Dare You to Live

By ElveNDestiNy

June 11, 2011

Dedicaton: To E, for all the times you've heard me talk about this story. This defenestration is just for you! P.S. Anyone out there who doesn't know what that word means, go look it up in the dictionary :)

A/N: Sorry for taking so long to update again. I've been writing a lot, but for other stories. Anyway, the twins' song "Two Wishes" (Futatsu no negai) from the D.N. Angel OST has been a great inspiration to me. Both the lyrics and the voices are lovely, so I tried to capture that emotion in my portrayal of Riku and Risa's relationship in this story.

Of course, Dark's song, "Kodou – Whenever," has always been the primary soundtrack for this story in my mind: call my name / I'll take the sadness endlessly raining on you / I offer up my body / even risk my life / I want to hold on to your smile until the very end…

- 13: Realize -

For a moment, all Riku could see was the face of her sister's killer. Fukuda's eyes gleamed with unholy light before his grip on her loosened and they came apart in midair. Shadows swallowed up his face, just as they did everything else—it was pitch black outside the cathedral and she could not see the ground beneath.

In a way, it made her fall turn into a dream.

It should have all happened too fast for her to be terrified, and yet, like on the day of the accident, time seemed to slow in Riku's mind. She felt every sensation with an intensity that almost broke her, as if her body knew that these were her last moments on earth. The sound of rushing air filled her ears and she closed her eyes automatically, though she was only trading one kind of darkness for another. Her mind went blank with fear, an empty void so complete that it was almost like acceptance.

There was nothing stronger than the pull of gravity and some part of her knew that the seconds were passing faster than her heart could beat, too fast even for her lungs to draw breath, for the scream in her throat to be released.

She could almost believe that she was floating, could almost pretend that there was no ground below her at all, in all that darkness.

Her whole body jerked when the collision came, knocking all the remaining breath out of her body. The impact was as if she had slammed into a wall and yet, somehow the wall moved, too—the pain that her body had already anticipated just didn't come.

Something warm and hard gripped her tight and her eyes flew open to see the outline of black shadows against the sky, blocking out the stars. She could feel it, the epic struggle in midair between one breath and the next: all the determination and strength of a winged being pitted against the unbreakable laws of gravity. For a single moment, it was as if the world itself held its breath. Riku hung awkwardly in midair, neither falling nor flying.

Then gravity won out after all and she was falling—but she was still being held tight and her own arms were wrapped around his chest with more strength than she had ever used before in her life. She could feel the strong wings that spread wide in a bone-snapping effort to slow their descent.

Dark's entire body jerked hard and he cried out in pain, the sound knifing through the air even more strongly than the piercing screams of the man still plummeting to earth below them. His arms, gripping her, were covered in something warm and slick. Riku remembered in a flash how Fukuda had stabbed at his wing repeatedly with the knife.

There was just enough time for her to realize that Dark couldn't save both of them. She was too heavy, he was too injured, and any moment now the ground would appear in the darkness below them. There was just enough time for her to realize that he could still save himself.

Let me go, she might have screamed, except her bones had all turned to water and her body felt as brittle and fragile as a piece of ice.

He still held on.

They crashed down together, entangled in each other, and then there was only darkness.

Risa was sitting beside her, staring off into the distance, distinctly not even in the direction of the teacher at the front of the room. While some of their classmates looked bored to death, Risa was dreamy-eyed, lost in her pleasant fantasies. With a sigh of exasperation, Riku stopped writing notes and poked her twin with the back of her mechanical pencil.

"Risa!" she hissed. "Pay attention or I won't even let you borrow my notes for the test on Friday."

Risa sat up with a guilty jerk at the poke just as their teacher turned back to look at the students. Fortunately, Kimura-sensei didn't seem to have caught Riku's furious whispering. Their teacher's eyes brightened as an idea occurred to her.

"Ah, we do have a set of identical twins in our class, don't we?" Kimura-sensei desperately tried to interject some energy into her apathetic class. A few of the tired-looking students sat up straighter in response, but the majority barely twitched.

Not again, Riku thought in irritation, glancing over to see how Risa was taking being used as the next example. But her twin's attention span today seemed to be shorter than a fly's. Riku could easily guess what she was thinking about, which just added to her own irritation. Daisuke noticed her annoyance from two rows across and gave her a sympathetic smile.

Riku's heart skipped a beat and she resolutely faced forward, trying her best to pay attention to the words that seemed to go in one ear and out the other. She liked science most of the time but listening to the technicalities of RNA and DNA structures was just torture today.

"…so that's the thing about twins," Kimura-sensei was saying. "Every individual in the world has a unique sequence of genes, like a biological fingerprint. It's better than a fingerprint, actually." She paused for dramatic effect. "But see…identical twins have a peculiar quirk. They have the exact same DNA."

So even on the biological level, I'm not unique at all, Riku translated in her head with another silent sigh. Kimura-sensei, not quite getting the reaction she had clearly wanted, continued to talk about DNA sequencing and how useful it had become for forensics and criminology.

Her focus shifted from twins to the young prodigy she had sitting in her class, who as possibly the youngest police commander ever, certainly knew a lot about criminology. She called on Hiwatari Satoshi a few times while the good students diligently wrote down what was being said.

Riku didn't bother to write it down in her notes—she wasn't going to be able to ever forget that little bit of information about identical twins anyway.

Judging by the expression on Risa's face, the person with the exact same DNA as her hadn't even heard. Riku poked Risa again, harder, eliciting a small "ow!" and a glare. Out of the corner of her eye, Riku saw with surprise that Daisuke was looking unusually interested in the science lecture. Or maybe he was just interested in her twin, and not DNA.

"Didn't you hear what sensei just said?" Riku asked Risa. "If I went and—" she was going to say something cliché like committed murder, but she glanced down at the wings Risa had drawn on her notes and changed her mind. "If I'd…stolen some priceless artifact from a museum, the police could totally think that you were the thief."

"Huh?" Well, the mention of stealing and thieves had gotten Risa's attention, as expected. "Wait, what?"

Risa hadn't bothered to keep her voice down and Kimura-sensei stopped right in the middle of her lecture, turning to give both twins a strongly disapproving and disappointed look. Riku turned back to her notes guiltily and they both sat quietly through the rest of lesson, although Risa still spent half the time drawing chibi Dark in various poses in the margins of her notebook.

God, her twin's obsession had gotten even worse recently, what with all the Dark sightings and Risa's mysterious encounter with the phantom thief that one time. Riku resisted the temptation to touch her lips with the back of her hand, remembering with a little shiver how exactly her first kiss had been…well, stolen.

When was the last time she had kept a secret this big from Risa? But Riku knew her twin almost as well as she knew herself, and Risa would absolutely freak out if Riku said anything at all about it. What could Riku say, anyway? Risa wouldn't see it as Dark stealing her twin's first kiss, she'd see it as Riku stealing a kiss from her beloved, uber-cool phantom thief Dark.

And even thinking back to that moment made Riku feel sort of funny inside, like she was nervous about something, only she wasn't. For someone so uber-cool, he'd looked pretty surprised after the kiss, hadn't he? Not that Riku had really noticed, since she had been too busy blushing.

His lips had been surprisingly soft and hot against her own and then his mouth had opened and Riku's lips had parted ever so slightly in instinctive response—with a sudden start, Riku realized that she was blushing again and her heart was racing.

She was sitting in the middle of class, not out on the balcony with a crazy pervert! Why couldn't she just forget it and start over? Thankfully, before Riku had time to really think about the…incident more, the bell rang. Chairs scraped and students shuffled around the room as they were finally freed from class.

Daisuke wandered over toward them, obviously eager to talk to Risa, and Riku tried to quell the small clench of disappointment in her chest…

She was dreaming, she knew, because somehow everything around her changed, and nothing about it seemed particularly strange. One moment she was reliving a few hours from class and then it was as if she had floated through time and space.

Riku was in her room at their house, and she could see her suitcase all packed and ready to go. Next to it was Risa's. Her twin came in just then and sat down on Riku's bed, her eyes red and puffy from crying.

Part of Riku knew exactly what was going on—this was a memory, too. They were moving far, far away and these were the last few hours they would spend in the Harada house. They hadn't even come back to visit during the summers, although at least the house hadn't been sold.

But at the same time, this wasn't a memory, not exactly, because Riku knew that her twin hadn't talked to her at all that day. Risa had isolated herself and Riku, dealing with her own feelings over leaving Daisuke, hadn't had the energy or time to seek out her twin. They'd spent most of the later flight sitting next to each other but not speaking, both lost in their own miserable thoughts.

In real life, Risa had never come into this room. But in this dream, or whatever this was, Riku's sister was most definitely here, right now, and that was what mattered.

"Hey," Riku greeted her softly, a sudden wave of longing sweeping through her as her eyes took in her sister's familiar form. She had missed her so much. Seeing Risa again, she could hardly imagine ever being separated, even if part of her mind knew what the future held for them and knew that this never happened and would never happen.

"I don't want to go," Risa told her in a choked voice, her eyes large and liquid. She turned her head and stared blindly out the window at the deserted balcony outside. "Why does it have to be like this?"

It was only then that Riku realized what was so jarring about this whole moment. Her twin appeared as Riku had seen her last, as a beautiful girl who had just turned eighteen years old. But they had been four years younger when they had moved out of this house and away from all their friends. Neither of them were fourteen year old girls about to enter high school in a completely foreign country. Even though this seemed as if it was Riku's memory of her last day they had spent in the house before leaving Azumano City, it wasn't.

But seeing her twin so distraught, whether or not this was just a figment of her imagination, still moved her. Without hesitation, Riku took a seat right next to Risa on the bed, letting her sister lean her head against her shoulder. She'd always done that when she was upset, ever since either of them could remember. "Risa..."

But what reassurances could she say, knowing what Risa's future was like? Knowing that the girl who was slowly becoming a woman would never get the chance to marry, have children, to really even live life at all? It would be a lie to say that everything would be all right...especially when now Riku was living the dream that Risa had dreamed.

Dark. The name hovered on the tip of Riku's tongue, the weight of Risa's head on her shoulder suddenly too heavy, like her guilt. Worse yet, she could feel hot and damp tears soaking into her sleeve. "Risa, don't cry..."

"I don't want to go, but I have to, don't I?" Risa lifted her head and turned to Riku with a strange expression. She looked forlorn but something in her eyes also hinted at growing acceptance and understanding. Her sorrow seemed to lend her face a new kind of beauty and strength, turning her mouth pensive and her profile almost statuesque.

A cold feeling shivered down Riku's spine as she really heard what Risa had said. Suddenly, she wasn't sure what this conversation was about. "What do you mean?"

Risa just smiled sadly, and it was the smile of a lost angel. "I know this is the way it'll be and I know that I'll still have to go. Things just happen this way sometimes, right?" She looked out at the balcony again, her gaze distant, as if she were imagining the future.

"You're scaring me," Riku told her, a little afraid to even disturb the tranquility that Risa seemed to have settled into.

"Don't be afraid," Risa said, and Riku was struck by how odd it was that their usual roles were reversed. How many times had she said those words to her younger sister? Risa's voice was light and airy. "It'll be all right, in the end. I always knew it would be, somehow. You were always there for me, ever since I can remember."

"Well, Mom used to say that when you were born, I was already there waiting for you," Riku recalled hesitantly.

Risa turned to face her almost directly and Riku found herself captivated by her twin's eyes—the eyes that could almost be her own. But it wasn't like looking into a mirror at all, even if on the outside they looked almost identical. Risa's personality shone out, brighter and bubblier than her own, as if she had a greater joy for life because she somehow knew she would have fewer years to live.

"I'm sorry I can't be there for you, Riku." Risa hugged her tightly and Riku almost gasped at the strength of Risa's arms around her. She had forgotten how hard Risa had always hugged her, how comforting the sensation had been as they had grown up together. "I'm so sorry I have to go."

"No," Riku whispered into her sister's soft hair, and it wasn't just that she couldn't bear to let go. "I should be the one who's sorry."

Risa let go and drew back, indignation lighting her features. "You think you're taking my dreams from me, don't you?"

"I..." Riku's mouth went dry.

"Well, you're not," Risa said bluntly, flipping her hair over her shoulder. "Riku, do you really believe that I didn't know how much you did for me? How much you always watched over me, just because you're an hour older than me?"

Riku just stared, surprised at the harsh note to her sister's words and finding it almost creepy than Risa was talking about herself and them in past tense. "Risa, what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that I'm not a child any more, silly," said Risa, her eyes flashing. "Neither of us are, least of all you. And you don't have to give up what you want just because you think I want it too."

"Wait, I never—" Riku protested, only to be cut off when Risa stood up abruptly, her hands on her hips. Her expression ferocious, she seemed to dare Riku to say anything.

"Yes, yes, you did! You used to do that all the time. I just never said anything, but I knew what was going on. If we both wanted the same toy, you'd let me have it and pretend that you never wanted it. But Dark isn't a toy, Riku."

Riku felt the breath leave her body as if her twin had suddenly grown another head before her eyes. This didn't feel like a dream at all. It felt like Risa was really before her, yelling at her. "I never thought he was! But he's—"

"Mine?" her twin interjected. "He's not anybody's, except he chose to be yours. God, how can you be so dense?" Risa sat back down on the bed with a flop, her shoulders slumping in dejection despite her flippancy. "I know you love him."

For a moment, it was dead quiet in the room, as if both of them were holding their breaths after her simple statement. The denial that sprang to Riku's lips died away before she could voice it. Risa finally turned her head, catching and holding Riku's gaze with her own.

"Maybe…maybe I do, but I can't do this to you," Riku blurted out, and then turned away, unable to keep looking into Risa's eyes. Tears of horror and shame prickled her eyes and she closed them.

She felt Risa's hand on her back, rubbing her spine soothingly in an up and down motion. "You have to let me go," she said steadily. "Don't you think you deserve happiness too? Don't you know that what I want most is for you and Dark to be able to live the way I couldn't, even if it's with each other?"

Risa's breath caught a little at the last few words, despite her determined tone. Riku turned her head sharply to see that Risa's eyes were glistening with tears. Still, her twin nodded once, jerkily, in affirmation of what she had said.

"You know I've always..." Riku started, unable to finish her confession. Risa seemed to understand anyway.

"I thought so, even back then," she said, her voice soft and lovely. "There was always something strong between you two."

That was true, even if she had been sure that what was strong was their mutual dislike. Riku could remember Daisuke asking her, a long time ago, what she thought of Dark. Without hesitation, she had told him that she despised him. Knowing what she knew now, that Dark had been within Daisuke then, she wondered what they had felt then. Had Daisuke felt Dark hurting inside of him at her pitiless words? Or at that point, had Dark still despised her as well?

Riku stared down at the hands she had clenched in her lap. This was just part of her dream. It wasn't really Risa here; it was just her guilt, finding a way to sooth her conscience. What was real were the diary pages she had found. What was real was that she had given him up; she had broken his heart, she had betrayed her twin...

"Riku," Risa said, so seriously it almost broke her heart. "If you would do the same for me, why won't you believe that I'd do the same for you?"

"Riku, don't move!" Strong hands gripped her shoulders as she thrashed, pain lancing through her body. "HEY! Riku, please. You're okay, you're safe now…"

But she wasn't. She knew that she was falling and they were going to die together—she knew that Dark wasn't going to let go.

Riku's eyes snapped open, but instead of the darkness she expected to see, she was blinded by light. Cautiously she opened her eyes again, letting them adjust until she could make out that she was in an off-white room.

Crimson eyes stared down at her, surprise quickly changing to relief.

"You're…awake," Daisuke breathed, still holding her shoulders, as if he didn't really believe it.

"Wh—" Her throat was dry and her voice cracked embarrassingly, so Riku accepted the cup of water that Daisuke poured and pressed into her hand. Okay, so it was obvious where she was. Her heart skipped a beat as she saw the familiar monitors and controls—things she hadn't seen since Risa had died.

Her right arm was in a cast and she felt stabbing pains through the right side of her chest whenever she took a breath, so she could guess what that meant. Even though she'd never had broken ribs before, it was pretty clear that she'd at least fractured one or three.

"You've been in a coma," Daisuke told her, and now that she was more alert, Riku could see the signs of exhaustion and stress on him. "You hit your head pretty hard, Riku."

His voice cracked on her name and he sat down in the chair next to her bed with a sigh. "The doctors said you'd wake up when you were ready, but you know that they can't really ever be sure with these kinds of things…"

"How long?" Riku managed, her throat still feeling like someone had sandpapered it. At least she didn't have a tube down her throat or a respirator, but she was kind of afraid to ask any other questions.

Daisuke rested his forehead in his hands, not looking at her directly. "Almost a week."

She had dreamed, Riku recalled, but she only remembered a couple of them clearly. Maybe she hadn't been dreaming at all—maybe she'd really been dying, and that was why she had been able to talk to Risa?

"You fractured four of your ribs and broke your arm," Daisuke explained, keep it matter-of-fact. "Everything should heal all right, though. It'll just take some time."

Since it was clear he wasn't going to volunteer the information, she still had to ask. Riku forced the words out. "So what happened to…"

"Fukuda Kohei is dead," Daisuke said in a hard voice, and as Riku took in his statement, she realized just how far they've come and how much they had all grown up. She was no longer the girl lost in the woods, afraid of bears, and he was no longer just the cheerfully smiling boy who had showed up to rescue her.

"He died from the fall?" she asked, just to be sure. They had been five stories up—of course he had died. He was human. But then, she was, too.

Daisuke nodded, expression somber. "Pretty much instantly."

She should have felt something over it, Riku supposed. Someone had actually died in all this craziness. She had accidentally pushed him and herself out the window; she was at least indirectly responsible for his death. But remembering how frightened she had been during the confrontation, remembering how gleeful and how vicious Fukuda had been when he had stabbed Dark repeatedly with the knife, she couldn't help but be glad.

He had terrorized her for months, first as the stranger behind the hit-and-run, then as Risa's stalker, and finally as some horrific combination of both those identities. It was as if the shadow over her soul had finally lifted. Riku could finally let go of all the annoyance and stress she had felt ever since that day.

It was fitting in a way, wasn't it? A random accident had taken Risa's life. Another accident had brought it all full circle, had ended the strange chain of events that had followed from her death. Maybe it was cosmic justice. All she could feel was relief.

Daisuke was looking at her carefully and with concern, however. She knew he wasn't just measuring her response to the information. Riku took a deep breath, immediately regretting it as sharp pains shot through the right side of her chest.

"Why—" she almost stopped, but now that she had begun, she couldn't hold back the questions even if she had wanted to. "Why haven't you said anything about Dark? Where is he? Is he all right?"

Daisuke avoided her eyes and his voice gentled, making her heart beat just that much faster. "He was trying to shield you when you both hit the ground. Riku—"

"He's not dead," she whispered from numb lips. "He can't be."

Daisuke looked briefly startled and then cursed at himself. "No! Riku, that wasn't what I meant at all."

But she could almost remember what had happened. Dark had been holding her so tight that it had hurt, his fingers digging deeply into her flesh, and then he had given up on trying to keep his wings spread and had pulled her into him—had somehow rolled them in midair as they fell, until Riku's chest was pressed against him as if she were laying on him.

"Dark is alive," Daisuke assured her, but his voice sounded hollow. "He's pretty hurt, Riku."

She sat up in the bed, her breath leaving her in a muffled gasp as her body protested the movement. Daisuke finally turned to meet her gaze. "What aren't you telling me?"

He hesitated. "We think he's healing, but we're not sure. Towa-chan says that it's kind of like when I was trapped in the Wings of Memory, trying to find all the feathers so that I could free Dark. The best we can guess is that he's trapped in his mind, or his own dimension."

Riku frantically tried to process this. "So…he's in a coma? Like I was?"

"Kind of," Daisuke said evasively. "We're concerned that he has to wake up before his body can really heal. His wings are broken, Riku, and no doctor is going to be able to help with that."

With a sinking feeling, she understood what Daisuke was saying. Dark wasn't really getting better—and he was injured even before the crash. If she'd ended up with broken ribs and a broken arm, and if Fukuda had died basically on impact, then how much worse had it been for Dark?

"Can't anyone wake him up?" It was unfair, Riku knew, to expect Daisuke to be able to do anything. They weren't the same person anymore. She wasn't even sure how much of a bond there still was between them. But she had to ask. "Can't you do anything to help him?"

"It's not that simple. We tried, but I couldn't reach him. He's hurt…both physically and spiritually."

"Oh…" She couldn't seem to say anything else. Ruby red eyes looked at her without accusation, but she still felt her stomach drop to the floor. "What does that mean, Daisuke?"

Her friend swallowed hard. "It means that the magic isn't letting him go. Or…that he doesn't want to come back."

tbc

A/N: I'm sorry to leave it at yet another somewhat-cliffhanger, but please review! Thank you all for continuing to read and review – without your support, this story definitely wouldn't be here!