But I Will Someday.
A/N: Before anyone says anything, yes, I know that Leon Leonhart's last name is Leonhart, so I'm going to preemptively tell you that when I say Leon Orcot as a passing name-drop non-character in the story that means nothing, I do not mean Leon Leonhart.
"No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."
- Henry Adams
US author, autobiographer, & historian (1838 - 1918)
I live, I die, I burn, I drown
I endure at once chill and cold
Life is at once too soft and too hard
I have sore troubles mingled with joys
Suddenly I laugh and at the same time cry
And in pleasure many a grief endure
My happiness wanes and yet it lasts unchanged
All at once I dry up and grow green.
- Louis Labe, I Live, I Die, I Burn, I Drown
"Sora!"
In his room, lying belly-down on his bed and scribbling furiously on a piece of lined paper with an oddly determined look on his face, Sora looked up abruptly at the sound of Belle's voice. Riku, on the floor, did nothing.
"Yeah, what?" he shouted back.
"Roxas is on the phone for you!"
"Wha-?!" Frowning, Sora slid of his bed and bounded to the door of his room. He hovered by the doorway for a second before dashing back, grabbing a shocked-into-silence Riku and pulling him down the stairs at a breakneck pace, skidding to a halt just before smacking into a coffee table. He let go of his companion, who'd been affronted into stony silence, and ran over to the wall to grab at the phone his foster mother was holding out to him, barely avoiding slamming into her in his hurry.
"Rox?!"
There was silence as the person on the other end answered.
"Hang on - Roxas, hang on, I'm gonna put you on speaker so Belle can talk to you too."
He listened for a second. "Okay." He hit a button on the phone and set it back in the cradle. "Say hi to speakerphone, Roxas!"
"...hello speakerphone?"
"Aaand say hi to Belle and Riku," Sora said, grinning and glancing up at Belle, who was setting steaming plates on a table.
"Hey Belle."
"Hello, Roxas," she called with a smile, walking back into the kitchen.
"And hello - um, Riku?"
Riku didn't say anything. He glared at Sora a little, first, but then he just sat down on the couch and stared at the floor. Sora just kind-of-laughed and stuck his tongue out.
"...Riku says hi back. Oh! He's someone from school and he's helping me with English. So anyways, why'd you call?"
There was the odd, crackling quiet on the other end of someone breathing over a phone line before Roxas responded lowly, "I was talking to Mr. Orcot about - "
And it looked like somebody just sucked the happiness right out of Sora. His face fell and his eyebrows went up. "Rox, you've been living with them for ten months, don't you think it's time you started calling him Leon, at least?"
"...Sora, drop it already."
It was funny, Riku noted, in a way that wasn't really funny at all, how Sora was just as animated talking to someone on the phone as he was talking to them face-to-face. His expressions were vivid. It was like watching a head-sized soap opera, the way he kept going from elated to disappointed. And right now it looked like he'd just found a dead squirrel in the road. Resigned and sad and kind of helpless.
"Y-yeah, sorry, Roxas. I know," he frowned and sat down on the arm of the couch nearest to Riku and worried his lower lip with his teeth. "What were you saying?"
"Well," and Riku observed, quietly to himself, that Roxas' voice was a little deeper than Sora's. "They said that - you know how we were talking about meeting up over April vacation?"
"Yeah-huh?"
"Well, they really can't get out of work then since Leon's a police officer, but they said that if you can fly up here you can stay with us all week. I mean, if you want. And Belle can come too..." he trailed off.
I mean, if you want. Boy, this Roxas guy sounded almost as lonely as Riku when he said that.
"Roxas?" Belle walked out of the kitchen again, holding a pitcher of water and addressing the speaker on the cradle of the phone.
"Yeah?"
"I'd love to talk to you more about this, but we're about to have dinner. We'll call you in a few hours, alright?" Her finger hovered over the 'end call' button.
"Yeah, sure. Bye." Before anyone in the room could reply to him, though, there was a click and the empty dial tone of a dead phone line. Belle turned off the phone and smiled up at the two boys. Sora had, in the time he was talking, jokingly tilted to the side like a doll and was leaning against Riku's shoulder. He laughed and stood up.
"C'mon, Riku, dinner!"
Riku didn't remember agreeing to eat dinner.
Besides, he wasn't hungry. He was sick of this place and sick of Sora and that stupid naivete he had.
But Riku knew when to pick his battles, so he just sighed the sigh of a man pressed upon and sauntered over to the dining table to sit next to Sora in front of a pile of roasted vegetables and pasta.
And after that, well, he hadn't thought it was possible to run home that quickly.
When he opened the door of his aluminum-shingled white house, Riku Tepes peeked his head in before the rest of his body, to check and see if anyone was visible. The kitchen was dark, all the chairs were pulled neatly in around the table and the drying rack was empty. Riku closed the door behind him with the slight sucking sound of the rubber seal and the buttery metal click of the latch, kicking off his sneakers in the shoe tray.
He walked down the hall, wondering when it got so dark outside; it was far past twilight. The hallway was completely dark and few of the rooms it lead to were lit; those that were leaked yellow light onto the carpet outside. Riku stopped by his mother's office, which doubled as his parents' bedroom. You had to make the distinction, and you always said it was her office before it was her bedroom. That's what she did in there.
And she was in there now, sitting at her desk with a phone sandwiched between her shoulder and her head as she typed furiously on the computer.
"That's what I'm saying, if we bring it up during the meeting - "
Riku snorted. "Hey, mom," he said, quietly, watching the back of his mother's head bob up and down as she talked animatedly. She didn't hear him, of course, but he didn't really mean for her to, so it's fine.
He just shakes his head and walks back to his own room, wondering if anyone in his house would notice if he never even came back at all.
He doubted it. He was his own responsibility, like his dad said.
He didn't know why he was suprised to be having a dream about Sora again.
Riku Tepes was having a dream about Sora again, and Sora was in it.
It wasn't one of those story dreams; it was just one of those dreams where things happen, things that aren't stories because it wasn't one of those story dreams it just had one thing that happened and happened and sometimes happened again.
Riku was in his house only it wasn't his house but it was a house and he was pretty sure it was where his brain went when he had dreams because it was too yellow and white and from the 1960s to be Riku's house, and the stairs were covered in carpet and none of Riku's stairs were covered in carpet so why did he like them so much?
He was standing at the bottom of white stairs topped with yellow, fuzzy carpet and at the top of the stairs, there was Sora.
Only, he still wasn't Sora. He wasn't covered in stripes or anything, but he wasn't dressed right. He had armor on his shoulders and belts on his arms, around his chest, over his pants and waist and a jacket that didn't actually look possible. He had a key in one hand, a giant house key with a serrated edge and a groove and a little serial number up on top, only it was a big serial number since the key itself was so big and so weird because Riku knew people used keys for things like opening letters or making scratches on walls as well as opening doors, but he'd never seen a letter big enough for a key like that or a door with a key hole that big, and he didn't see why a person would want to make such a big scratch on a wall anyways and -
"Riku, Riku!" Sora giggled and waved the key around. He was sitting, just at the top of the stairs, and the stairs were so narrow that he really shouldn't have been able to wave the key around but he was just doing it, anyways, like that didn't matter. "Come up here, Riku!"
"I can't," Riku replied.
"Come up here, Riku!" Sora said again. "Come say hi!"
Riku shook his head furiously and crossed his arms. "I can't, I can't, you idiot!"
Sora stopped waving the giant house key around and frowned at him from the top of the stairs. "Should I come down there, then?"
"No." Riku glared at him. "Besides, you'll puke."
"I won't puke!" Sora stood up suddenly, much taller than he really should seem and much taller than anyone should ever seem, really, in a dream, and with one angry sideswipe embedded the house key in the wall. Reciprocal cracks snaked through the plaster with splitting noises. "I'll be fine! Don't you dare say that!"
"Go away, wouldja?" Riku said. God, that was such a stupid word. 'Wouldja'. What kind of a jerk says 'wouldja'? Riku turned around to leave.
"Hey!"
He passed by a window with curtains covered in pictures of butterflies. It was snowing outside.
"Hey! Come back!"
Riku woke up just as he was sliding off the bed and falling to the floor. Thunk.
"Shit," he said.
Riku used to like Fridays. Not only did school end half an hour earlier, but he didn't have history, and one of the five periods he did have was a study period. It was like somebody had specially engineered Fridays personally for Riku Tepes, just taking all the good parts of a week and putting them on the same day.
But then that somebody made Sora happen. After all, Riku didn't have history with Sora. One of precious few periods, it seemed.
But today was Friday, and they had science first, in which Sora sat next to Riku while Dr. Zexion talked on and on about the lab they were going to do that morning.
Riku felt about Dr. Zexion much the same way a corn snake might feel about a milk snake - the former being venomous, the latter imitating its coloration and being harmless. If you'd asked Dr. Zexion about milk snakes and corn snakes, he would explain this to you using small, short words so you'd be sure to understand. But if you'd asked him if, were the corn snake to understand the free ride the milk snake was getting from its reputation, the corn snake would be kind of pissed, he'd look uncomfortable, say it was a silly question and shouldn't you be getting to class about now?
By the time they actually got to the lab, about half the class had been wasted, but it didn't even matter. All it was was looking at onion skin cells under a microscope. The room was filled with the quiet buzz of friends talking with friends, making a halfhearted effort to do the work, and then cracking jokes about it until they'd gone onto a completely different subject.
Oh, except for the nerds. They were discussing cloning. Onion cloning.
Riku wondered why it was he didn't hate the nerds yet. He didn't like them.
"Riku? What're you looking at?" Sora poked him in the side.
"Jeez!" Riku grumbled, jerking away with conditioned reflex and glaring at his lab partner. "Seriously..."
"Oh, come on," Sora grinned at him, tugging him closer to the microscope and the glass slides. "Better me as your partner than anybody else."
And, as much as it pained him to admit it, he was horribly right. Just looking at the other people in the class, well... well, at least with Sora, he didn't look all hurt and offended when Riku gave him a death glare.
(Actually, yesterday, when Riku had death glared him in English, he'd remarked on Riku's "pretty eyes." Riku would've smacked him if he'd actually cared enough.)
One table over, though, and Zack and Kairi the wonder team were managing the most spectacular screw up in scientific high school history.
Coincidentally, Riku had never heard so many terrible "What does this button do?" jokes about a microscope, and that was saying something, since Riku passed seventh grade science.
And as Sora - who was, actually, surprisingly adept at setting the onion skin in the slide and adjusting the microscope - was focusing the lens, there was a loud and distinct CRACK! from the table over.
"Shit!" Zack shouted, jumping backwards. He'd crushed the slide with the microscope.
But it wasn't until he swore that Dr. Zexion's head shot up from the laptop he was working on, his eyes narrowed viciously.
He was even wearing gold rimmed glasses - the only reason being, Riku suspected, to pinch the rim and look just over the tops of them intimidatingly as he was doing now.
The whole class was silent as Dr. Zexion stood up, very slowly, and walked to a glass showcase of rocks and minerals. He took a small gold key out of his pocket and unlocked the case, drawing out what looked to Riku like a baseball-sized lump of hard brown...well, rock, and then he closed the case again, stone in hand. He approached Zack with his face completely blank, and perhaps the barest hint of a sadistic smile.
"Mr. Fair, do you know what this is?"
Zack coughed a little and obviously tried to resist cowering. "N-no, look, I'm sorry about the swearing it's just - "
"This, Zack, is a coprolite," Dr. Zexion told him, holding it out. Zack took it hesitantly in his own hand.
Somewhere behind him, one of the nerds' eyes bugged out her her head and she clapped a hand over her mouth.
"Do you know what a coprolite is, Zack?"
"...no."
Dr. Zexion smiled a snakey smile. "Well, don't you remember learning the tests in middle school? Color, hardness, dissolvability, taste and all that?"
"Ye-ah..." Zack said carefully. It was sad, sort of, watching it from where Riku and Sora were standing. Like watching a mouse in a room with nothing but a mousetrap and rapidly closing in walls.
"Let's do them now, shall we?"
So Zack scratched the rock with a penny, and rubbed it on a piece of paper, and identified it as 'non-metallic'.
"What about taste, Zack?" Dr. Zexion smiled at him again.
And oh, poor Zack, who assumed that no public school teacher would really have him put him mouth on something too bad, no, he just went ahead and winced and licked the rock anyways.
"Does it taste like anything? Salt? Iron?"
At this point the excited nerd in the back leaned over and whispered something to her friends, and then all of their eyes bugged and a few of them bit their fist or finger to keep from, it seemed to Riku, cackling.
"Uh, it just tastes like a rock, Dr. Zexion," Zack said, grinning weakly when a few brave souls in the class giggled.
"Do you know what that is, Zack?" Zack shook his head again.
Dr. Zexion just took the rock back, very carefully. "That, Zachary, is fossilized - " he said, using small, short words so Zack would be sure to understand, " - shit."
Walking down the stairs and across the hall to English, Riku was still seething a little about what had happened in science. It wasn't that he felt sorry for Zack; he'd gotten what was coming to him. Licking dinosaur poop was one of the more mildly cruel and unusual punishments in Dr. Zexion's cell biology class. But that was just it - Dr. Zexion had looked so smug when he did it, like it was Zack's fault nobody had ever told him what a coprolite was.
"Hey, frowny McGrimace, what's wrong?"
One thing Riku hated was when he had two classes in a row with the same people. You left the same classroom, followed the same route, and often entered the next classroom at the same time. It was awkward, especially if you were Riku and therefore trying to avoid the other person as much as possible. This meant no eye contact, walking on the opposite side of the hallway if you could, and long strides.
But then there were those few that chased him anyways.
He glanced sideways at Sora, who was walking next to him with an earnest smile.
"What?"
"You look pretty royally pissed off right now, you know. I mean, more than usual - "
"Hey, Sora!" shouted someone from a little ways down the hall. Sora looked away from Riku for a few seconds to wave hi back and widen his grin. Riku took this chance to speed up his walk, darting in between bodies of stalling students. He was moving fast enough that his open button-down shirt actually flapped behind him. He was a man with a mission.
Of course, that didn't mean Sora couldn't sit next to him when they did get to English, and damn all these two-person desks. Riku cast a glance sideways at the messy brown hedgehog on the top of Sora's head as the kid leaned over his backpack, pulling out his English binder.
"So?"
Riku didn't say anything, he just opened his notebook and wrote down the homework on the board. If he hadn't been in school, he would have taken out his music player and turned the volume up. Not that that had stopped Sora before, but he felt he could condition the response if he did it enough. Like with a puppy. If there was anything Sora reminded him of, it was a tactless 3-month-old puppy. There was only so much naivete a person his age should have. Sora probably still thought it was cool to go up in tree houses!
"Is it because of the thing Dr. Zexion did to Zack? 'Cause Zack didn't look too upset about it afterwards." He smiled at Riku and flicked him in the shoulder; Riku drew his arm closer to his side.
"It's not about - I don't feel sorry for Zack of all people. I just don't like Dr. Zexion," Riku said coldly, never making eye contact. He didn't want to be pestered about this.
"Ye-ah, but admit it, you thought what he did was unfair and it pisses you off!"
Riku turned his eyes to the ceiling because he didn't need this right now. "I just - ugh, Sora..." he said, setting a record for most exasperation in a monosyllabic grunt.
Sora just laughed and turned to the front of the classroom, chewing on the inside of his cheek absently. He didn't say anything else until Mr. Reno walked into the room with a flannel shirt, questionably tasteful jeans and a cloth-bound book.
"A-hem," he said decisively, sitting down on a stool in front of the whiteboard. He surveyed the kids in seats with only mild dislike.
"Well, I was going to give you time to work on your essays in class today, since your homework is to come up with a rough outline, but then it wouldn't be homework, would it?" And then Riku snorted and leaned back in his chair, because this he had noticed about all people: they loved to lord information over others. He saw it everywhere, in kids his age, in adults, toddlers, anyone. The conversations always went like this:
"Hey! You will never guess who asked me out!"
"Omigawd, who?"
"You seriously would not believe me if I told you."
Or it was
"Did anyone tell you about what happened to the ex-prime minister of France?"
"Uh, no."
"Oh, you should totally listen to NPR, they were talking about it on this one quiz show."
Or even
"You know the deep-sea barreleye fish? With the clear foreheads?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"Did you hear about what they discovered about how they find food?"
You always asked people if they knew something if you already knew they didn't. You withheld information just because and Riku hated that, he hated how people used anything they could to assure themselves of their superiority. He'd removed himself from the whole vicious, biting world as soon as he realized this, watching from the sidelines as shallow and petty people chased each other in circles with nipping little teeth.
With a shake of his head, Riku's mind was back in his second-period English class with Mr. Reno, the redheaded man with a barely concealed blue streak a sailor would be proud of.
"And I could give you a free period and let you all terrorize each other, but then it wouldn't be English class, would it?"
And to his considerable surprise, Sora turned to the side, caught Riku's gaze and rolled his own eyes, followed by a muttering of "Wouldya get on with it already?" directed at their teacher. He leaned his elbows on the desk.
And so Riku's interest in he of the impeccable smile was magnified twofold. He had mood swings!
With this renewed interest, he began to observe the other boy with mild non-disinterest.
(It occurred to Riku that rapidly changing his opinion of Sora from 'He's a naive and immature idiot' to 'He's a relatable teenager my age' was, in itself, a bit of a mood swing, but he attributed it to hormones and thought nothing more of it.)
So once again he noticed the medical bandages covering three of the fingers on Sora's hand - which had been changed by Belle, yesterday, when he was in earshot - and he noticed that one of them was just low enough to expose some of the wound underneath. But the angle of the cloth prevented him from actually seeing whatever it was on Sora's hand that warranted honest-to-goodness legitimate hospital bandage instead of a band-aid. So Riku shifted in his seat, half-standing and then sitting down again on his foot, all while Mr. Reno droned a speech about the contents of their essays that sounded suspiciously prepared. And with that slight change in position, he could see -
- oh God.
He'd known it would have to be bad, obviously - it required daily bandage changes and medical tape and he was pretty sure he'd seen Belle with a tube of some prescription ointment or whatever, but it really was different when you saw third-degree burns in real life.
The glimpse of skin Riku'd caught looked sticky and swollen; it was a sort of sickly mix of yellow and red and he could sort of see veins in the white parts and it was risen and horrible and black in places and purple in other places like somebody had just torn it right off of Sora's finger and it was trying to heal and could something like that even heal, oh God.
He blanched and clapped a hand over his mouth, staring down at the desk and trying to rid the images from his mind. That was only a tiny part of one of Sora's finger and three of them were bandaged. He remembered Dr. Zexion talking about how of all the parts of the human body, the hands were covered in the most nerves, that they were the most sensitive, and Riku couldn't imagine...
He looked back up at Sora, who met his eyes again and grinned at him, obviously unaware as to Riku's discovery. But Riku had never been a very good liar (it wasn't like he'd had many people to lie to, anyways, and the constant indifference didn't really require any trying), so when Sora looked at him and saw his wide eyes pricked with maybe-sympathy-almost-tears, his happy face deflated. His mouth grew small and part-open, his eyes got a little watery and, maybe just a little, his lips quivered. He blinked and clenched his jaw in a way that looked kind of practiced to Riku, and stared at him like it was Riku's fault he'd found out.
But he remembered the conversation he'd overheard.
"It's just, you know, what if people ask about it, is all. I don't want other people to feel uncomfortable."
The next second he was shifting uncomfortably and watching the wall to his right; Riku was on his left. His uninjured hand was curled into a tight ball and Riku watched his whole body tense up angrily.
But Sora was looking at him again in the next second, and staring at him with his hopeless eyes the color the sky should be, searching for a reaction.
And Riku did something he hadn't done for a really long time. He looked right back at Sora, and he smiled for him.
It wasn't a big smile or the kind of smile that stuck with you, but it came from Riku to Sora and it said just enough to get Sora to smile back.
"So anyways," Mr. Reno was saying, "Everyone come sit on the floor."
And so Riku and Sora's little world was broken (funny, how many little worlds happened around Sora,) and Riku looked back up at his English teacher with a mix of curiosity and horrible nagging fear.
There was nervous chuckling in the classroom, the sort of chuckling that happened when the teacher had made what was probably a joke, even if it wasn't funny, which people laughed at for fear of retribution.
Mr. Reno grinned, and said to them cheerfully, "Oh, that's right, it's really funny!" he laughed. He stopped laughing. "Do it." He pointed at the floor in front of him. And as the chronic giggling dwindled and confused looks multiplied, he smiled at them and held up the book.
"Be honest. Whensa last time you idiots got read aloud to?" A little part of Riku's faith in humanity died every time his English teacher made a grammatical error. "Kindergarten?" Mr. Reno continued. "First grade, maybe?"
So with a little bit of somewhat-gentle urging, kids started to get up and sit cross-legged on the floor, or lie down and rest their heads on their backpacks, or lean on each other and against desk legs. After a few seconds of observation, Sora smiled and stood up, taking his dream demon sweatshirt with him, draped over one arm. He sat down on the floor just in front of their desk, folding the sweatshirt and putting it on the carpet. He looked straight up and grinned at Riku, who was watching him with vague distaste and hadn't moved.
"Hey Riku, come down here! We can use my sweatshirt as a pillow."
"We can use my sweatshirt as a pillow"? What did he think Riku was, a boyscout?
Looked like the skin had been torn right off Sora's finger...
He shivered and looked at Sora again, wondered if he still felt pain from it, if he was in pain right now and just couldn't show it. Or was just too used to it.
But Riku knew that pity was the worst way to treat any kind of pain, so ignored that and acted on autopilot. Autopilot meant no, you didn't share sweatshirt pillows while a "grown-up" read stories out loud to you.
"...I'm good."
Sora, who had been lying down and leaning on his elbows, sat up on his hands with his mouth twisted up in mock anger. His eyes shot wide for a second and he winced, lifting the bandaged hand and mouthing some French cuss. But he blinked a couple of times and looked at Riku again with the exact same mock-anger of a scrunched up mouth he had before and a mischievous glint in the crinkles of his eyes.
"Aw, c'mon. Indulge yourself for friggin' once," he laughed. Lucky, about half the people were still being seated, so they weren't drawing any attention. In fact, a couple more similar situations were going on near and around them. Riku rolled his eyes.
"I was never big on circle time in elementary school," he deadpanned.
Sora rolled his eyes. "Then come down here and fall asleep."
"Sora..." ...drop it, he didn't say out loud. It was silly for this to become an issue.
The boy on the ground raised his eyebrows. "Riku Tepes, I will come over there and sit on you. Don't think I won't."
All Riku could do was stare at him disbelievingly, somewhat shocked that anyone could say that so seriously. And it didn't look like Sora was saying it in a joking way, no. Riku had no doubts that, should he fail to comply, Sora would stand up, walk around the desk, and plant himself directly on Riku's lap with a completely straight face and, in reaction to any weird looks, would look puzzled and probably make something up about how it's traditional French culture to sit on the lap of someone of the same gender.
"Okay! Jeez, fine," Riku grumbled, standing up and coming around to sit next to a smiling Sora. He glared back. He felt like Sora had made a big deal out of something that shouldn't have been, but Riku hated to draw attention to himself. And as socially inept as he was, even he knew that having the new French kid in class sit on him wasn't the greatest way to avoid attention. There was also the fact - and Riku wasn't the type to lie, not to himself - that he often didn't do things for the first time without a deal of outside encouragement.
The thing was, though, he couldn't remember the last person willing to give him enough encouragement to get him to do something.
Which was...kinda sad, if you thought about it, if you didn't think too much.
So that was probably why he just snorted and rolled his eyes, laying down on the sweatshirt pillow after Sora so that they faced each other. Sora made a funny face at him (to fill the silence, presumably), giggled, and then hushed when Mr. Reno started up again.
"Okay! No, 'okay' does not mean 'keep talking with no regard to the teacher', it means shut up Yuffie. Hey! D'you want a nap time or don't you, yo - you kids." He cleared his throat awkwardly. Riku suspected Mr. Reno of being a reformed slang-user. Or, partially reformed.
"Um..." he glanced at the book in his hand once, then frowned and looked at the bookshelf to his side, scanning it. He plucked something from the shelf and weighed one book in each of his hands, curiously. "Okay," he said after a while. "We've got two things, since it just occurred to me that some guys will get all objecty at the one I grabbed from my apartment this morning. So." He shifted backwards on his stool.
"Choice A," he said, holding up the cloth-bound book. "Peter Pan. None of this Disney crap, I mean the actual novel by..." he turned the book around and peered at the cover. "...J.M. Barrie. Or," he held up the book he'd gotten from the shelf, "One of those Lemony Snicket books. I don't know which one this is. The one with the lions, whatever."
In the time it took his class to pick a book, Riku completely forgot about what was theoretically going on around him. He was sleepy, and it was second period.
He stared dazedly in front of him, not really at Sora's face but not at anything else, either. And fifteen minutes later, neither of them had moved, still staring at each other and relishing how they had a good forty-five minutes to go until they had to move again. Riku had forgotten - had he ever known? - how wonderful it was, having a story read out loud to you. You could tune in and out whenever you wanted. You could imagine the story as it happened, or you could just lie there and stare at a set of faceted blue circles and let the words drizzle over your body, wash over you like standing near the spray of a waterfall, plink, plink, plink.
After a while, Sora started to wiggle around a little, trying to get more comfortable, bringing his gauze-wrapped right hand up and in between them, resting it on the carpet.
It didn't feel like he was taunting Riku, exactly, no. It wasn't like he wanted to gross Riku out with his burned hand. Riku didn't know that, strictly, but it didn't really feel like taunting. It was more like...
Like I don't have to pretend this isn't here now. Like Sora needed somebody to know that he wasn't always alright. And Riku, being frequently not alright himself, could respect that about a person, even if he didn't know if he liked it.
That was the thing about Riku Tepes. If he was going to try a new thing, he needed a lot of outside encouragement.
"Hey," Sora said in something that was below a whisper but still, somehow, a noise, "Wanna see it?"
Riku blinked at him in mild confusion until it occurred to him Sora meant his burn. He stared at Sora in mostly-disgust.
Sora stifled a giggle and snorted at him. "I mean -" he cut himself off, glancing up at their teacher. "- no, seriously. Can you help me change my bandages after school? It's basically impossible by myself, and Belle doesn't get home until late tonight. It's really easy, it just that I can't do it...you know, one-handed."
"Uh..." Riku stalled. And then the time for actually answering a question sort of slipped away because the words were still falling into the air, cool and smooth, plink, plink, plink. He just sort of walked his index and middle fingers through the spaces of Sora's splayed ones on the carpet like feet, absently, watching them the way you watch a TV program that isn't really interesting. He smiled to himself sleepily, his eyes half closed.
(And later that day, in the lunchroom, he would overhear Sora talking to one another guy who joked with him about their "faggoty" behavior, all in good humor, of course. It wasn't like Riku was upset about it, but he would readily admit that he thrilled a little when Sora when silent, stared at the kid for a few seconds, and just walked away without saying anything else.)
"Hey, you don't mind that we always go to my house, do you?"
Riku looked up at Sora who had, until this point in the walk to his house, remained blissfully quiet. So quiet, in fact, that Riku had started to listen to his mp3 player with both earbuds in.
Riku had specially bought, online (even though paying for shipping was Hell in the Destiny Islands), the kind of earphones that block all outside sound. He couldn't even hear cars on the street when he walked down the sidewalk. He loved his headphones.
"What?" he asked, casually pulling one out of his ear and looking over at Sora.
"You know," Sora said, still walking. "That we always go to my house."
Riku licked one of his teeth, more for the sake of just doing something before he spoke than anything else. "Ah, I wouldn't say always when this is...the second time."
Sora just laughed and kept walking, turning down the grisly dirt road that led to the crazy house.
Riku was standing in front of Sora, who was perched on his kitchen counter swinging his legs back and forth and looking at Riku.
He was holding a roll of medical bandage in one hand, and a third degree burn in the other, and he was grinning a madman grin that Riku had learned to fear. It was the grin he'd had on when he'd guilted Riku into eating dinner with him, and the one he'd worn earlier that day in English on the floor.
"Okay," he said, holding out his injured hand. "So if you could help me take this bandage off, that should be hard, and then I'll help you wind the new one around and try to walk you through the parts you have to do. I'm right-handed, but I've gotten better with my left in the last year-ish, so I should be able to do some on my own."
"Ah..." Riku swallowed. He understood why Sora was doing this, naturally. Joking around about it must make it easier to bear, and besides, he wasn't making up having to change his bandages. He got it, really. Twice the people makes half the burden. He respected it. It was just...
...Riku was kind of squeamish. Seeing other peoples' injuries always led to that horrible spine-tingling shiver and made him go weak in the stomach. And that was just things like loose teeth and scabs.
Sora smiled at him sidways. "Don't worry," he said. "It's not really gross. I mean, it kind of is, but you don't really register it as being human skin, so it just looks weird. And, uh, don't worry about hurting me." He didn't say that it wasn't going to hurt him, or that he was used to it. He just told Riku not to worry about it.
It made him want to try really, strangely, uncharacteristically hard not to hurt Sora, if only because Riku hated living up to realistic expectations.
And he only meant about hurting him physically, with the bandages and all, Riku didn't do symbolism. Symbolism happened in novels you read in English class.
So when he started down at Sora's wrist, which was held out to him, he was very careful. He untucked the end of the bandage and carefully began unwinding it. It wasn't burned down at the wrist, so when he pulled the elastic white gauze off of there all that was revealed was slightly reddened skin. It was when he got to the palm that he met a little resistance.
When he felt the first tug, Riku slowed down. He could just see the horrid puffy red and yellow and black swelling. He took a deep breath - he might have heard Sora take one, too. And when he started to pull the bandage off it made this terrible wet, sticky noise like stepping on a mud patch. The bandage came out blotched with a sickly jaundiced tone, and when Sora sucked in a breath and stifled some kind of noise, Riku stopped and looked up at him.
Sora grinned at him, and looked like he was trying to find something to say. Strangely enough, Riku found it first.
"So..." he said, trying to do what Sora did, trying not to think of it as skin. It was just crusty red and yellow blotches like - like the surface of Mars. Sure. "Who is Roxas, anyway?"
"Huh?" Sora looked at him with genuine curiosity.
"Roxas. You were talking with him on speaker phone on Tuesday night, right?"
Sora grinned, but Riku didn't miss how his eyes were beginning to get watery. "Oh, right! I forgot you were there when that happened. Roxas is my brother, he turns fifteen in June."
Riku raised his eyebrows and nodded, pulling the bandage away a little more. He didn't miss how Sora's whole arm tensed when he did that, but at least he was done with the palm of his hand. Just the three fingers to go. He tried to think of other things to ask about Sora's little brother.
There was the obvious.
"They separated you?" Riku frowned, wet-and-sticky-noising some of the bandage off Sora's pinky.
"Yeah," Sora shrugged. "He was fourteen and I was sixteen. He got adopted before I even got let out of the hospital. I mean, it took like three months, but still. Fourteen is cuter than sixteen. He wasn't even in high school yet."
"...oh," Riku said quietly, removing the last of the bandage. He took a mental step back and wished he hadn't; Sora's whole hand was exposed and oh, it made him want to cower. He'd seen the latest Batman movie, he'd seen Half Face or whoever, but a movie didn't show you anything like what a real burn was. It didn't show you the smell like burnt hair and rubber and blood. It didn't show you the cracked scab and the slimy wet puss.
He blanched.
"...yeah," Sora said again, very quietly.
"Sorry," Riku said. "But how...?" He trailed off, picking up the roll of unused bandage.
Sora took it from him and peeled the end off, pressing it against his wrist. "Oh," he said. He took a big breath. "I was coming back late from a friend's house only Roxas was also sleeping over at somebody's house or something, and anyways when I tried to open the door to the kitchen it was really really hot so that probably gave me like a first degree burn? And the kitchen was on fire. And...yeah."
He looked Riku right in the eye, and then he looked away quickly. "Sorry," he mumbled. Sorry, Riku assumed, because he hadn't meant to give so much away - or sorry because he had meant to.
"Nah," Riku said. This kid, this kid, he decided, this kid was amazing. To go through what he'd gone through - about which Riku was still foggy - and to come out the other side letting almost-strangers see his scab took the kind of bravery Riku had given up on. He smiled a little. Even if the end result was kind of whiny and a little too pushy.
It wasn't that Riku Tepes never changed his mind. He just didn't like it to be changed for him.
"Ah - " Sora winced when Riku got to his pinky with the bandage; he'd been going too tight.
"Oops," Riku said, unwinding it.
--
A few minutes later, with Sora freshly wound up again and the old bandage carefully disposed of, he hopped off the counter and grabbed a couple of prescription pill bottles from the back of it. He tipped one pill from each, popping them without water.
He turned to Riku and smiled. "Antibiotics," he said. "It's prone since I don't have a skin graft."
Noticing the lack of a 'yet', Riku followed him into the living room with a question. "Why not? Don't you need one?"
Sora turned on a record - just soft jazz this time, Riku noted with relief - and sat down on the couch, soon followed by the cat.
He didn't say anything for a little while. He sighed. "At first, I refused to get one. I don't really remember why, you know? And then I was supposed to come here and I wanted to get settled before I did. I'm getting one soon."
"Oh," Riku said, and he didn't press it. Because even though at this point it was apparent that Sora wanted to tell him these things...
...he didn't really want to know. They scared him, to be honest. He claimed to be world-wise, sure, but when he found there actually were people who lost their parents in toaster-oven house fires, and who got burned, and who got separated from the only family they had left and were expected to keep going, it gave him a funny feeling in his gut. Besides, Riku was the type to not tell somebody the whole story. He treated other people that way.
They just sat on the couch and listened to Ella Fitzgerald croon her way through "All of Me", and when that song finished Saix had curled up in Riku's lap (because it was warmer), and Sora giggled and muttered something like "Ella, elle l'a!", which even sounded dumb in English.
He probably should have seen that Sora was on the verge of something. He could have seen the next Friday coming, if he'd asked an easy question. But he didn't know if Sora was really okay until he wasn't.
Thus I suffer love's inconstancies
And when I think the pain is most intense
Without thinking, it is gone again.
Then when I feel my joys certain
And my hour of greatest delight arrived
I find my pain beginning all over once again.
- Louis Labe, I Live, I Die, I Burn, I Drown
A/N: Yeah. The coprolite thing seems cracky, sure, but it's based on real life. Not...not my real life, but still. This century, at least. I mean, I think.
Two things. One, a request, two, some boring information.
First thing: I need to know the names of some of your favorite poets. Alive or dead, male or female, any nationality. If any of their poems are readily available online, that's fantastic, but if I can just find them in a poetry anthology or individual published work at the library that's totally fine. Technically, it's for a project, but I'm always up for more poetry. Mmm, Louis Labe.
Second thing: I'm going to try very hard to update on March 14th, and if I do it will be short and kinda angsty and kinda fluffy. If I don't, I'll have an excuse prepared.