightening the mood with wit but was relieved that he had tried, anyway.

Amanda looked at the clock. "About five minutes," hushed whisper, little lick of the lips.

"Huh," Sora mumbled, returning his gaze to the plain yellow wall in front of him and finishing off his analysis of something he thought he would never more than glance at.

Friendship had its ups and downs, but when you weighed them against each other the ups ruled over the downs and smothered them, happiness over sadness, fun over annoyance, acceptance over jealousy, smothered them as if they didn't exist. And then when you weighed the ups and downs of a friendship with the pain of losing it, it was … worth it. The experience of a love that isn't forced upon someone, where the choice is made to love or hate a complete stranger and change the life of someone so drastically; that choice, that innocent choice, was a choice that Sora wanted to make again. Even if it was just one time. Even if it hurt.

In theory, he could do it. In his head he thought up different ways to dodge the pain, smother it, run away from it, but in the big wide world it didn't work like that and he knew, god he knew how much it hurt and that, no, it wasn't as easy as it was in his head.

But he was going to try.

" … Okay," he whispered, feeling Amanda jump next to him.

"Okay what?" She asked, and Sora had to remind himself that no matter how observant she was, Amanda wasn't able to read his mind

"Okay, let's stay. Let's convince Mum to live here in the Gold Coast for a few years, maybe even more, and we can go –"

"You serious, Sora?" She stared at him as if he had just sprouted horns and was galloping away with Santa Claus.

"Why? You think I'm joking?" He asked, raising an eyebrow before lightly laughing, and Amanda just shook her head, bright smile on her face, happiness there and honey eyes back and a gleam of white teeth across a stretch of glossy pink lips. The glisten of tear tracks down her cheeks was wiped away with the back of her hand.

"What changed your mind?" She asked, bemused little tone in her voice coated in glee and relief.

"I don't know. I guess I never really thought about it before, is all." He shrugged, and it was the truth, at least. He never thought about it before because he didn't think he had it in him.

Amanda sighed, then, slumped in the chair and put her head in her hands and laughed, chesty and wholeheartedly and it was both exhilarating and scary at the same time.

"Eight years," she gasped, head still in her hands and she was rocking back and forth, now, laughing and gasping, "Eight years of running away and we're finally going to do something about it!"

"Yeah," Sora laughed, scratching his head. He could feel the atmosphere around them lighten up instantly, yellow walls sunny and bright instead of bleak and pale, smiling faces instead of shaking sobs.

"Yeah," Amanda gasped, finally coming to her senses, a certain calm on her face as she sat up, out of the chair with a squeak, and a quick pace around the room before her eyes settled on Sora again, a sparkle in her eye; ideas forming, doubtlessly.

"Why don't we start now?' She asked, clapping her hands together. "Yeah, Sora! You know the people next door? We could get to know them," she smiled, walking over to Sora and tilting her head, inquisitive little noise in the back of her throat. "And you could get to know that Riku better, too."

Sora's heart missed a beat before pumping in his chest tenfold. Sora could have sworn he was going crazy, or worse, but he didn't want to think about that because his nerves had had enough for one day, and it was only morning but he felt that he really needed a long, long nap.

Sora knew it, knew that he really, really wanted it; wanted to find out more about Riku and explore the kind of person he was (and a sudden thought occurred to Sora that he wanted to explore more of Riku than his personality, something physical, maybe, and that made his insides flip), but the walls he had built weren't fully knocked down yet and he knew that it was going to take some serious hammering to get them to disappear.

Sora was a muddle of uncertainty, so he didn't think he could speak coherently, but thankfully he was able to manage a, "Um, I don't think I can do that just yet," to Amanda before completely breaking down to a pile of pitiful teenage hormones while trying to hide spoken breakdown from his sister.

"Oh really?" Amanda had said, voice teasing and full of a promise of further talk about 'getting to know Riku', whatever that really meant.

"I hope you're not planning anything," he replied, bright smile on his face that hid the party of hormones and stimulated nerves in his body.

"Hey, big brother, I don't do the planning. You do."

* * * * * * * * *

Riku groaned. Of all the embarrassing things his mum could have thought up, it had to be this. The unintentional misery she was throwing at him was so obviously intentional it was painful. She did know that Riku had been trying not to fling himself at Sora's house all morning, right? And now, what, she was sending him there? What the heck?

"Listen here, Riku. If you don't take this plate of food like I have so kindly asked you, I will not only put you on garage duty, but I will also forbid any piano playing for a week," his mum stated, spread of a sly smile across her face. "Is that understood?"

Oh, she wouldn't dare. "But mum –"

"Don't you 'but mum' me, mister. I don't see how hard it is to walk next door and hand Ms Knight a little welcoming gift."

"It's not that it's hard or anything –"

"Then why won't you?"

"I - I just don't want to, mu –"

"You might even get to see that lovely Sora boy."

"But that's my point –" Riku realized his mistake immediately and backpedaled. "I-I mean –"

"Riku," his mum said, motherly tone comforting. "Maybe you should stop avoiding it and go."

Riku stumbled over his words, mouth agape but it was doing nothing to help him. What exactly did she mean when she told him to 'stop avoiding it'? Did she know what she was talking about? Did she know what he was talking about (and god did he wish she didn't know)? There was a stretch of silence, extended between them and growing, bigger and bigger, and Riku decided that he'd just go with what his mother was telling him to do and hope with all hope that she didn't know exactly what he was thinking.

"Fine, I'll go."

"That's more like it!" She exclaimed, clapping her hands together. "Now be careful when you're carrying this; it's heavy," she warned, picking up a large ceramic plate that was ridiculously overflowing with food and handed it to him. The smell emanating from it was mouthwatering.

She was practically pushing Riku out the door, then, calling out "Remember your manners!" and promptly shutting the door behind him.

"Well, that was nice of her," Riku muttered, slipping on a pair of worn out joggers and walking over to the Knight's place, wondering if they even liked coconut cake and barbequed sausages and whether Sora would be the one to open the door.