This Is How Big Your Heart Is.
Song: Mrs. Bagwell's Rhumba from the Mirrormask soundtrack. Just search 'Bagwell Rhumba' on Seeqpod if you'd like to hear it for free (and legally).
"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
- Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
The walk to Sora's house was as hot as it was dry as it was pensive.
Pensive, Riku thought. I wonder if it comes from that French word. Whatever it is.
He coughed as, in front of him, Sora unwittingly kicked up a cloud of dust.
Riku often thought about their island. It was the biggest island in Destiny Islands, and had been quite thoughtfully named Destiny Island. To him, it was so stupid it looped all the way around the stupid gradient and came out as anti-smart.
Destiny Island was divided by a long mountain range, essentially splitting the island in half. East and West Destiny Island. And due to a rain shadow, one side got nearly all the rain, all year. So really, it was divided into the 'wet bit' and the 'dry bit' for the natives. Whenever Riku talked to someone from the wet half of the island, they always commented on how nice the dry heat was, how refreshing it was to be out of the humidity.
Riku said that those people had never had to spend three hours in a classroom breathing dust because the air conditioning wasn't working and the only option was to open the windows, because if they had they'd know that the sweating teenagers more than made up for any natural humidity.
Hence the pueblos. They had a natural way of mediating the air inside. There were still a good deal of people who preferred those to relying on heating and cooling systems which often broke down because they were choked by dust or heat.
Riku shook his head to clear it, looking over to Sora, who seemed unbothered by the heat. It was probably new to him, though. Didn't it snow in France?
He wondered if snow really made everything look as perfect as it did in movies. He doubted it. Hollywood exaggerated everything. It probably fell in uneven clumps and turned gross after a couple of days. If he ever bothered to remember, he might ask Sora about that later.
Sora who, at the moment, was walking some invisible straight line, keeping his feet directly lined up with each other neatly and his arms out to the side, as if balancing on a rope. He was staring intently at the ground.
Riku looked down. He saw nothing interesting. He saw a pale biege sidewalk and, flanking it, some tall dry grass and the occasional tough flower.
He breathed in through his nose and sighed. It was like smelling heat and nothing else.
"Hey, so, my house is just a few minutes away," Sora said, turning his head back to talk to Riku.
"Uh huh." Riku reached up and tugged out his hair tie. He hated wearing a ponytail, and at this point it wasn't even helping. What Riku didn't need to look like was a gay pirate.
It wasn't that he hated gay pirates, but he didn't want to look like a gay pirate. Even gay pirates, he mused, probably didn't want to look like gay pirates.
"Riku! This way!" Sora tugged on his shirt, and Riku admitted he would have kept aimlessly walking forward if he hadn't been pulled. He didn't even know that there was a road down that way, it was so bumpy and dirty.
"So, what's your essay going to be about?"
Riku looked at Sora dully. "I don't know." He still felt a little forced to come.
"Aw, you don't? I was totally going to mooch off your idea! I guess we'll help each other, then," Sora laughed, tugging on a piece of his hair. "I just can't find any good middle ground. I don't want to write about like 'I got lost in the mall when I was seven for thirty seconds' or something. I guess that would work, though."
Mr. Reno had called the essay dumb. He'd said he didn't see the point in it, but they were going to damn well do it if it killed them. He'd sat on his stool staring at his students with serpentine eyes and hissed "Listen, this is the shittiest essay I'm ever going to make you write, but your whole grade's doing it. It's not my fault the principal's such an idiot. Making kids write dumbass essays, makin' me speak 'normally', dude's a prick, y-" at which point he'd blinked, looked around the classroom and promptly shooed his kids out seven minutes early.
Sora snorted. "But on the other hand," he continued, "My only other option is just gonna be the obvious, and that'll be whiny and way too...well, you know," he said. Riku did know. It would just be way too something, writing about dead parents. Demeaning, maybe, or just wrong.
"And anything else big is related to that - like moving down here." He sighed.
"Yeah," Riku said after a while, pausing to think of what actually would work for himself. Mr. Reno said that people usually wrote about favorite books or friends or relationships. Riku was just tempted to make something up. 'Oh, my grandfather was actually a samurai, see, and he taught me how to use a sword and then the chivalry of being a samurai in ancient Japan, also I'm half fairy and this has affected me as a person.'
He sighed.
"You're not really a talker, huh, Riku?" Sora asked him, beginning to fish in one of his more obscurely placed pockets, presumably for a key. He looked like a moron doing it, too, like the words 'Sora' and 'suave' had never even been in the same sentence.
"Not when I don't have things to say."
"Or people to say them to?"
Riku shrugged. "I guess."
At this point, he paused to look at where, exactly, it seemed they were headed. And naturally, of course, Sora lived in the crazy house. It wasn't that it was a pueblo, of course, but it was that it was covered in the most obscure and bizarre sorts of art-deco murals. The kind that weren't even of anything, or if they were of anything, it was something ridiculous like 'wind'. That's what it looked like. Big flowers, fractured and uneven with the paint peeling, looked like extensions of the shrub that grew along the side of the house. What humanoid creatures were featured were elongated and distorted, with tiny heads and huge hands.
"Oh, yeah. Did I tell you about that? She has a friend who's like an artist or something, and so he did this when she moved in. I think it's really cool."
Riku did not think it was really cool. He thought it was really creepy, and he thought it was really pretentious, but he did not think it was really cool.
But it was really something. What with the dark lines and the white shadows and the people that weren't. It wasn't strictly likeable, but it was impressive.
Sora laughed and tugged on Riku's arm, towards a perfectly normal white door with the number 779 in metal figures. And he noticed, in that detached way he did because Riku didn't let himself be distracted by pointless things like people, that someone had measured the height of the doorway and penciled it in. 200cm, it informed him, with a vertical line to show which side of the door had been measured.
Riku wondered why somebody thought that was important enough to measure the height of the doorway, but he wondered a lot of things about people. They just didn't make sense to him. Any of them.
There was an awkward moment of foot-shuffling as he followed closely after Sora, trying to close the door at the same time the other boy was putting his stuff down on a table closeby. And somehow, for just one warm second, they were so close they could smell each other.
When he was a little kid, and still going over to friends' houses, Riku noticed how everybody's house smelled a little differently. It was a describable smell, exactly, just all the parts of a person's life that culminated in that smell. He'd lost that as he grew up, barely noticed it any more.
But Sora smelled of vegetables. Not in a bad way - he didn't smell like fungus or rotten squash. He just smelled like dirt in the rain, clean and new and promising and a little nostalgic. But not in a good way, either.
"Sorry," Sora grinned, coughing a little. He moved away, kicking off his shoes. "Coming in's always awkward 'cause there's nowhere to put your stuff. Anyways, just dump it on the table over there."
Riku dumped it on the table over there, and took stock of the room, which was surprisingly high-ceilinged and had the same yellow stucco walls as appeared outside, lacking murals.
But there were things on the walls, rough, old things like masks - many masks - and pictures, drawings, even framed quotes. Sculptures, too, on those fancy shelves that looked like perfect square units tacked to the walls. Black ones with yellow eyes. The whole room just had a musty, old feel too it. Riku felt out of place. He wondered if anybody felt in place here - it was one of those places that seemed to look down on you just for coming in. How much he hated when people designed their houses for looking at, not playing in.
"Oh hey, you want music?"
And not waiting for an answer - not that he ought to have expected one - Sora went over to what, if Riku wasn't mistaken and he began to sorely hope he was, was a record player. The old kind that played actual, legitimate records the size of small car tires. Riku was mostly sure that those didn't exist outside a DJ's studio. And at least those weren't made of wood.
He was surprised to see it didn't have the bell of a gramophone or something attached to it.
"Yeah, sorry," Sora grinned sheepishly, getting a record from the adjacent shelf and removing it frome its cardboard sleeve. "My foster mom's got this, like, thing about radios." He paused while putting the record in the player. "...Belle's got a thing about a lot of things. I guess you have to be crazy to be a good inventor?"
Belle? Was everything in this kid's life French?
Sora plopped the needle down and as the static crackles and pops began, Riku looked at the sticker in the center. It was blue, and though he couldn't read quite what it said he noticed that the writing was uneven and spiky.
A brassy, accented voice started in soon after a bright piano tune, and it seemed like he was just making whatever fun sounds landed in his mouth, rolling his R's.
"Ah-ha-hey! A-sol-say! Rachurnmow, y'okay da-dow~!" He drew out random 'ooh's. Not Beach Boys 'oohs', but operatic ones.
Occasionally, just to mess with you, the singer would add in random, coherent English words. Riku heard 'shadow' and, once, quite clearly, 'sausages'.
"Yakimbezea-EL! Aderail, facoshaymemboosh, yaroo-! Rashelsh! Eeeh!" in came the operatic squeaking again, accompanied by a trumpet with an attitude problem.
Riku had no idea what the Hell he was supposed to make of this. It was hard to dislike something when you had no idea what was going on.
"This is probably one of my favorite records ever," Sora giggled, walking through an open doorway into a room the Riku could see had rustic, red-brown walls and a sink. The kitchen, then.
"To get to my room you can either climb the stairs in here or just go outside and climb up two, um, flights of ladders and go through the big window. Want some food? I'm starving, but I'm always hungry, so..."
Sora popped his head back out into the living area, where Riku was still standing dazedly and tallying up his homework assignments in his head. He just wanted Sora to piss him off so he'd have a good excuse to leave. Because Riku couldn't just stop feeling neutral towards Sora (which for Riku was the equivalent of throwing the kid a welcome parade to the Deranged Psyche of Island Boy), and he hated people who hated other people with no actual reason.
Riku knew that looked like a double standard from the outside, but him just being there proved he always had legitimate reasons for not wanting to be around a person before snubbing them.
Which is why he wished Sora would stop being so damn interesting. One moment he's getting cheesesticks from a fridge, the next it turns out he's got a Maincoon cat with practically-blue fur and eyes yellower than a canary.
Even for a Maincoon it was big, too, more like a smallish dog, and it sat on the back on the black leather couch and watched Riku disapprovingly.
Now, apparently this Belle woman had a thing about radios.
Well, Riku had a thing about cats. He didn't like them, the way they stared at you like just because they were cats and you weren't made you completely useless. How they just liked to screw with peoples' heads.
But the cat didn't look too mean, so Riku figured that if he was going to, now would be the time to ingratiate himself.
"Hey," he said carefully, taking a step towards it. It didn't move, just kept watching him with those wild eyes.
"Hey, cat," he said, taking another step.
"You - hey - you! Haha! You can't see me! Shtooltz!" the brassy singer said through the repetitive, minor piano tune and the trumpet. Whatever it was, it wasn't pop, it wasn't modern, it wasn't jazz.
In the kitchen, Sora was getting a couple of sodas from the fridge and putting some food on a plastic plate.
"Silly boy! Oh, silly boy - you can't! Come to my place~!"
The cat narrowed its eyes and swished its tail in a graceful S.
"Hey now," Riku said resignedly. "It's not like I want to be here, don't get all defensive."
Sora, upon seeing the situation before him - the pretty boy with the superiority complex trying to approach the weirdest cat in existence - stopped in the doorway, leaning against it, plate in one hand and sodas in the other. He tried not to giggle. And oh, the record was getting to his favorite part. After his favorite part he never bothered listening all the way through the rest of the track.
"Cat," Riku said simply, and reached out to pet the rough mane on its face, his hand hovering a few centimeters away. The cat just looked at him with its angry yellow eyes.
"Oh-ho!"
Sora stifled a giggle. Riku was so serious, even about petting a cat.
"Don't let them see you're afraid!"
Riku faltered.
"Don't let them see you're afraid! - Don't let them see you're afr- Don't let them see you're afr- Don't let them see you're-"
"Oh, sorry!" Sora rushed over to the record player and picked up the needle again. "Sometimes it just gets stuck there, it's so weird." He frowned, and tried to figure out a way of putting down either the food, the sodas or the needle so that he didn't end up staining something important.
Riku snatched back his hand and went to pick up his backpack again. That was entirely too disturbing.
"Sai, what're you doing, you know you're not supposed to go on the couch! Get down from there!" Finally just dropping the needle, and then placing the sodas next to the record player leaving a reverberating "Don't let them see you're afrai-! Don't let them see you're afrai-!" and Sora shooed the cat off the sofa.
"It's okay, Saïx's like that with everyone," Sora told him as "Saïx" the lynx-cat pranced through the room and up a narrow staircase.
Sora the weird-kid followed him, after stopping the record and grabbing the sodas again, and Riku reluctantly followed the both of them upstairs to Sora's room.
Sora's room was white.
That was really all that could be said of it. It had white walls, the bedsheets were light grey, and the only color was his clothing and the few items on the shelves around.
"I get to repaint it soon, but until I moved in it was just storage or like a guest room or something, so it's boring," he laughed, plopping down on the bed and grabbing a cheese stick.
"Uh huh," Riku said, putting down his bag.
Sora patted the spot next to him and grinned, taking a bite of his food. And as Riku (reluctantly) sat down next to him, Saïx lay down between them and glared at Riku defiantly.
My human. I won't let you get a-ny closer.
Riku snorted and thought, to himself, No interest in doing so.
"I have a lot of homework, so- "
"You know, I'm in like seventy percent of your classes and I've stalked you at lunch both days I've been going to school. You do not have a lot of homework, and what you do have, I have too, so we can do it together." And Sora and his stupid eyes stared at Riku, who crossed his arms and tried to pretend he wasn't pissed off by the cutesy act.
"Yeah," he said curtly.
Sora sighed and took another bite of his string cheese. "Uh-oh, I scared the rare Riku-turtle back into his shell."
Riku thought to respond to this bitingly, but instead went with bitter silence as his weapon of choice. He crossed his arms and shifted to lean against the head of the bed with his legs in a pretzel.
Sora just shrugged, scratched Saïx behind the ears (to which he did not react kindly) and stood up to get a notebook and pen from his desk, sitting down at the end of the bed with it and staring at Riku like he was a writing muse.
And for some reason, Riku felt safe. Like by sitting on the end of the greyish bed, Sora had established a little territory with him and Riku and a cat, and Riku could breathe. He didn't need to deal with things outside of the area of the bed. And if things needed to fit into the bed before he dealt with them, Riku eat the crap the world fed him in little bite-sized pieces.
Not that he was happy, or anything. Sora was doing this little tilt-your-head-to-the-side-like-a-goddam-crow business, like he was trying to look quirky or cutesy or something, and Riku thought it looked incredibly dumb. He hated it, when people looked so stupid and didn't realize it.
"Um," Sora said after a while. "How about learning English? That was kind of...life-changing, I guess? Or, convenient."
Riku just let out a long, bothered sigh and leaned further back. "I don't know, Sora."
Sora winced, because the venom with which his name was said that time was not as fun as the curious way it'd been said the first time.
So he fake-pouted and put down the things he was holding, crawling up the bed to look at Riku's face a little. Riku just stared out of his wispy white bangs with his clear teal eyes and looked at Sora like he didn't know how to use his face. But he did, oh he did, and his stare could cut right through a person.
But Sora didn't care. He just sat down in Riku's lap with a very determined look in his face, grabbed two fistfuls of bang and tugged them up.
"Holy shit!"
"What?" Riku asked, seething quietly. He did not like being touched. By anybody. The only people outside his family that touched him were people who didn't understand personal boundaries.
Therefore.
"You actually have a forehead!"
"...what?" he sounded considerably less threatening.
"I figured there was maybe a fifty percent chance that the reason you kept your hair in your face was because you were actually a machine, and you didn't have skin covering this part, and that's why you hate everybody!"
Riku frowned inwardly. He didn't hate everybody.
He - well, he didn't hate everybody. He didn't hate Sora, strictly.
"Sora..."
And abruptly he had his hair back in his eyes and Sora was looking at him blankly, his chin in his hand.
"So do you think I could even get a decent rough draft outta the bilingual thing?"
Riku shifted uncomfortably. "Sora."
Sora blinked at him. "What?"
"...please get off my lap."
"Huh?" He looked down and appeared to notice for the first time that he was in an incredibly compromising position. His eyes widened and he leapt backwards, tripping over gangly limbs and crawling backwards like a crab to the edge of the bed. "Oh jeez! Man, everybody always says I've got issues with personal boundaries, I just never got what they meant cause I usually only do it to people who're used to it. Man! Oh, I'm so sorry!"
Riku snorted. "It's...yeah." He wasn't really bothered by it all too much, but he didn't want Sora to think he was okay with it. That he liked people climbing over him.
So he just rifled through his own backpack and got out his English binder to brainstorm.
"Ri-ku?"
"Do you like me, Ri-ku?"
"What."
"What're you writing?"
"Brainstorms." He wrote 'personal essay' in the center of a blank page and circled it, adding a branch for his first idea.
After a moment of consideration, he wrote down pets and a branch off that which read George.
At this time he noticed Sora peering at his paper. He was leaning forward on his hands and stretching his neck out as far as he could, and Riku began to feel a little uncomfortable.
"Wait, you write in cursive? Who writes in cursive? Who's George?"
Riku rolled his eyes and threw Sora's previous words back at him, Riku-style. "I take it you're quite a bit of a talker."
"Yeah, that's another problem I have. You're kind of the opposite, aren't you? Totally normal life, hates contact, hates talking, pessimistic -"
Riku almost bared his teeth at that but chose, instead, to snap his eyes to Sora's and hold the kid there. A stare from Riku Tepes could freeze a person so much that they'd be thawing on the later side of the next century. So Sora was left kneeling on the bed, almost falling over, staring at the other boy and blinking, trying to understand why he stopped speaking.
"Don't talk to me like you know who the Hell I am," Riku said quietly, after a while.
And Sora didn't say anything for another while, but then shook his head and leaned forward more. "Yeah, but was I actually wrong about any of that?"
Riku didn't say anything.
So the French kid who smelled like spring in New England leaned forward and flicked his forehead. "You might not, but you might as well have a big ol' machine up there for how human you act, you little white-haired doofus."
Riku sluggishly swatted his hand away with a frown. "Sora," he said. "Don't."
It should have been awkward. But it wasn't.
"So anyway, who's George?" Sora grinned at him, big and goofy.
"He was my first pet," he said reluctantly.
"What was he? Dog, bird, cat?"
"No." He didn't offer anything else.
"Fish?"
"Closer."
"Riku Tepes," Sora said, wrinkling his nose. "Tell me you didn't have a pet shark."
"Those are fish, so no."
Sora groaned and fell backwards dramatically, just barely avoiding the cat's tail. "How can it be kind of a fish and not a fish?"
"I never said it was a fish."
He snorted again. "Well is it some sort of stupid Destiny-Island-pseudo-fish that I wouldn't have possibly ever heard of?"
Riku licked one of his teeth half-absentmindedly and half-maliciously, and sighed through his nose. "Octopus."
Sora sat up abruptly. "You had a pet octopus."
"My mom's big on weird ocean animals and stuff. We have an eel now." Riku wrote down 'eel' next to 'George', creating a carrot between them and writing a question mark.
"And what's its name, Roger?"
Riku didn't answer. He didn't feel like answering, so he didn't answer. That was how Riku Tepes functioned.
Riku Tepes wasn't really too big on social norms when they didn't suit him.
So Sora just sighed, grabbed his soda and stared moodily at his blank paper. After a while he started to doodle on it. Apparently, Sora was the kind of person who doodled socks when the mood struck, until the moment his eyes lit up and he straightened his back before hunching over to write furiously.
And because he couldn't help it, Riku happened to see what was being written.
'Riku Tepes and his smexy hips!' was what was being written.
And Riku wasn't normally the type of person to judge other people's thought processes out loud unless they were really, hideously stupid, but those were his (smexy) hips being written about, and he was feeling uncomfortable. "Sora, what...?"
"So you do notice other people!"
"What?"
"Be honest, you don't care about what's going on around you unless it directly involves you."
If this was the piece of shit the world was going to feed him first, Riku began to think, then clearly a territory the size of the bed was far too large. He cringed inwardly, and maybe a little outwardly. So Sora was also one of those stupid judgmental - well. Stupidly judgmental people. Who said everything out loud.
But still, he was curious the way a fish is curious about something glinting in the water. It's always going to be a bottle top, but you want to look, just in case this one time it's your gold coin.
"What makes you say that?" he said evenly.
"Come on. You glare at anyone who talks to you - you're doing it right now - and your default is disliking people. Admit it, the only reason you came over to my house today was because of the whole suicide thing. It must've pissed you off or..." Sora sighed and looked at his watch. Belle was due home any minute now, probably covered in bits of whatever she was working on and looking like the lunatic she was. That woman was a good kind of insane.
"Like I said," Riku told him, seemingly unphased. Just underneath he was spluttering a little and trying to get his temper and his conscience to quit cat-fighting. "I just...don't see the point in being friendly to people."
Sora snorted and scooted up to sit next to Riku, this time a safe distance away, just enough to brush their shoulders.
"Doesn't mean other people are worse than you for not thinking like that. I don't think like that, do you hate me?"
Riku rolled his head to the side and stared out of Sora's window. It must have been on the second or third floor, because he could see dozens of houses and shops and people walking around and in them, apologizing for brushing shoulders. That was another thing Riku hated, though, he hated how people apologized for pointless things like sneezing too close and they wouldn't apologize for things that mattered like stealing. A person could steal a toothbrush from a drugstore and never even whisper 'sorry' under their breath, but bumping into somebody in a movie theater automatically called for it.
The world didn't make any goddam sense to Riku Tepes!
"...oi, this is actually the part where you vehemently deny what I just said."
"I don't think I hate you." Yet.
Sora grunted and leaned his head on Riku's shoulder, much to the latter's discomfort. What was it about this guy? What kind of a boy was so...touchy-feely? Why didn't Riku just smack him already?
Because Mom always taught you not to hit girls, his temper snickered, which earned it a crisp slap from his conscience.
Riku was too lazy to bother smacking Sora, so instead he wondered, idly, if everybody felt this warm when they were resting their heads on your shoulder. The kid's cheek felt feverish.
Five minutes later, he said "Wait."
"Oh, I'm sorry, is my falling asleep too fast-paced for you?" Sora mumbled.
Riku rolled his shoulder at an attempt to get the sleepy teenager off of him, but succeeded only in shifting Sora's head a little backwards. The sliver of now-exposed skin on his shoulder felt suddenly cold.
"What the hell do you mean 'Riku Tepes and his sexy hips'?"
"Admit it," came the muffled giggle. Sora flipped around and lay down, burrowing his face under his pillow. "It got your attention, didn't it?"
Riku just readjusted the sleeve on his newly-freed arm and looked out the window again, feeling every part the lazy teenage boy. He didn't answer.
"Hey," said the pillow-mole. "Can I ask you another one of those questions you seem to hate?"
"Why?"
"'Cause nobody else thinks about them when I ask. Just sorta gives up after figuring out it's too hard to figure out," Sora said, and sort-of-laughed. He took a big breath underneath the pillow and circumvented the urge to return to socially awkward but nice and dry Riku heat.
"...yeah. Okay." Sora turned around again and stared up at his almost-friend and his angry eyes.
"Just because a person, like, doesn't think the same as you, do you still listen to...why? You know, why they think that?"
And as Riku lapsed into pensive silence, he realized Sora was probably screwing with his head. Probably read this stuff in some stupid teen drama novel.
His sensible side rolled its eyes and muttered Yeah, Sora's definitely the type for soap operas, too. Riku, you're going to be that cranky old guy who shouts 'damn kids' whenever a ball rolls into your yard.
So he just gritted his teeth and said, "No, not really."
"Yes!" Sora cried, sitting up. "Some honesty! You just don't want to go to the trouble of - " he blinked and scooted back again. "Sorry. Belle says I'm too honest with people. I haven't actually had to meet new friends since, you know, starting school when I was five until now, so...it's not really..."
"Yeah..." Riku trailed off. The sun was starting to be pulled underneath the horizon. "It's...I mean, whatever. Honesty's...good." It felt weird to even say it. And he wasn't sure how much he was lying.
"Yeah."
He mentally grimaced before saying, "So what were you gonna tell me?"
Sora looked at him wide-eyed again. "Oh! Um...you just don't really...want to go to the trouble of changing your mind. So you tell yourself that what you think now is final when you a year from now will probably think you're being stupid. I guess. That's how I am. I - I don't know."
"Look," Riku said. "My opinions are mine, and if I think they're right, and I don't want to listen to a bunch of whiny teenagers sharing their views on...I don't know, getting a girlfriend or something. That's fine."
"No it's not," Sora said.
"What?"
He paused and tilted his head to the side a little, thinking before he leapt. "Just...just because they're not your reasons doesn't make them bad reasons to do something. And just because your reasons are your reasons doesn't make them good ones."
They stared at each other for who-knows-how-long with awkward silence punctuated by rustling sheets or Saïx yawning and making mildly irritated noises.
Dammit, how did all of their conversations turn into debates like this?
There was the noise of an angrily slamming door downstairs, Cree-eeeak, SMASH! and they both jumped a little. Saïx jumped off the bed and out the door, trotting down the stairs silently.
"Yes, well," said a feminine voice, accompanied by the sound of soft footsteps. "I'm so glad you could give me a ride home. I can't imagine how I missed the last bus," she hissed. It was a shame, too, it sounded like she had a very musical voice. She was using it so harshly.
There was the sound of clunky workboots. "Oh, it was no trouble at all! I was only too glad to help out the damsel in distress," the man's voice was a deep rumble. Even Riku shuddered at the undilted sexism in his comment.
There was a stifled silence as the teenagers listened. Sora was hunched with his knees against his chest, biting his knuckle and making stifled laugh noises.
"Well," the woman said again. "Perhaps next time we'll have to cut our little after-work-chat short for once."
"Belle," the guy said. Sora shuddered with visible dislike and caught Riku's eye. They started grinning. "I don't mind giving you a ride home, I never will! We're both such busy people."
"Speaking of busy - " she sounded hopeful.
"You'll think about my offer, won't you?"
There was a sigh. "Yes, Gaston. I'll be considering it, I already am, really -"
"Do you have an answer?"
"No." She sounded, perhaps, a bit too forceful upon saying it. "I mean, I don't have an answer. Now, I think it'd be best if you got going - like you said, so much to do! I'm sure my foster son is just eager for dinner. You know how teenage boys get."
"Ah," he rumbled. "Yes. Well, I suppose...you're right. But I'll see you -"
"Yes, tomorrow, good-bye Gaston, it was lovely seeing you!" Cree-eeeak, SMASH!
Sora jumped up at clattered down the stairs, followed after a moment by a morbidly curious Riku.
They got downstairs just in time to see Belle leaning her back against the shut door, sighing and sinking down to the ground. Her eyes closed, she mouthed "Five...four...three...two...one!" She opened her eyes.
She looked at Sora.
"Is he gone?" she grinned at him and stood up, peeking out one of the windows. "Augh, can you imagine? He asked to have dinner." She groaned. "Ugh, me, dating that borish - brainless - !"
Sora laughed and grabbed Riku's wrist, pulling them further into the living room. "Aw, can't you see it? Madame Gaston!"
"Shut up, you little ingrate," Belle laughed a musical laugh and turned around, fixing Riku with a stare.
So that's where Sora'd learned it. To stare at someone with such honest sincerity it stung.
"Ah. Hello. Didn't know there was anyone else here to listen to me verbally amuse my charge." She smiled at him.
Riku wasn't too big on sex for a teenage boy, but even he thought Belle sure deserved her name. It was like everything in her face was custom-designed to compliment everything else. Even her eyes, big and brown and warm, they were so different from other peoples' eyes. Just in color, was all, Riku did hate people who said eyes were the window to the soul.
"...yeah."
"Oh, right! Belle, um, this is Riku. He's helping me with English."
Belle laughed again and absently scratched the cat's head, who looked at her between angry eye slits. He shirked her and leapt back off the table he'd been sitting on to go do cat things.
"Only two days into school and you've got model friends?" she started to walk into the kitchen. "Boy, you move fast, kiddo." Sora dragged Riku after her as she started rummaging through the fridge. He wondered what Belle had meant, 'model'. He wasn't exactly the cookie-cutter mold for an ideal friend.
"Got a project you need help on?"
"Yeah, we've got English essays."
Belle started taking out colorful vegetables; squashes, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes.
She nodded and put the food on a cutting board, getting out a sizable knife and observing the edge.
Her kitchen was a small place, more for cooking than for eating, really, with the old sort of spice shelves that reminded a person what cooking actually was. The walls were just grey, and everything else was wooden and worn out; it was much longer than it was wide, pots, bowls and huge wooden spoons hung from hooks in the ceiling. It was the sort of kitchen that hugged you.
"Riku," she said. "Are you staying for dinner?"
"Oh," Riku said. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been asked to dinner at somebody's house. "Probably not."
"What? Oh, come on! Come on come on! You can't appreciate food until you've eaten one of Belle's meals!" Sora protested, jumping up and down a little in mock-excitement.
Belle blinked at him, half-smiling a wry smile, her eyebrows knit together. "Really? Thanks."
"Yeah," Sora said to Riku. "You her cooking once, and suddenly any other food tastes great in comparison."
"Sora!"
"Wha-at?"
"I'm holding a cast iron frying pan is what, and I know how to brandish one of these things." She waved it at him effortlessly.
Sora just stuck his tongue out and smiled at her. Momentarily he looked at his hand. The one with the bandages and all.
"Hey, Riku," he said.
"Yeah."
"Can you - " Sora paused. "Uh, can you wait in the living room? I gotta talk to Belle 'bout something and... I don't want you to feel uncomfortable." Belle paused in chopping a squash and looked at him, giving him a sad sort of non-smile before she put wiped the knife off with a dish towel and placed it next to the cutting board.
"Yeah." Riku shrugged and walked into the room with the shelves and the creepy statues and the smell like jasmine and oatmeal and hot glue. That's what he'd parceled it into - if you ever walked into a room where somebody was eating oatmeal while burning jasmine with hot glue, it'd smell like Sora's foster mom's living room.
But apparently they hadn't soundproofed it.
"Okay, c'mere kiddo, we have to change those bandages," came Belle's voice.
And what was he supposed to do?
"Uh-huh. I just - ow!"
"Oh, sorry honey!"
Just casually rap his knuckles on the wall?
"You have been putting antibiotics on it, haven't you?" she asked him as Riku could here the sounds of medical bandages like duct tape.
"Yeah," Sora replied, sounding just a little resigned. "But Dr. Lammie says it'll scar, pretty noticeably. At least, it'll be visible for a while."
'Oh, excuse me, I can actually hear you talking about your recent trauma and subsequent scarring third-degree burn, mind turning it down a notch?'
"You're upset about this?"
"Nah, it's not like I won't be able to use my hand. It's just...you know, what if people ask about it, is all." Saïx slinked back into the living room, making a scant squeak when he jumped up onto the couch next to Riku and sat down next to him, as if they were equals. Disinterested and relegated to this life.
"You don't have any obligation to tell someone something, Sora."
"But...I don't like lying to people."
"So you tell them you're uncomfortable saying!"
"But I don't, I just..." Sora trailed off and Riku tried hard, he tried so hard not to keep listening. And he wasn't, it was just that for Riku, Sora's voice always ended up being force-heard.
"You just what, Sora?"
"I guess I don't want to make other people depressed? I dunno, it's just weird. I don't want other people to feel uncomfortable."
"Sora..." Belle trailed off and so did Riku's train of thought.
Dammit, now he was curious. He looked at the cat sitting next to him, completely blasé and absently licking his paw.
Shuckin' cat.
Riku wondered when his mother would be getting home. If he ended up staying for dinner (unlikely), he ought to call her to say. He also wondered, vaguely, what Belle actually did for a living - 'inventor' was a vague term. Invent what? That surely couldn't be enough to support a lavish lifestyle.
"Oh! I almost forgot. My coworker - don't look at me like that, I mean a nice coworker whom I like - has tickets to this traveling circus that he gave me. You should take one of your friends."
"When?"
"...euh, bout two weeks?" It was followed by the sound of rustling paper.
"Yeah. Look here, thirteen days from now," Belle said.
Sora was silent for a few minutes before muttering, in French, "...t- tu ne crois pas qu'il puisse nous entrendre d'où il est, n'est-ce pas?" Of course, Riku took high school French, and could very easily understand that Sora was just beginning to realise that maybe people could hear him from the living room.
"N'inquiéter pas! Il ne peut pas. Vraiment." Belle reassured him that of course they were completely inaudible.
"Um. Il parle un peu de français...donc..." And Sora reassured her that Riku did, in fact, speak basic French. So if he could hear them...
"O-kay!" And then they were visible again, Belle in her sweet blue summer dress and Sora being dragged by his arm the way he'd dragged Riku. Riku noticed a few more things about Belle, like the way her pockets were full of things and how she was the type of person who had her ears pierced and only wore those tiny little golden hoops. Nothing flashy. He wondered where Sora got his fashion sense from; until he remembered the two weren't related. It was hard to remember, what with the same eyes and the same hair and the same pushy, manic behavior.
"You two go up to Sora's room and Sora, don't you dare come back out until you are bleeding English, hear?"
"Yes, mum." He smiled at Riku, one of those 'what can you do' smiles.
It was just before she was about to call them both down for dinner when Roxas called.
A/N: HAHAHA CANON OF WHAT DO YOU SPEAK OF COURSE SAIX IS A CAT