Since Four Leaf Clovers will end soon (almost done with chapter 7 and after that there'll be two more chapters) I'll be updating Superfluous more. A few more characters introduced in this chapter, including Seifer and Demyx. Plus more background information. Of course leaving a couple holes and riddles always makes a nice story. Enjoy
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Nostalgia
1.
A bittersweet
longing for things, persons, or situations of the past. (n.)
2.
Unhappy about being away and longing for familiar things or
persons. (adj.)
"Hey there Olette," a sweet voice chimed, with an entrancing smile attached to the mouth of the orator. Long blond hair laced down to her shoulders fluidly, sitting on the stool that watched over the counter of the coffee shop. Her small arms placed cautiously and carefully acting as if it was a fork and knife on a fine dining table. Life filled blue eyes scanned over her friend Olette, who was behind the giant divider, washing her boney hands in ice cold water.
"Hi Namine," Olette responded, twirling a strand of her light brunette hair, finishing wiping her hands with a small white cloth. She looked upon the girl that stared over the counter, and for a split second wanted to switch places with the blond item of adornment. "How are you doing?"
"Just fine, I am worried a bit," she quietly crooned, nibbling on the skin of her index finger cravingly yet with a hint of preciousness. "He seems more worried than usual."
"That's a silly thing to worry about," Olette scowled at Namine, "so what if your cousin is a bit off for one day?"
"He's just so much more aloof," Namine started, emphasizing the last word with a despising click in her tongue, "I don't know what's going on?"
"You need to relax, Namine," Olette shook her head as her assuring mother-side sunk into the blonde's deepening eyes. "Maybe you need a vacation," Olette started quickly again, piping cheeriness snapping in her throat.
"No I can't afford one," Namine grumbled, tapping her fingers on the black marble counter, "besides I think I need to be around him more to help him. They do say that keeping someone upset company helps them more."
"Yes, but they also say that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," Olette countered back, a witty smirk on her face as she placed two fists on her hips.
"Well I don't know anyone named Jack, so," Namine replied with a dull shrug. She knew that Olette meant well but going on any vacation wasn't going to happen anytime soon. After all with no parents to support her anymore she needed to work harder or she would be out on the streets.
The brunette frowned a bit, the image of no one on the other side of her disposition still sticking in her mind like fastened glue. The balance was good but along with balance came a devious desire that not even she knew the full extent of. "Well then," Olette said with a frozen smile, "good luck dear. I do so hope you go on vacation, you do deserve it after all."
Namine made another sickening soft smile at the brunette and laughed heartily. "Can I have some coffee, please? I'm feeling a bit dead."
Olette just nodded, eyes fixed but smile intangible. She turned over to the coffee machine and brewed up the empty caffeine coffee. Her peripheral vision gazed to Namine who was staring at the glossy counter in disappointment. The brunette had to help. True she had her own problems and of course she wished to fix those but they had been friends since sixth grade. It was an unthinkable thing for her not to help. Perhaps with help she could get her to vanish from that giant cloud that keeps raining on her parade.
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"Damn it Axel," murmured a boy under the shade of school outside benches, covering his eye tenderly, making sure that the soft feeling of his hot palm wouldn't touch any part of his bashed eye.
The last hour seemed like a blotchy blur or a figment that couldn't come into full view. He was on his way to school with his two companions, Axel and Luxord. The three had known each other since they were middle-aged toddlers in first grade. Luxord was about three months apart from Demyx but Axel was about a year older than both. All three had missed the bus and were walking on the road to get to school. Cars were rolling down and up the streets, their drivers disobeying the speed limit, trying to get to their work as fast as possible. Demyx, being of curious wit, asked Axel where he was yesterday, as he ditched both him and Luxord at the movies.
Out of nowhere the mullet-haired boy fell to the ground unconscious, a black eye replacing his normal left eye. While Luxord sputtered out his trademark British accent while asking why the hell he 'punched the lights' out of Demyx, but the pyromaniac continued to punch Demyx in the nose, most likely breaking it. Luxord had asked Axel what had gotten into his mind when he punched Demyx, but Axel didn't respond, stalking off to school with a quick pace. Demyx was happy that Luxord was good enough of a friend to try to bring him back to consciousness. The two were late due to Axel's breakdown from nowhere, but Demyx told Luxord he would be ditching first period today.
Now he was here, staring at the sky, sister to the ocean, watching clouds swarming around the emptiness of the light blue and planes penetrating their space. Even if Axel acted like a jerk before he knew that both the flaming red haired man and his British friend Luxord were loyal enough not to reveal his location. He sighed, swishing his legs back and forth, waiting for the sound that allows him to come into the building safely. Of course he had the sneaking suspicion that he had already been caught somehow.
"You're either very brave or very dumb," an invisible voice stated, making Demyx think that he was hallucinating from blood loss. "Not many people would ditch their first period and stick around campus, so you must be new?" Okay he knew his inside voices were not that unkind. Sighing slightly he craned his neck back to see who it was. Another fellow ditcher, perhaps?
"What about you? Why are you ditching on campus?" Demyx sneered back at the other man, but before the other one could reply to the remark Demyx continued with a half-hearted sigh. "Sorry about that, just ticked off."
"Well I could obviously tell that," the other one replied, "but I'm not a ditcher. I'm not even a student."
"If you're not a student then what are you doing here?" Demyx asked curiously, head still staring at the much shorter man.
"I'm the school psychiatrist," the other said with a smirk.
Demyx blinked at the man in the dark blue long sleeved sweater and baggy black jeans, still trying to comprehend what he was just told. As soon as his mentality slapped his brain and screamed at Demyx that this guy works for the school he turned his head around and stared back up at the sky, trying to pretend the other didn't exist. "I'm screwed, aren't I?"
"You have a black eye and your nose looks crooked, so I can assume you were already screwed," the psychiatrist said with a low chuckle. "You should probably head to the nurse."
"Well she'll wonder which class I came from and if I tell she'll call the teacher and I think you know the end result," Demyx said with a shrug, still refusing to make eye contact with the man so he could bask in the thought that he's talking to no one.
"I'll just tell her that you came late to school and decided you wanted to talk with me before going to class. Besides you can't walk around before second period with a black eye and a broken nose," the psychiatrist sighed lightly, walking over to Demyx. "Besides if your nose starts bleeding again I'm not going to hold it closed for you."
"Thanks for the reassurance."
"Your welcome, now get up," the psychiatrist sternly said, grabbing Demyx's hand, starting to pull him up from the bench. Yet forgetting how weak he was (hence why he became a psychiatrist) he failed to pull the mullet haired student up, receiving a pity laugh from the student. "Shut it," he growled in annoyance.
"Stop pulling so much," Demyx mockingly laugh. "You might hurt yourself."
"Just get up stupid," the psychiatrist grumbled, letting go of Demyx's arm with failure rotting in his bones.
"Fine, I'm sorry," Demyx chuckled a bit, finding it a bit amusing that he could rile up a psychiatrist. Still there was something about the older one that made him feel much more relaxed. It wasn't like when he was around Axel and Luxord. He felt like his head was in the clouds. "I don't think I ever seen you." Hell he didn't even know the school had a psychiatrist. Smooth move, Senior student Demyx. "What's your name?"
"Mr. Clairvoyant," the psychiatrist responded without a seen smile. Demyx bit his tongue as the shrink introduced himself, repressing the urge to chuckle insanely at the girly last name the smaller male had. "Though everybody just called me Zexion. It was nice to meet you, Demyx."
The ending bell rang. The sky waned in delight yet again.
Zexion was gone before the blonde knew it. How did he know his name?
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"Riku, where are you?" Kairi chimed into her cell phone, laxly walking around the school campus, on her way to second period. Her albino haired boyfriend was not in homeroom or in their first period class, peripherally worrying the red head. She had not seen him over the weekend even, which made her even more anxious.
"I-I, decided to go to—stay home," a stuttered reply came back from her boyfriend's voice. She decided to interpret the stuttering as static, even though there were five signal bars on her phone at the moment.
"Well call me later then," Kairi said with sigh, "I worry, you know."
She hastily gazed at the clock tower in the middle of campus. The giant shadow clock hand continued to move clock-wise, landing on number after number, while emitting a soft clicking noise that was out of earshot from this distance. "I need to go now, Riku. Class is starting in a couple minutes. Love you."
Kairi grasped her phone closer to her ear, hoping to hearing a loving response to swoon back into her ear but after ten seconds all she heard was the beeping noise, signaling that Riku had hung up on her. The redhead let out a somber sigh and hurried on to class. She couldn't help knowing that something was indeed wrong with her boyfriend. What she did wonder was if she really wanted to know what was the problem.
The sixteen year old junior dashed through the nearly empty halls, clutching her hard cover copy of 'Catcher and the Rye' to her chest, panting rapidly as her footsteps echoed in the lavished hallway. There were still a few people walking around the hallway, taking their precious time but unknown that they barely had any to begin with. Her peripheral vision scanned the room number plates on the middle of each doorway, looking for the clunky rusty one that read in faded numbers '124'.
'108, 110, 112…' she continued on each plate seeming to gleam less and less as she followed the even numbers. How she hated the archaic style of the school. It looked more like a European palace than an academy. She had never even been outside of her town and the familiarity sickened her to a point where she wanted to cut a hole in her stomach, take out the non-existent birds and butterflies inside it and let them fly away to somewhere totally new. How she yearned for it.
"Well look who it is," a voice cackled as Kairi was suddenly stopped from continuing her dash to class.
"Let go Seifer, I need to get to—"She paused though as a monotone bell disturbed the sincere peace of the empty hallway, "class."
"Well now that you're late you might as well ditch with me and have some fun," Seifer darkly chuckled, silently wrapping his arms around Kairi's waist.
"Incase you forgot, Seifer," she hissed out, easily releasing herself from his latching grip, "I have a boyfriend, so go find some other whore to screw."
"Sorry Kairi, but I think I did forget," Seifer retorted with a trace of phony sympathy in his voice. "Honestly I thought you did too. After all it's probably been months since I seen you two walking around this shit-hole together, with your prissy hands laced around each other—"
"We're still going out," Kairi fumed at the blonde, crossing her arms as she did so. "He's just sick today."
"Sick of you," Seifer grumbled under his breath, to which he received a quick yet harmless kick to the shin. "I'm just telling you what I see Kai, and you know it's true." He added as he started rubbing his shin gingerly. It didn't hurt but if he didn't rub it he knew what kind of angered impression Kairi would get from it.
"It's not true. Riku and I are still going out with each other and that's all there is to it." Kairi announced as her hair whipped her neck when she turned around from Seifer's face.
He does have a point though, her subconscious nagged in the back of her head. You and Riku haven't even gone on a real date in two months.At this rate if nothing patches up then you won't have a boyfriend anymore.
Suddenly the door with the rusty plate reading '116' flung open, resulting in an echoing door crash in the hallway. Seifer watched in bored confusion while Kairi looked fearfully at her fifth period teacher, shooting both students a cold glare.
"Mr. Almasy and Miss. Carmine, stop having a lover's quarrel and get to your classes." Shouted out the junior class chemistry teacher, Mr. Vexen Sickle, turning his head back to his own class, which was giggling uncontrollably at both Kairi and Seifer's argument and their normally calm teacher's lashing.
Before either Kairi or Seifer had a chance to deny anything Vexen had shut the door again and the hallway was unbearably quite. "Well then," Seifer said with a shrug, lifting up his arms and putting his hand behind his head, "want to ditch with me, or not?"
Kairi kept quiet for a while and then made a raspy sigh. "No thanks, I think I should go talk to Zexion for a while."
"The school shrink? Why do you need to see him?" Seifer said with immense apathy.
"You gave me a lot to think about," Kairi shrugged with a smile, walking up to Seifer and giving him a quite chaste kiss of his pale skin cheek. Without another word she slowly paced off to Zexion's office, hoping that Miss. Gainsborough wouldn't be too upset that she skipped biology.
He knew he shouldn't have thought much of it, as Kairi was incredibly dim-witted in planning out her actions ahead of time, but then why could he literally feel his cheeks heating up. Seifer placed a hand onto his forehead and started to gently rub it, stalking off to the west exit, opposite of Kairi's direction. He was not falling for Kairi, no way.
Seifer does not fall in love.
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"Riku, who was it?" A groggy Sora yawned, attempting to pick himself up from the beige colored sofa. He had fallen asleep at Riku's again, but he didn't really mind it. His mother would say different though, knowing she would blow a mental fuse if he just called her. Yet he was awaken by the sound of a vibrating cell phone, of course it wasn't easy to feign sleeping while his breath taking boyfriend was right in front of him answering the call.
Riku masked his frantic look with a light smile, knowing that his naïve love interest would never suspect a thing. "Oh it was just my brother. He was just wondering why I wasn't in school." It was a lie. But what could he possibly tell Sora. That he was cheating on Kairi, Sora's ex-girlfriend, and he didn't even know that they were together. It's the truth, but he just didn't want to crush Sora's heart like that. At least until Sora became a bit more mature to understand the situation better.
It was just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had just come back from another uneventful date with Kairi that he just couldn't stomach himself to keep in memory. Riku was dragged by that redhead leech to some chick flick. What was it about? He honestly didn't care to remember, but he had a feeling that it had nearly the same plot line as every other chick flick ever put into existence. Girl meets guy. Guy meets girl. Girl and Guy get into a situation. Girl and Guy fall in love. Girl and Guy have a falling out. Girl and Guy patch it up in a matter of fifteen minutes. Girl marries Guy. Roll the credits.
After dropping off Kairi at her house he dragged himself across the town boardwalk, simply distraught by what had happened. Moving across the dangling lights of the forsaken Twilight Town he finally realized that there was nothing left between Kairi and him. She probably saw something in that relationship; something he could never even begin to take hold of. In his mind though there was no point of continuing the relationship.
On the way he caught eye of his old high school friend, Tidus. Tidus was a senior in high school, like himself, but he moved away to Destiny Island last year after his father got a promotion. Apparently an old friend of Kairi's had moved into town that night from Destiny Island and Tidus decided to hitchhike with the mover to help them settle into the neighborhood. That's when he was introduced to him. Sora Jejune.
After being somewhat forced to help Tidus and Sora unpack Sora's mother delightfully decided to insist that Sora could stay over at Riku's. Tidus insisted on it too, yet Riku wasn't sure at all. Part of him thought that maybe he could tell Sora that he was with Kairi now and wanted to break up with her, but another part just didn't want to tell Sora he was even dating. At that time he wasn't sure why, but he agreed to letting Sora stay over at his house.
His older brother, Sephiroth, wasn't home again. Riku had assumed as always that he was out having fun manipulating some college girls around his age, or maybe even younger, to give him what he wanted. It wasn't sex; Sephiroth wasn't some heated luster that was for sure, but control over their being.
He quickly turned on the living room television, wanting to destroy the unbearable silence laced into every room, and led Sora to the couch. The two just started to talk for a while, but one thing remained glued to the back of his mind. Should he really tell Sora he was dating Kairi? He didn't think it would make any difference to Sora if he was dating his best friend. But that's when Sora told him something that made him knew he could never tell Sora that he was dating Kairi.
Sora and Kairi had dated and broke up when Kairi abandoned him by moving to Twilight Town.
From the look in Sora's eyes he could automatically tell that Sora still hadn't gotten over being dumped by the redhead. At that point he knew he couldn't tell the brunette he was dating Kairi, not for a long time. Riku didn't even think he could let Sora see Kairi again, knowing with Kairi's temper and lack of coordination something was bound to happen between the two.
At that point Riku had pulled Sora into a tight embrace, not even sure of what he was doing. He was still with Kairi and that was unbearable to think of. Sora didn't reject the embrace though, as much as Riku thought he would. They just stood like that for 5 minutes to a whole eternity, the television emitting soft sounds that just seemed like an illusion at that point. In the end it was Sora who made the first move, grabbing his shoulders and placing a gentle chaste kiss on Riku's lips. Riku could have pulled away; hell the moral thing to do would be to pull away. But in the end he went along with it.
The rest of that night was just a melancholic haze to the albino haired male, but surely enough when he woke up in the morning he was in his bed with the brunette resting soundly in his arms. It was just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sora just yawned tiredly again, rolling over to face the back mount of the sofa, not caring for his boyfriend's caller. He didn't find a reason not to trust Riku, so why should he argue?
Riku stared dimly at the brunette and elicited a soft sigh. It had been two months since Riku had started cheating on Sora, and he was honestly surprised he wasn't caught yet. Sora didn't go to 'The Academy that Never Should Be', but went to some private school across town. It was a good thing too, because if the two ever met again Sora would probably blabber out to the auburn haired girl that he was dating again. Kairi would ask who uncaringly and the second Sora shot out the name 'Riku' from his mouth the redhead would have a meltdown.
Not to mention the academy personally was incredibly closed minded. The majority of people that went were pale, there was barely any diversity besides a few exchange students here and there, everyone was straight (though many who were gay denied such) and if you weren't that way then you were labeled an outcast. He was friends with a couple of those outcasts, but he had to talk in private to them.
Overall the academy was a forest. People are trees, gossip and rumors are fire, and once the fire starts it takes months for it to stop spreading and repair damage.
After a few minutes of silence he assumed Sora was yet again asleep on his sofa. Riku blinked at the item of adornment and smiled. It was a mistake, but it was the best mistake he ever made. He didn't regret it because Sora gave Riku something Kairi could never suffice in the several months they were together.
He gave Riku genuine compassion.
-5 more days until we wake up-
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Long chapter, but it was fun to write. Wondering about the '5 more days until we wake up'? Too bad, use your brains :D Well till next chapter.
"I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die" (Mr. Garrison, South Park)
