Are you -- Nobody -- Too? Then There's a Pair of Us!

A/N: (ignore first paragraph)

I think I'm...speciesist. Or...family-ist? Not genus-ist. But I was reading this article on Skiffia livebearers, and the author concluded by urging people to reconsider their opinions on members of Poecilia, since it's common to think of fish like guppies as just food for cichlids, adding that he sometimes feeds baby cichlids to his livebearers. And my first thought when I read that was "What? You can't do that! Baby cichlids are gonna be...you know, adult cichlids when they grow up!" But then I realized that I have, for some reason, no problem with baby livebearers being used as live food for cichlids. Does this make me a fish elitist or something?

Okay, I was gonna post this tomorrow, but I've decided to post it today and post this one-day fictionpress thing tomorrow. See y'all later.

"Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own."
- Logan Pearsall Smith
(1865 - 1946)

There was one thing that Sora hated, more than he'd ever hated anything else.

He hated to wake up smelling blood.

It had only happened twice in his life, and in a row. The day after the fire, and then the day after that, both in the hospital. He still couldn't decide which day was worse, though, not that he really thought about it that much.

The first day, he opened his mind before his eyes. Still groggy, at first he thought he was in his room - he was sprawled out the way he always was, with his forearm across his face to keep morning from coming (it never did, and Dad always snorted and yanked the blankets off anyway, even on Saturday). But he definitely smelled blood. He knew the smell of it; everyone does. Tangy, like metal, but a little more potent. It wasn't a mystery smell.

And over the blood smell, there was the musty bandage smell of medical casts, and something like bad meatloaf.

(He'd find out, when he left his room four days later, that this was because he was a floor above the cafeteria, and near the staircase.)

It took him a few seconds to remember why he was in a hospital with his hand throbbing dully and not at home, wishing for a snow day in March. But he did. He remembered coming home to a fire, and trying to get in through the kitchen and burning his hand on the toaster oven, and blacking out. He was surprisingly calm about the whole thing, considering. He wondered where his family was.

So he eventually sat up in bed, being careful not to lean on his hurt hand, and looked around. The room wasn't too bad, for a hospital. The walls were a frosty green, and his sheets were white; there was a little TV in the upper corner and an IV stand next to the bed.

He was alone in the room. There was nobody in the plastic chairs against the wall, no nurse checking his stats, no stern police officers waiting in the corner to question him. Only Sora.

He didn't know what to do. He didn't really want to watch television, and he was thinking in a bemused mix of French and English.

He just sat ignorant in a hospital bed, with his hands folded neatly. He had to wait, alone and confused and, yet, not, already sort of knowing but still not knowing and able to blame it on his dramatic teenage mind. He had to wait for almost an hour before the nurses made their rounds, and somebody noticed he was awake.

They made a small sort of fuss over it, and one of them went and got his designated doctor. They were all sort of awkward about it, because nobody wants to tell a kid he's an orphan - whose job was that? Not the doctor's. So the doctor just told him that he would probably need skin grafts for his hand, and Sora nodded and thanked her.

After a few hours, somebody official showed up - Sora couldn't remember if it was the police, or social services or child protection or whatever - it was hard, really, to remember who was telling you something when you were so focused on what they were saying.

But a blond man showed up, knelt by the bed and explained slowly that Sora's parents had been killed in an accident due to some short circuit or something in the toaster oven. His brother, Roxas, was fine, but since he was uninjured he'd been put directly in foster care.

(Their grandparents were either dead or in homes, and both of their parents had been only children. They'd joked that because of that they'd wanted to have a huge family, but once they'd started raising the Wonder Boys Roxas and Sora they realized they clearly couldn't handle any more of the people they seemed to be making. It had been an ongoing joke in the family.)

The same would happen to Sora when he got out of the hospital. Foster care.

Of course, he knew they were just going through the motions - Roxas had a chance, still, because he was only barely fourteen and still cute. But Sora was sixteen, a firmly established bratty teenager who would, of course, want to learn to drive and snub his foster parents, and be of legal age in too short a time. He knew he was going to spend the last two years of his childhood life essentially homeless.

He briefly entertained the idea that somebody would adopt both of them, claim they didn't and couldn't separate brothers, and at first Roxas and Sora would rely on each other for support, then as they grew to know their foster parents would create a whole, if slightly dented, family.

But life isn't Hollywood, and Roxas came to see him a week later with red eyes (but not crying, never crying, never Roxas) to tell him that a family had gladly taken him in, but they could only take Roxas. So they made the best they could of it, and Sora made Roxas give im his new phone number and address and tell him about the family taking his brother away, smiling as much as he could. They tried to joke about it, and promised to visit over the holidays and to call or email every day.

And that was it, Sora thought. Get out the hospital and then...that's it. Use his half of the life insurance for college when he turned eighteen.

He didn't know which day was worse, though - the first day, when he'd had to hope for an hour, or the second, when he tried to and knew he couldn't. After the second day he learned to sleep with his arm by his side, so he only woke up smelling musky, too-clean blankets.

He refused the skin grafts, maybe because he didn't want to let go. Probably more, though, that he wanted somebody, some adult, to step up and overrule him and maybe prove that he wasn't so...abandoned.

And then Belle happened. She'd made everything so much easier. She didn't ask him to talk about it, never talked about "crying it all out" or "purging himself of the bad emotions." Sometimes she'd just glare at him, sit him down and tell him to cry for a little while, but she stopped after the first few months, when he'd started to act normally again.

But he still remembered the abandoned feeling, especially that first day.

That was three hundred and sixty-four days ago. Maybe three hundred sixty-five, he didn't remember if there was a leap year.

But the point was that...that today was - ...well, it was last block on a Friday, at least.

It was math class, but luckily their teacher had a policy of letting them goof off on Fridays if they got ahead, which they usually did in honors classes. Of course, goofing off with Mr. Leonhart generally involved math worksheets in which you solved for the punchline to a pun joke, but they were never hard and he didn't expect you to turn them in.

Today was different, though. Just Sora's luck, really.

"So," Mr. Leonhart said. "Who knows what today is? I heard somebody say it - yep. Pi day, right? March fourteenth, three one four. I thought we'd do some easy worksheets on spheres and circles, and maybe something else if you finish those early." As he spoke, he started passing out the aforementioned sheets.

In the last row, Riku rolled his eyes and rested his chin in his hand. He'd thought that, at seventeen, maybe he was past math puns. "What happened to the glass blower who inhaled? He got a pane in his stomach!" Disgusting. He knew - he could see, in everyone's movements - that everyone else thought so, but they weren't willing to admit it because everybody liked their math teacher. He gave easy tests and light homework and taught well. But nobody liked the worksheets. There was always dead silence when they were being passed out. Not that Mr. Leonhart noticed, or anything.

"Mr. Leonhart?" Riku looked up, because it was Sora who had spoken, and noticed that the boy three seats up and two seats to the right had gone completely rigid, sort of hunched over his desk, looking at the paper. Riku had just gotten his; he glanced at it. All it said was "Happy Pi Day - March 14th!" on it in what were probably brightly colored letters before being photocopied, and beneath it some problems on circle areas and sphere volumes. Not exactly interesting stuff, but he didn't see what was so upsetting.

"Yes, Sora?"

"...can - " his voice cracked, and Sora tried again. "Can I go to the bathroom?"

Mr. Leonhart glanced at the clock, which read a few minutes past one. "Yeah," he said, "Quickly, okay?"

Sora nodded complacently. He grabbed his backpack and slung it over the shoulder, walking as quickly as he could without running out of the room.

"Sora, don't take your - " Mr. Leonhart stepped halfway out into the hall, calling out for the him. But he stopped, frowned. He walked back to his desk slowly, drumming his fingers on the table thoughtfully for a few seconds while the rest of the students either waited for his response or whispered amongst themselves.

And it was true what they said, Riku noticed. That gossip spreads faster than wildfire. He had no doubt that Monday would bring hysterical rumors about Sora, though he didn't know what they'd be. That Sora was secretly a drug addict (you know, since he was French) and had to go snort the cocaine in his backpack in the bathroom. That he'd had to puke because he had a rare medical condition that made him puke when he saw circles with numbers on them. It would be something stupid, Riku knew, it was always something stupid; he knew that about gossip.

But finally Mr. Leonhart spoke.

"...Riku," he said carefully.

"Yeah?" Riku looked at him nervously. Sora had this kind of contagious sadness; just being near him when he was thinking about things like his old family made Riku feel sort of funny in his stomach. It wasn't, strictly, that Riku was being empathetic, but maybe that Sora was hyper-emotional or something.

"If Sora doesn't come back by..." Mr. Leonhart glanced at the clock again. "If he's not back by one ten, could you go and see if he's alright?"

Riku shrugged. "Yeah, okay," he said. He admitted he was worried, but anybody would be worried if they saw the unabashedly happy one start to have what looked like a breakdown.

A few people turned around the look at him, because it wasn't really a secret that Sora liked to hang around Riku (not that it was interesting enough to be gossip, anyways), so naturally Riku must know exactly what was going on.

He didn't say anything, and at one ten he caught the teacher's eye and left the room, heading for the boy's bathroom.

When he pushed open the swing door, the first thing he noticed was Sora's backpack, next to the trashcan overflowing with brown paper towels. It wasn't a bad bathroom, but every high school bathroom has graffiti about sex or drugs or catty insults in the stalls. This one had one brick wall, too, which just made it seem more depressing in addition to have an olive green color scheme.

Sora was hunched over one of the sinks, bracing himself with a hand on either side of it, staring at the drain.

Riku came up, leaning his back against the other sink. "Hey," he said quietly.

Sora glanced up at him and tried to smile. But he...couldn't. "Hey," he said back.

He went back to staring down into the sink, breathing quietly, and neither of them said anything for a little while. Riku didn't know what to do, he didn't know how to deal with somebody else's pain. He didn't know anybody who'd lost a person, really lost a person, not a grandparent they barely knew or a dog that got run over. He knew that he couldn't even begin to understand, but he wondered why it was that Sora was freaking out about it now.

But to his credit, Riku tried. He took a step closer to Sora, but when he put his hand on his back it was like he'd hit a switch in the other boy.

"I thought - " Sora said, and cleared his throat. "I thought that...I'd be okay. I mean, I kept trying to convince myself that today was just another day, and the calendar shouldn't matter, and I was doing so well but...but..." he took a big, shuddering breath and Riku started to massage his back, awkwardly. He didn't know if he was helping at all. Grief was such a funny thing. There were some people that had to tell anyone who would listen in order to make it better, and others that hoarded it like a horrible secret.

Sora licked his lips. "Pi day. I come to school praying that nobody will notice me, and that I can act normally, and I almost do but then all of a sudden...c'est l'anniversaire de la mort de mes parents, et vous dites que c'est Pi day?!" He sobbed once and wiped at his eye.

"Hey, Sora," Riku said quietly. "It's okay. It's okay." He just rubbed Sora's back systematically, up and down, up and down. The cloth rolled under his hand. He felt so clueless. And...ignorant, and juvenile, because he couldn't say what people normally said, he couldn't say "I know," or "It's normal to cry," or "You'll be fine," because he didn't know. All he knew was that Sora was warm and shaking a little as he tried to breathe. God, he was so clueless. Who decided it was okay to let him be the comforter?

Sora turned around to look at Riku with his eyes red and puffy, but no tears rolling down his cheeks. He shook his head. "Je le sais," he whispered. I know that. Maybe he couldn't handle speaking English now, Riku thought. Maybe it was too post-trauma for him. Maybe he missed living in a French-speaking country with his parents and his brother and his friends and his faith in the world. Because it sure didn't look like he had any of those things now.

He shook his head. "Je suis désolé," he said. I'm sorry. "Je...je ne peux pas..." I can't.

"I know," Riku said, touching Sora's shoulder. Sora put his hand over Riku's and hiccupped a little smile, staring at the floor.

"I just," Sora said, in unaccented English. "I guess it doesn't really make a difference, or anything. It's just that now it's...officially a year, you know? Like it's...sinking in, all over again. Like it's all...real, now. My parents have been dead for a year. A year. It's cemented in time. Like there's...no...going back, or something. I don't know," he took a calmer breath. "This probably doesn't make sense." He stared up at the ceiling, crossing his arms and blinking and swallowing.

Riku shrugged. "Nah, it does," he said, glad to see that Sora was pulling himself up, because Riku wasn't sure how he could have helped.

Sora looked at him again, a little calmer, and really met Riku's eyes. Riku hated it when people met his eyes, because it felt to him like putting two mirrors facing each other. Only you were one of the mirrors. It felt weird, because even though he knew they didn't, and he hated people who said they did, a person's eyes looked so much deeper than just things for seeing.

Sora broke eye contact first; he leaned forward, resting his head on Riku's shoulder and squeezing his eyes shut. And that little, slightly spiky weight almost broke Riku in two. It was so personal, and so sad, and so sort-of-desperate. It wasn't that nobody ever touched Riku (heck, it wasn't even that Sora never touched Riku), but it was never really emotional. But Sora was just like that, Riku figured. He'd just gotten in the kid's hyper-emotional way, was all. Nobody leaned on Riku Tepes for support.

Sora pressed his forehead further into Riku's shoulder and took another shivery breath. "I'm sorry," he said. "Just - just give me a second, okay? Just...give me a second."

Riku went one better. Sort of. He put his arms around Sora's shoulders, and hugged him awkwardly. Sora grabbed his shirt but he didn't say anything. They just stood there, two boys, hugging in a bathroom, the only sounds breathing and the slow drip of a broken faucet.

Riku was mostly sure that he couldn't possibly be doing the right thing, but Sora seemed to be improving, so maybe he wasn't screwing up, either. But after a few minutes, he started to glance at the door. Nobody had come in yet, but that didn't mean they weren't going to, and he couldn't guarantee it wouldn't be a homophobe who'd see two guys being emotional and, well, everyone knows what they say about gossip.

"Sora," he said quietly. "I don't...I mean, you can tell me if you think otherwise, but I don't really think you should go back to class today, okay? I mean, it's last block anyways, so..."

Sora let go of his shirt and stepped back, shaking his head to clear it. "Yeah, I - no, yeah, sorry. Didn't mean to go all angsty on you there, sorry. But...yeah." He looked at his backpack in the corner and laughed a warbly laugh. "Actually," he said, "I was planning to just stay in the bathroom for the rest of the period and then go straight home, anyways. I can't...go back in there." He looked at Riku again, with just a little bit of a Sora smile there again, and for some reason Riku felt his own eyes prickling. But he couldn't start crying, too, because two people crying was too horrible. One of them crying and the other one holding, that was progress. That was okay. Besides, he barely ever cried anyways.

--

He walked with Sora to the door of the classroom, and left him waiting outside of it. Letting them see a teary-eyed kid after he's run off to the bathroom would only serve as fodder to the rumor cannon, Riku knew.

It was funny, thinking about it; all of his stupid problems seemed just that: stupid. Here he was, worrying about a B minus on a math test, and there was a boy on the other side of the door like the little blue engine of sadness: "I think I can, I think I can, I have to because the world won't stop turning."

So he bore the unabashed stares for the both of them, walking into the room and right up to Mr. Leonhart's desk, leaning one hand on the surface and leaning in to whisper in his ear so that no one else would listen in. He told his math teacher that Sora was upset about the anniversary of a tragedy in his family, and that celebrating Pi day had upset him. He explained to his sometimes socially clueless teacher that Sora was in no state to come back in the room, and that it would cause a fuss. He asked, on behalf of Sora, if he could go home early. It was last block on a Friday.

Mr. Leonhart sighed and looked at the students.

"...alright," he said at length. "I'd prefer if he called his guardian first, but...well, I trust you two. Losing someone is hard." He smiled at Riku. "I'll write a pass for you and..." he leaned in towards Riku conspiratorially, grinning. "Just don't let anyone see you leave."

"Ah - " he laughed the obligatory laugh, and asked. "...me too?"

Mr. Leonhart licked his lips absentmindedly, scribbling on a piece of scrap paper. "Yes," he said. "I think that's a good idea." He handed the paper to Riku. "Why don't you go grab your stuff?"

So Riku did.

He packed up his stuff and still ignored twice as many stares as he would have gotten, and ignored the girl next to him who whispered a "What's wrong?" in that falsely-concerned voice Riku hated, because she didn't care. She was curious. Curious and vicious, like they all were, like barracudas and vultures.

He slung his backpack over one shoulder, keeping the note scrunched up in his hand. Sora, outside, had barely moved, just leaning up against the wall with his hands in his pockets. One of the pockets of his backpack was partially unzipped; Riku could see the corner of a video game magazine sticking out of it. The cover looked familiar, so he wouldn't be surprised if it was a game he owned - oh, hey. One of the smaller pictures was definitely familiar.

So that's why Sora was dressed like that in my dream last week, he thought absently. He was relieved, sort of, to know that his mind didn't just spontaneously dress people in leather and belts and strapped giant swords to their backs. It was probably the hair that triggered it, the protagonist had spiky hair -

"Riku?"

"Ah, yeah," he muttered. "Let's go. Mr. Leonhart let me go too."

"Yeah?"

So the walk to Sora's house was silent and awkward, because Riku knew he couldn't start listening to his mp3 like usual, and Sora wasn't about to say anything. He wasn't crying any more, which was wonderful because Riku couldn't deal with crying people, but he wasn't talking, either.

Almost there, he stopped walking when the had to cross the street that led down to one of the beaches on the island. It wasn't a big beach or a nice beach, really; it was all rocky and the only animals people ever found were periwinkle snails or a particularly nasty species of invasive crab. Sora didn't know that. He just stopped right before crossing the street and stare-stare-stared in that way that he stared at things.

Riku cleared his throat. "Wanna...go swimming?" he offered cluelessly.

Sora shook his head. "Nah, but..." he glanced back at Riku and headed straight down the road. Riku followed after him kinda-hopelessly. Sora stopped, just leaning against the side of the building closest to the beach without having to actually step foot on the boardwalk. When Riku caught up with him, he had this stupid Sora-smile on his face.

"Um...you okay?" Riku asked hesitantly.

"It's not the first time I've seen a beach or anything," Sora told him. "But the only one I ever visited was at least a couple hours' drive away from Caen - I lived in Caen, it's in northern France - anyways, it took forever and a half to drive up to this really gross beach. It didn't have sand, or anything, just these huge boulders," he held his hands far apart to try and emphasize the hugeness of the boulders. "And the water was always black or green and freezing cold, and the tide pools only ever had green slime. One time there was one with a dead fish."

"Yeah?" Riku said. "Gross."

Sora just shook his head and laughed. "Uh-huh. I just wanted to see a real beach. I always thought I'd like them."

"And do you?"

"Yup. Maybe I'll spend more time here over summer."

"Mm."

"Wanna come with me?" Sora looked back at him and grinned. Riku laughed awkwardly and nodded his head towards the side of the street. "Let's go."

He wondered what went through the mind of someone like Sora. Even on a bad day he was shiny.

When they got to Sora's house (it had gone unspoken that Riku would stay with him until he was feeling better, because Riku Tepes was a lot of not-so-good things, but he had always been and would always be stable-minded, and so good in crises), Sora went right into a room that branched off the main living room. Riku was fairly certain they passed by Belle's living room (which had, strangely, only a single twin bed) before they came into a room with a television and a couch and an adjoining bathroom.

"Ah," Sora dropped his backpack on the floor and sat on the arm of the couch. He seemed to have relapsed into his withdrawn, quiet state as they'd finished walking back home. "I'm gonna go take a shower. Movie collection's over there, or channel flip for ten minutes before you realize mid-afternoon TV sucks," he laughed a little, "But...yeah. Make yourself at home."

The fifteen minutes for which Sora was in the shower, the only sounds Riku heard were the rush of hot water and, once, a thud noise like punching a pillow. But for all he knew, Sora just knocked over a towel stand or something; he forgot to wonder about it.

He turned off the television when Sora walked back into the room, slightly damper.

He sat next to Riku on the couch, crossing his legs and leaning back, staring at the grey-blue walls. He didn't say anything, just worried his lower lip with his teeth and fidgeted, occasionally glancing at Riku nervously. He'd probably started to think about something in the shower, just to distract himself from his own personal, PG-13 version of a No Good, Awful, Very Bad Day.

"I - " he swallowed, and sat up a little straighter before blurting "I think I might be gay." Only he said it much faster than that. It sounded an awful lot more like "Iinkimiteblgay".

Since Riku had met a maybe-gay person about as many times as he'd met an orphan, he calmly replied "Huh?"

"Ah, um," Sora looked vaguely flustered as he plowed his way through slippery words. "I - I don't really know, it's just a hunch or something, but I've been thinking about that lately that like maybe I'm starting to figure it out and it was triggered by stress, only I didn't know who to tell and I figured now was a good enough time because you don't really seem homophobic and if you are I can just blame the confession or whatever on, um...on this being a really bad day, for me, so I'm confused but - but I had to tell somebody - ..." He trailed off, and it was obvious even to social delinquent Riku Tepes that he was expected to interrupt.

He shrugged. "Okay."

Sora stared at him. "Okay?"

"Yeah," Riku leaned back and started to channel-flip again. "Okay." He'd be kind of a hypocrite if he thought Sora was weird or creepy, wouldn't he? He had had that...dream...

Tu m'aimes, Ri-ku?

It was the only dream he'd ever remembered so well, and it hadn't really been all that innocent at all.

"It doesn't seem...weird, to you? Or abnormal, or anything?" Sora asked, his hands shaking a little from anxiousness or excitement - maybe relief, Riku wasn't a mind reader.

"Nah," he said, settling on a shark documentary. "I mean, it's not like you consciously chose to be gay or not-gay."

Sora looked like he deflated again, like that day a week ago when Riku'd seen his injured hand, but this time he didn't seem broken. He seemed relieved, definitely relieved. A little disappointed, like he'd expected more of a reaction (from Riku the ice man? Unlikely.).

"That's it? I mean, I could be wrong, you know, about it..." he licked his lips and shifted on the couch, making it squeak a little.

"Well, you'll figure it out," Riku told him. He paused for a second. What was that expression, that one his French teacher had pounded into his head? "T'en fais pas." He looked at Sora out of the corner of his eye; he was trying not to giggle.

"You've got a terrible accent," he told Riku, settling down onto one of the pillows. "I mean...seriously."

Riku rolled his eyes, but he didn't really feel any dislike. They both watched clips of fish and listened to a gravelly male voiceover for a few more minutes (Riku more than Sora, really, who still seemed to be expecting some sort of opposition to his sudden confession), before Sora spoke again.

"It's funny, though," Sora muttered. Riku looked up at him. "I mean, when you get - get put in that situation, and everything, it's really easy to see why people turn to...to God, you know? 'Cause at that point - " he swallowed. "At that point, when you know that you can't do anything, and nobody can do anything, you have to do something, right? So you...you let God take over and...because I guess it's really hard to think that - that that can happen to somebody and that there's no way of fixing it."

Riku didn't know how Sora had gone from possibly coming out to talking about God, and religion, and death so suddenly. Riku felt so...outside. Separated, from Sora's grief, and the knowledge of what loss felt like, of any connection at all. He was ostracized from that kind of pain, too, he realized. He wished he could follow the little electrical zaps that rivered Sora's mind, and he wished he could know where that mind went when he was being real quiet and looking at a beach he'd never seen before.

But he couldn't, so Riku Tepes just put and arm around his friend and let Sora cry silently.

Next chapter: Skin grafts! Circuses! Axel?

A/N: No joke, I have exactly 8 deviations and 13 messages on my deviant art account right now. I'm totally keeping it that way forever.