Nothing But the First Step to Something Better.

"Bodhisattva recovered, except for one leg,
In the front, which atrophied.
So if you asked him to beg, he'd sit,
And could only offer the one that didn't work,
As if to say 'Here, take this from me - it hurts.'"

- Taylor Mali, Bodhisattva

Sora was kind of an awkward child.

Not socially, certainly; that much was obvious. But when he slept he looked like a bunch of sticks tied together with string. Riku knew this because, at the moment, Sora had somehow fallen asleep basically on his lap. He didn't remember the pillow being put on his lap, nor did he remember Sora putting his head on the pillow, but he figured it must have happened in the three hours they'd been in the television room. Somewhere between the Egypt documentary and the Nile perch documentary, maybe (they were unsurprisingly hard to tell apart).

Sora was an awkward sleeper, in short. He sort of curled in on himself, with one leg tucked under a couch cushion and the other resting on the arm. He made these innocent little "Mnam, mnam," smacking noises unless he was dreaming, when no part of his body moved except for his flickering eyelids. That happened for a few minutes when Riku was being documented at about the introduction of some big fish to some lake in Africa. Other than that, he nuzzled the pillow.

And that was all well and cute, really. But the simple fact of the matter was that in that time Riku had calculated that there were about three layers between his crotch and another boy's face. Just pillow, pants and boxers.

Which was awkward, to say the least. That was maybe, what? Three inches, four if it was a thick cushion?

That was uncomfortable and entirely too...well, he wanted to say gay. Which seemed like some kind of moot point now.

But Sora's face had been red and blotchy from crying until just a little while ago - and Riku knew, he really knew that crying was one of the most tiring things a person could do. Once you've had a good sob you're spent; and if you can you should take an aspirin and go to bed. Sora just did the next best thing. So Riku didn't want to wake him up yet. Maybe in a few minutes.

This was how Riku Tepes did compassionate.

Luckily, Sora was just waking up, anyways. He made one final smacking noise with his mouth, sitting up and digging at his eye with a finger.

With one eye still closed, he looked at Riku and smiled. "I fell asleep?"

Riku nodded.

"Uhn," he muttered, laying his head back down on Riku's lap. Riku had turned off the television a few minutes ago; he wasn't sure entirely why. He did things like that, sometimes. He'd just been staring at his reflection in the shiny, shiny glass and thinking about the warm weight on his legs. Sora was kind of sad, when he was asleep.

Of course, that didn't make it okay for him to consciously put his head back on Riku's crotch. That was not acceptable behavior regardless of how much emotional trauma he'd suffered. It just wasn't.

But he looked like sleepy dog, and Riku kind of liked dogs. His eyes were half open; he stared at the black TV screen for a few lazy minutes before sitting up again finally, his hair all spiked to one side because he'd fallen asleep with it wet.

"Aw man," he laughed, getting off the couch. And there was that same feeling of rapid cooling in Riku, when a heat source is taken away. It wasn't so bad, it just felt funny.

Sora went up to the TV, staring at his reflection and poking at his hair, which looked like it'd been swept to one side. "I look like Roxas now!"

"Your brother?" Riku asked, leaning back on the couch and running a hand through his own hair.

"Yeah," Sora said, coming back to the couch and sitting down with a squeaky sort of flop. "Y'know how my hair just sorta sticks up everywhere?"

"Nn."

"Well, Roxas' is just like..." he stared up at his own hair for a second, a few bits of which were hanging down in front of his face. "It's like...whoosh." He made a sideways motion across his head with his hand, with maybe a little swirling. "He looks kinda like a rooster from a fancy hair salon."

"Oh. Weird," Riku said, because he didn't really know what to say, but it seemed like the right reaction. Sora smiled at him, which further confirmed his suspicions, so Riku took a shot in the dark at what seemed like the right thing to say again. "I have two brothers, but they both have pretty normal hair."

"So you mean it's not like all glowy-angel-white?"

Riku looked at Sora directly, mildly confused. "What?"

"Like yours." He pointed to Riku's head.

Riku made a sort of face to himself, of almost-disbelief. Glowy-angel-white? Had Sora called his hair glowy-angel-white? Riku didn't really think about his hair often - he wasn't a girl - but when he did he just thought of it as white. Maybe shiny, but not noticeably shiny. It was a genetic oddity in their family. His brothers, his father, his grandfather, and all the men in his family had premature white hair; maybe it was a Y-chromosome thing.

Why was he thinking about hair, again?

"Um, glowy-angel-white?" he asked Sora, who just nodded and grinned at him.

This struck Riku as another "Riku-Tepes-and-his-sexy-hips" incident, which was to say, making fun of his appearance to garner a reaction.

Which was...good, right? Because Sora was acting like himself again? As far as Riku could tell, anyway. Which wasn't...very far at all, really.

He'd only known Sora for about a month. That wasn't very long at all. It wasn't long enough.

Well, that made it sound like Riku wanted to get to know him well enough to make the judgment call and, really, he still wasn't sure about that. Because it was obvious you didn't have much of a friendship with someone, when you periodically lapsed into silence with each other. When the only thing you thought about around them was what to say next - little conversation-starters for conversations that might last ten seconds. Just grasping at anything to break up the silence.

Sora just shrugged. "Yeah, I guess so," he said. "Definitely never seemed normal gray to me."

"Hn," Riku grunted, effectively ending that thread of dialogue. Riku's grunts, like his stares, tended to finish things rather than start them.

Not that that stopped Sora, who was apparently a mouth on legs.

"Anyways," he started. Riku turned on the television.

He noticed that was the only way with some people. Some people got that you weren't going to talk to them when you put in your earphones, some when you noticeably turned up the volume in the earphones, some when you only replied in smiles and nods. Some needed outright interrupting. And Riku Tepes was never the type to beat around the bush.

They were still playing the documentary about Nile perch. And Riku was pretty damn sure that there wasn't anyone in the world who wanted to know that much about fish. But he'd rather learn about the commercial value of big-game fish in poor African communities than he would to hear -

Sora laid back down on the pillow and closed his eyes.

Riku made a sort of protesting noise, to which he responded, "Y'know how when you're still tired, your eyes kind of sting, even when you close them?"

"Yeah."

Neither of them said anything for another little while, because documentaries make good background noise for thinking. Riku figured Sora had a lot of thinking to do. Or sleeping. He couldn't tell which one the kid was doing.

Sora sat up, after a little while, leaning on his elbows and with his head not so horribly close to Riku's crotch.

"Hey," he said, scooting back until he was leaning against the back of the couch. "There's this painter," he said, "Norman Rockwell. You know who Norman Rockwell was?"

Riku shrugged. Norman Rockwell was one of those names that kind of sounded familiar, but was just generic enough to be mistaken for practically anything else.

"No."

"Well," Sora said, watching the television screen. "He was this guy who painted all these pictures, like for the war bonds posters and stuff for World War II, and they were all of like normal everyday life. You know, a guy with a wife and two point four kids and a dog and stuff, who goes to work every day and has a home-cooked meal or whatever - I mean, not like that, really, but I'm bad at describing things. But you know what I mean?"

Riku licked his lips and settled further into the couch. "Yeah, I guess." He had a pretty good idea of where all this was going, but from where he was it didn't look like a good idea. Sora was like a ferret who kept on almost backing out of a hole and then turning around at the last minute and burying himself deeper. Did ferrets dig holes? He didn't know.

Sora smiled. "I think - I mean, that's obviously not going to happen, right? For me, I mean. Not exactly. But it's not like I don't have anything, right? What I have is just...just less built-up, right? Like I have all the building blocks. For Norman Rockwell."

"Yeah?" Riku questioned, asking him to continue obligatorily.

"Yeah. I've still got my brother, and I've got Belle, and she's like my big sister, or maybe a little older. And I bet I could beat a best friend outta you. And there's the cat, and - I, I think it can still be just like Norman Rockwell. It'll just take...work." He laughed a little and closed his eyes again, but now there were four layers between Riku's crotch and another boy's face.

One of them was Sora's arm, which really wasn't much better, but it was something and that helped.

He heard a sort of loud, angry noise outside, like a giant metal trashcan on somebody's lawn had fallen and was rolling down the driveway. Thunder, probably.

Riku hoped it didn't start raining. He may have lived on the dry side of the island, which meant dry heat most of the year, but all that meant was that when it rained, it poured. And not dramatic-funeral-depressing-realization-background-scenery pouring, it rained like the clouds wanted to kill somebody. Like they were fed up with all the people. Sometimes Riku expected to see an ark out on the ocean when it was raining, an ark sailing away from all the hopeless humanity again and leaving Destiny Island to drown. Again.

But anyways, the sound of the thunder had evidently covered up the sound of Belle coming home. There were the usual door opening and closing sounds, the metallic clink of keys being put on a table and the sliding of shoes being discarded. Riku didn't move. This was bound to be awkward.

There was a quiet knock on the door, like knuckles. Sort of gentle and careful, like she didn't want to interrupt anything.

"Hello?" she called. She really did have a nice voice. It sounded like she was singing even when she was just talking.

"Hey, Belle," Sora called back surprisingly quickly. For a kid that looked like he'd been almost asleep, he replied suspiciously quickly. Riku stared down at him and narrowed his eyes. Sora just sat up and rubbed his hand over his face obliviously and looked at the door. "What is it?"

"Can I open the door?" she asked.

Which seemed like a weird thing to say, especially from a guardian to a teenager. She must have known Riku was in there, since his shoes were by the door and his backpack was next to Sora's (though, wait, were their backpacks in here or were they in the hall?). Why would it not be okay for her to open the door? What did she think they were doing, smoking pot?

"Yeah, sure, come in," Sora said, but Belle just opened the door a crack and peeked her head in. She was wearing another dress, a blue one with a white shirt underneath it and a blue ribbon loosely tying her hair together. She really was a different kind of pretty than the kind of pretty Riku usually saw. He saw high school girls trying to cover up all their human bits with mascara or lipstick or tight clothes, or do the opposite and try to convince themselves they didn't care by wearing giant shirts and messy ponytails. Guys did similar things. Even if it wasn't as obvious, it was just as sad. Riku hated that about people. How sad they were when they didn't even know it.

Belle just sort of was. She didn't hide her nice face or her body, but she didn't flaunt them. It was like the difference between a factory-whitened, photoshopped supermodel "sexy scowl" and a spontaneous grin scrubbed clean and human.

And now that he thought about it, Sora was kind of like that too. Sora wasn't pretty. He just was.

"Oh, I don't need to come in," she smiled at them. "But Sora, can I talk to you outside? It'll just be a minute, I wanna get back to work so I can finish up a project."

"Oh," Sora stood up off the couch, "Yeah, sure." He walked out into the hall.

Before closing the door, Belle smiled at Riku. Her eyes crinkled a little around the edges. "Don't worry, I promise I won't steal him for long. You guys are watching a movie?"

Riku licked his lips. He was sitting down, sprawled across the couch with a remote in his hand while the owner of the house was standing in work clothes talking to him. It was awkward being more comfortable in a person's house than they were. He felt like he should stand up and start cleaning up after himself or something.

"Uh, yeah."

"And you're sleeping over, aren't you?" At that, Riku found his eyes caught by Sora's, standing just behind his foster mother with his hands in his pockets. He didn't look desperate, he didn't mouth "please." He just looked at Riku impassively, like it was a test. But maybe it was just the way he was looking at Riku that made him nod. "Yeah, I guess so. But I have to call my mom."

"Alright, you can use the phone as soon as we're done, okay?"

Riku nodded again, and Belle closed the door, turning to face her foster son.

"Sora," she began, looking at him. She was still a little taller than him, but that could have been the heels. He wasn't a very tall kid. "You know I love you, right?"

Oh, Sora thought. Oh. The conversation with Roxas had started the same way.

"Sor, you know I love you, right? You're my older brother...it's just..."

"...okay," Sora said quietly. He didn't know what the bad news was, but he knew it was there now. Maybe she couldn't support a child. Maybe she didn't want to any more.

"Oh no, sweetie!" Belle laughed. "You look like you think I'm going to kick you out! It's nothing like that!"

Belle was so good at that. Telling what he was thinking.

"Oh," Sora took a deep breath. He'd felt that same crushing weight he felt sometimes. His hand stopped shaking. "So what is it?"

She scowled. "Well, it's not really good news, I guess. But it's nothing horrible."

"So?" Sora whined. "Just tell me."

"Well," Belle sighed. "You know child services still checks in sometimes, to see how you're getting on?"

"Yeah," he said.

"Well, Sora...they think - and really, I've been thinking this myself for a while - about your hand..."

Sora looked at his hand. He'd just changed the bandage late last night. It wasn't hurting too badly.

"You want me to get the skin graft or whatever, so it'll heal right instead of getting all scarred?"

Belle nodded, and sighed when she saw the way he was looking at her. "Sora," she said, "I know you don't like talking about it. I know that, but that doesn't change the fact that you can't keep going like this. It's either surgery now, or lots of court-mandated therapy and then surgery later."

Sora stared at her for a few long seconds, and she just stared back like she was daring him to blink.

It wasn't that he didn't know that. But he'd gotten used to it. Gotten used to only using his left hand to eat meals, and gotten used to changing the bandage everyday. Gotten used to hiding that hand around acquaintances so they didn't feel awkward. Used to using it to garner sympathy from the guy on the other side of the door. And he didn't want to go back to a hospital, not ever.

Belle smiled, after a while, and put a hand on his shoulder, massaging him with her thumb and making comforting noises.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay, we'll - talk about it - just...not now, okay? I mean, Riku's here, and it's Friday and - " he swallowed. "It's just been a - a bad...day." He looked right into her eyes, to see if maybe she'd make the connection.

Belle opened her mouth, but she couldn't seem to talk for a long moment. "Yes - oh, yes, of course. Sora, I - "

"Yeah, Belle," he muttered."It's okay, don't worry."

She sighed through her nose, squeezing his shoulder. "I know it's hard, sweetie. Having to make all these big changes, one after another without having any time in between to adjust. It sucks, okay? I get that, and I'm sympathetic towards - "

"Okay!" Sora snapped, then pinched his lips together with his eyes wide. "S- sorry. But, I never said I wouldn't...I'm gonna do it, okay?"

Belle made an exasperated noise, rubbing her eyes with her hands. Outside, he could hear rain pattering on the roof and the ground; a car passed by with a whoosh and, somewhere far away, an ambulance screamed. But Belle just tapped her foot, trying to figure out the best way to say what she wanted to say. Sora wondered if it was a natural maternal instinct, because his mother had done the same thing whenever she was trying to have a serious discussion with him. Especially when he wasn't listening.

Belle shook her head. "I know," she whispered, pinching the bridge of her nose. "And I know you mean it and you think you'll do it, but that's because it still seems far away." Sora wanted to interrupt, wanted to tell her he wouldn't, he wouldn't change his mind, that he realized -

"What about when you're in the hospital, getting wheeled into an operating room?"

Sora looked at his socks, then the carpet, then the door behind his foster mother.

And then he wakes up, and nobody's there. The room is empty and it smells like meatloaf and soap. Something is beeping. What a funny beeping noise. The room is empty. He knows there's something he's not remembering, but the room is empty and nobody's telling him what to do, and he feels sick. He feels like he's going to throw up. Why is the room empty?

He didn't even want to think about that. Everything seemed jaunty and weird and moving too fast.

And she just snorted and took a step back, crossing her arms. "Sora," she said quietly, "Like it or not, you're still a minor, and it's my job to take care of you."

...oh.

"And I want you to know that I have no qualms - look at me," she interrupted herself harshly, grabbing his chin and staring him right in the eyes. "Look at me, Sora."

Look at you? Yes. Look at you, because nobody's paying you to say these things. You're not a part of a system that sees me as just another nuisance.

"I will have no problem overriding your decision if you back off, you got that?"

Oh God, thank you.

"Yeah - yeah, okay, but can we...just, talk about it tomorrow? Please?" he stared at her imploringly. "I promise we'll talk tomorrow." He twisted his good hand in his shirt, feeling up and down at the same time.

"Yeah...yes. I'll let you go back to your friend now."

Sora smiled at her, and they hugged, and she kissed him on top of the head and it was okay.

This time, though, Riku hadn't heard a word of what they'd said except for the "Look at me" bit, and that could mean anything. So when Sora opened the door and walked back in, sitting cross-legged on the couch, he didn't say anything. Sora looked hyper-emotional again, and that made him nervous. Riku was bad with emotional, really bad. He tended to make things worse.

"Oh!" Belle opened the door again, leaning inwards to catch their attention. "One more thing. Sora, can you turn to a news channel? Somebody told me that they've issued a - yup," she said when Riku flicked the channel away from public television. Every other channel was one of those "emergency news interruptions," claiming a flood warning and that people should be staying indoors.

"I'll be okay," Belle explained, "My office is a ten-minute walk away, so I'll just take an umbrella. But I don't want you boys doing anything dangerous, so don't go down to the basement and be careful around electronics."

Sora grabbed the blanket draped over the back of a nearby chair and wrapped it around himself. "Yeah, 'kay."

Belle snorted and raised her eyebrows. "That means no computer. Got it?"

"Uh huh," Sora said.

"And you'll have to feed yourselves."

"Yeah, okay," Sora grumbled, wiggling the fingers of his right hand and staring at the bandage absently. But the funny thing to Riku was, he kept staring at it. He turned his hand around to look at his palm, held it up to the light. The cloth rustled a little.

Belle closed the door.

Riku Tepes wasn't really big on starting conversations. Mostly because he often have an opportunity; after all, most people who talked to him started them themselves. And finished them the same way. And partly because when he was sitting quietly with a person, he didn't see why it couldn't just stay that way. He didn't want to start conversations. If somebody wanted to talk that badly, they could initiate it.

The funny thing was, though, that he was curious about what had happened to Sora to make him look the way he looked. He looked far away again, like he had just before switching the subject a few hours ago. Running along little Sora lines of thought that took him places Riku didn't get.

Because he felt awful about it, really, he did, but Sora was interesting because he was traumatized. He knew what he was talking about, he wasn't just mimicking reactions he saw on TV, he got it. Something about Sora with the funny-shaped hair was authentic in a way that seemed just broken enough to be an actual human. And Riku'd just...never encountered that in a person, before.

The point was, he didn't know what to say to a person he didn't want to piss off. It was a depressing realization, that that stupid kid from a couple weeks had been right, that he couldn't just turn on social-butterfly syndrome when he needed to. That people actually learned these things.

And Sora was stupid then, wasn't he? At least to Riku. He hadn't been the little blue train of sadness, then, he'd just been the new kid at school who had yet to learn that Riku Tepes didn't like fake people and could find more problems with them than Holden Caulfield on a bad day. So to Riku, Sora had just been annoying and hideously normal. And uninteresting, except for a few of the things he'd said.

Riku wondered if it made him shallow, to like a kid because he was in a bad circumstance. Because angst made him worth studying. Like Riku couldn't be satisfied if Sora was just a normal, insightful kid with two parents and a brother and a dog, because if he'd had those things he wouldn't have counted?

And not for the first time, Riku started to feel a little disgusted with himself.

But Sora just kept staring at his hand and wiggling the fingers and frowning, and Riku changed the channel to one of those dramatic teenager shows. He didn't like those. People always got to say exactly what they wanted to say exactly the way they wanted to say it. And it seemed like every single thing they wanted to say fit their words exactly; never struggling and never - he was over thinking things. But it just bugged him. How there was no sincerity.

Because saying what you wanted to say to a person, and having them understand you perfectly; it was like finding a tree that was ten meters tall, down to the millimeter. Sure, they happened in real life, sometimes, but it was always a fluke. Nobody was sitting down and writing down how tall a tree would get. Even God didn't have the time.

There were a million imperfect trees and a million misunderstood sentences for every ten meter tall tree, Riku figured, which was why he didn't want to ask Sora what was wrong. Because he didn't know how to say it without sounding too interested, or disinterested or - or whatever. He wanted to think before he leapt, or something, he just - . He wasn't good with these things.

"Uh," he said after a while. Credits were scrolling down the television. "Hey, are you..." he thought about ending the sentence with "hungry."

Sora shook his head, more as a way of getting Riku to stop talking than as an answer to his almost-question. "You ever feel like some part of you is just way more worn out than the rest? Like getting carpal tunnel in one hand or something? And you just wanna...replace it. You know, to give your hand a break."

He sighed. "Don't look at me like that." Riku was looking at him the way he might look at a kid sniffing sharpies, which was to say, confused and vaguely disturbed. "I mean, don't you just want to - never mind."

He fell into quiet for a few minutes, accompanied by the rapid and angry pungpungpungpungpung outside. It sounded like the sky was dropping buckets full of black marbles on the ground (you had to say they were black marbles, or at least grey marbles, because it was a scared and furious rain, and it was the kind that wouldn't end in a rainbow; it would end with a grey sky that turned into night and didn't even give the sun a chance).

And then, after taking a breath, "I have to get my hand fixed. R- really soon. So..." He inhaled through his nose, deeply, flexing his fingers again. "I dunno," he said. "I probably won't be in school for, like, most of next week. I dunno."

He sneezed, and Riku discovered something interesting: Sora sneezed fairy sneezes. Four or five in a row, and all high pitched and in rapid succession. "Atsu! Atsu! Atsu! At-choo!" It was hilarious.

Riku giggled, just a little bit, but he stifled it. Because what he'd said just before that was real, even if it wasn't ten meters tall.

"Oh," he said, "You mean you have to be in the hospital?"

Sora nodded. "Uh-huh." He licked his lips, and turned to look at Riku. Riku had turned, resting his hand on his chin, which was resting on the couch's arm, and was staring out the window at bucketfuls of black marbles. He didn't have anything to say. He guessed that this was probably upsetting for Sora, but that didn't mean Riku could suddenly discover some empathetic, helpful part of himself buried deep in his soul, or some shit like that; he still had nothing to say and Sora had almost called him his almost-best-friend, and what was he supposed to do about that? He'd made it pretty clear he wasn't interested in making friends.

Riku was almost done closing the door on society, and Sora was one of those giant, annoying rubber doorstops. The kind that were actually made to stop up doors, instead of those little triangular pieces of wood which worked just fine. Riku didn't like those; they were so obnoxious. He didn't - well, anyways.

The point was that Riku wasn't looking at Sora, who was glaring at him with red eyes and a shivery jaw. "Look - " he cut himself off, pursing his lips and pulling his knees up, hugging his ankles.

"I'm not asking you to marry me or anything, man," he said, and Riku turned to look at him a little. "I'm just saying that - " he sighed, and Riku looked at him fully. He didn't know it, because he couldn't see himself, but he'd completely turned off his glare. He looked calm. He didn't know that Sora took comfort in that, and he didn't know that Sora needed Riku, the ground, because real life wasn't a perfect tree. "I'm just saying that I'm gonna need a little help, okay? Quit acting like you're the one who needs a whole new hand."

Riku froze, his mouth half open and his brain working furiously. And furiously was right, he was angry about - something, at himself, or at Sora or the situation. Why was Sora, smiles-sunshine-choo-choo-train-best-friend Sora accusing him of self-involvement?! None of this was his fault -

And it wasn't Sora's fault, either. Sora had had his hand burned off in a fire that orphaned him, which was about as traumatic as it got. Sora had had his entire life displaced. Sora had been separated from the only other living member of his immediate family, and he kept going and looking for silver linings in clouds that were spitting lightning and trying to drown islands. And Riku was complaining? God, he was such a dick, excuse his language.

What killed him was that even right after he'd realized it, he knew he didn't have any real inclination to fix it. He wasn't going to slide over the couch and hug the kid, and he wasn't even going to take his hand. A little part of him wanted to, but too many factors worked against the inclination. For one thing, he didn't even hug his family. So if he'd told himself to do it, it would have been like trying to get up before ten on a Sunday morning. I'll get up in five seconds...four...three..two...one...and then you didn't move, anyways. And for another thing, Sora had told him - not even six hours ago - that he might be gay.

And that was fine, really, of course it was, it was just...did he really want to hug a gay boy? Really? Wouldn't that be like hugging a girl, only more one-sided? Not that Riku hugged girls, either.

But Riku was looking at Sora's eyes, his stupid, stupid sky-colored eyes that were the only part of the dry half of the island that was sky-colored right now because the real sky was raining black marbles, but Sora's eyes were sky-colored even when they were wet and fuck, excuse is fucking language, Riku didn't like meeting peoples' eyes. Because it meant they were looking back at you, and even though Riku knew eyes weren't the window to anyone's stupid soul, they still felt so much more open than any other part of the body.

Sora choked a little, widening those eyes and tripping over his words. "I - I'm sorry, Riku, I didn't mean it, seriously - I would never say something like that - it's just that so much stuff happened today, and - " his voice cracked, and he coughed.

"No," Riku said, sort of smiling at him. "No, it's fine." He cursed himself. That was not a perfect tree sentence. Saying something like "no, it's fine," made it seem like Riku was all in the right, and Sora was all in the wrong, and Riku was the bigger person for forgiving him, which wasn't right at all. Sora was right. Riku had screwed up, and he'd screwed up again, but he'd been silent for too long now and he couldn't correct himself. "I mean," he said, even though the conversation had died again, "I was way out of line. It's just...uh...my default, okay?" It wasn't perfect, but it worked. Sora was smiling.

"Haha," he grinned, sticking his tongue out. "Riku, the epic fail socialite."

"Psh," Riku snorted, throwing the remote at Sora's head and missing by half a meter. "Sora, the epic fail..." he paused. "Shit. The epic fail non-bedhead-haver." Oops.

Normalcy clicked back into place with a metaphysical thunk, like the over-sized gear of a clock tower, when Sora laughed a snorting, gross, teenage-boy laugh. "It's not bedhead, it's...Roxas-head!"

"Well, Sora, I hate to break it to you..." Riku almost-grinned, because he was a teenager and pointless, stupid banter came naturally to people his age.

"Yeah, says mister snowy angel white hair!" Sora cackled and tossed a pillow at Riku's head, aiming impressively badly.

And the world was a ten-meter-tall tree.

For some reason, all the public transport Riku ended up on smelled like musk. Not like nature-y, grassy forest musk, but the kind of musk that happened when you mixed old middle-class lady with testosterone-pumped city teenager and sweaty businessman. He didn't know if it was just some sort of conspiracy against him, or something, but every bus he got on was like that.

Maybe all buses smelled that way, all the time. But he figured that maybe the guy that cleaned the buses, whoever he was, must have at least one bus, every day - probably the last one - that he just didn't clean. He probably thought to himself, Well, who'll even notice? It'll be dirty again this time tomorrow anyway, and so just went home ten minutes early. Riku wouldn't blame the guy, if it wasn't for the fact that he always ended up on those buses.

He really hoped not all buses smelled the way this one smelled; it smelled like despair. That's what it was. He was sitting in the very back, resting his head against the cold glass window, his backpack on the seat next to him. The only other people on the bus were a couple, sitting down the two or three stairs that led from the back of the bus to the rest of it, so Riku had a perfect view of the backs of their heads as they kissed obnoxiously. Like they were trying to suck each other's faces out, or something.

He couldn't help but think that they must have known he was there, and were just showing off for some strange reason.

Riku just sneered, sticking his tongue out and making a face at the clueless couple before rolling his eyes and resting the back of his head on the back window again, tilting his head to the side. The window was gross and smeared with hand prints; the world outside wasn't much better. The sun was just about setting, though it was hard to tell. It had only stopped raining that morning. The bus rattled as it hauled itself to a pause at a stop sign, causing his head to bump against the stupid back window and the empty, now-useless handholds hanging from the ceiling to sway from side to side, squeaking.

The guy of the couple had had those stupid white earphones in his ears - the ones that came with the music player for free - but one of them fell out. He detached himself from his girlfriend, swearing and fumbling for the lost bud. She made a pouty face, rolled her eyes and adjusted herself on the seat.

He hoped they weren't going where he was going; it was hard enough for him to do what he was doing without the most shallow romance in the world being paraded in front of him.

He just sighed and rubbed at one of his eyes, pulling his backpack closer to himself and looking at his shoes on the grooved rubber floor for the next few minutes before, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the big white building.

He paused for a second, with his finger on the yellow stop button, before just sighing and pressing. There was a vague buzzing sound, and a few seconds later the bus rolled to a stop and Riku picked up his backpack, slinging it over one shoulder. All his binders were bottom-heavy, so it resulted in the top half of his bag being stretched out and the bottom having awkward lumps; he fished his mp3 out of one of the smaller pockets and walked right past the exhibitionist couple without looking at them.

He wasn't so comfortable with the non-residential part of Destiny Island. The downtown, only it wasn't. It was a nice place, it had an ice skating rink, and a few nice restaurants, and a hospital. Mostly a hospital.

The glass doors were the kind that needed one strong push before they went and opened themselves; it was disconcerting. And the hallway of the hospital, as well as the waiting room it led to, didn't smell how he expected a hospital to smell. He would have expected it to be all clean and white, and smell like disinfectant and blood or something; it didn't. It smelled like carpet, and something uniquely its own: sort of pungent, bitter and offensive, like a new car, only worse. He almost sneezed, but he felt like he shouldn't.

There were a good ten or fifteen people in the waiting room already; some of them reading the provided dog-eared magazines, some of them trying to keep their kids quiet. One or two - the scariest ones, to Riku - just gripped the armrests or the plastic and metal generic chairs, staring at the ground and not moving an awful lot.

A couple of people looked up when he walked in, an unchaperoned teenager being probably being at least vaguely unusual, but Belle was in the corner and she stood up right away.

Today she was in one of those pretty yellow sundresses, with her hair plaited back loosely and her big brown eyes rimmed with dark rings.

"Riku," she smiled, very human, wringing her hands together. "Hey, I didn't know if you'd show up today, I thought you might have a lot of homework, I know Sora complains about it all the time," she laughed.

Riku shook his head. "No," he said, "Today was a short day, so I finished most of my homework."

"Oh!" she said, looking surprised. "Well, that's good that it was a short day, maybe Sora didn't miss much if you only had half of your classes."

Riku paused and licked his lips. "Yeah," he said, even though she wasn't right. On half days you met with all of your teachers, just for half as long, so Sora had really just missed another whole day of school, not that it mattered. Besides, you didn't correct other peoples' parents about stuff like that. It was dumb. There was no point.

"Well, anyways - " her phone started to ring, and she blinked blankly for a moment before seeming to realize it. "Oh," she muttered, going back to her chair and picking up her purse, rifling through it with little clicking sounds of object on object. "Aw, crap," she grumbled, which was off-putting. You didn't expect a pretty woman in a yellow sundress to say things like "Aw, crap," but apparently some of them did.

She stared at her cell for a second, pursing her lips and looking unhappy. She sighed through her nose after a moment, looking at Riku. "I'm so sorry," she said sincerely, "I'll be right back, can you wait a minute?"

"Yeah, sure."

Belle went out to the hall, holding the phone up to her ear. Riku sat down in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs, dropping his backpack next to the chair. He wasn't sure, really, why he was there. Maybe because he hadn't really had a choice, by normal social standards. Before he left Sora's house on Saturday Belle had given him the address of the hospital, and even told him about the easy bus route, and asked if he would be coming. What was he supposed to say, "No, I hate hospitals and I'm still kind of eh about your foster son"? This was why Riku Tepes hated social obligations.

He grunted and perched his chin on his fist, looking at all the people in the hospital chairs.

Riku Tepes was a kind of unintentionally morbid person. Often, without meaning to, his mind would just go places it wasn't normal to go. One time, for a project, he was cutting a bunch of paper shapes out of paper with an exacto knife and all he could think about was what if he slipped, or dropped it, or forgot where it was - and what would happen if it was sliding between his ribs. Not deadly, or anything. Just what would happen, if something drastic were to finally make itself reality. Who would call an ambulance for him, and how it actually felt, being stabbed. If metal could feel sharp when it was inside you, or something. It wasn't a morbid thing, though, was the funny thing. It was just...curiosity. He knew what it felt like to bleed, and he didn't have a death wish.

He leaned back in the chair, staring up at the harsh ceiling-tile fluorescent lights, wondering what would happen if he went blind. Sometimes he spent whole days not looking at the sun; you learned to, living on the dry side of the island. The sun happened an awful lot, and too many things were reflective. But now he was staring right up at the lights, even though it hurt his eyes and he could feel those little purple-black-green sun spots forming on his eyes.

He looked down again, digging the corners of his palms in his eyes.

"Y'know how when you're still tired, your eyes kind of sting, even when you close them?"

He sighed.

Yeah.

Belle came back in a few minutes, looking upset and pacing while still walking forward, if that even made any sense, which it didn't to Riku. Worrying her lower lip with her teeth, she sat down in the chair next to him, still staring at her phone. Glaring at it, more like.

"Ugh," she said, which was another funny sound to hear from that voice. "I can't believe this, of all the times - !" She turned to Riku, frowning and fisting, then unfisting her hands. "I have to go in to work. Right now, apparently; they made that much clear."

She turned her head to the side, making a little distressed noise. "I can't believe this," she said again. "Riku - " she looked at him full on. "I know this is a lot to ask, but I just don't think I can stay until he wakes up, and..." she sighed, again. "I wouldn't feel comfortable if he had to wake up all alone - "

What was it with this stupid family and guilting him into shit?

Riku clipped the visitor "badge" to the flap of his backpack. It wasn't a badge at all, and he didn't know why the nurse manning the front desk had insisted on calling it that. It was a badly laminated ID tag, but it just said VISITOR in all capital letters in a faded red color, and in a font Riku was pretty sure he recognized.

Sora was still asleep, when he got to the kid's room. Riku stood in the doorway for a minute or two, awkwardly, wondering if it was okay for him to go all the way inside and sit down when Sora might not even be expecting him.

But what the hell, he'd gone to all the fucking trouble of filling out a visitor log and having Belle explain why he was allowed inside (Sora, apparently, had "special circumstances," not having a real family and all), and he did have a badly laminated badge.

The room was pretty expected, for a hospital room. The walls were white-painted concrete, and the tiles were speckled grey. The chairs were a little better than the ones in the waiting room, which were almost the same kind as in Riku's school. There were two of them, on the opposite side of the bed from a big tan beeping machine, and they were padded. A little. He sat down in one of them, and put his backpack down in the other one.

Sora looked creepy. Not that he was creepy, like Riku would have thought he was a shady person in alley way, or something. But like something creepy had tried to eat him from the inside out. He was pale, jaundiced, and his hair was a little limper than usual and he wasn't sleeping like he had a few days ago, on Riku's lap (which Riku still maintained was one of the most painfully awkward moments of his short life). He was totally still, and straight as a board, with his right hand heavily bandaged and flung out as far as it could go away from his body.

He was still making little "Mnam, mnam," smacking noises, but they were meek and uncomfortable.

Boy, hospitals sure were depressing.

He prepared himself for a good, long wait. Sora looked like Riku imagined Sleeping Beauty looked most of the time: perpetually tired, even after being asleep for a hundred years, and having a nightmare where he was strapped down.

His little boy chest was covered halfway with generic hospital blanket, but Riku could see it push up-down, up-...-down, slowly, wondering at how solid he looked.

A tiny shadow caught his eye, and he looked up at another one of those ceiling-tile fluorescent lights.

There was a little brown moth, flickering around it frantically like it was lost. It was just a funny dun blur, darting from point to point in the empty space in the room. Riku was surprised to see something like a moth in a hospital; he'd thought they were immaculately clean and sterile places. But, he supposed, even hospitals had to have windows, and windows always got left open by some moron. That was another one of those stupid things that happened; people opening up windows for no reason and then not even closing them.

There was a window in this room, but it was closed. Riku saw, though, that is was almost completely dark out; he'd already called and told his mom that he'd be home late. He'd spat some crap about going to a friend's house, and she'd been so glad he was getting social interaction she hadn't questioned it.

The moth was trying to land somewhere, but it kept changing its mind. He wondered how something as small as a moth even chose where and where wasn't a good place to land; it was touching down on the wall or the floor or the bed and then taking off not a second later. The word flighty didn't so much come to mind, mostly because the word twitchy was already flitting in front of your eyes no matter where you looked.

On some silly impulse, Riku stood up to follow it, casually, around the room. It went to one side of the bed, so did he. He followed it with his eyes, curious and confused, because he knew moths couldn't think, but he still thought it was kind of endearing.

At one point, it brushed over first the back of his hand, then seemed to contemplate landing on the bridge of his nose. It was scared off, though, when Riku laughed and the sensation; people weren't exaggerating, for once, when they talked about the softness of butterfly wings. He'd always liked moths better, anyways, even if they were just little and brown in a hospital room.

It felt like nothing, like somebody had taken all the nothing in the world and condensed it into a little bug-shaped thing and tickled his nose with it.

Eventually, it landed right next to the leg of Riku's chair, so he just sat back down and sighed.

He kept on avoiding stepping on it, really consciously; every time he turned to get a book from his backpack he carefully moved his foot around it. It was completely still, now, with only the occasional little flutter of wings to prove it was still alive. He didn't know why he was doing it. But some part of him really didn't want the little thing to get crushed by his foot.

He read ahead a bit on the book they were reading for English, got bored, got hungry. Not half an hour into waiting for Sora to wake up, and he wanted to leave to get something from the vending machine he'd seen on this floor. He debated it for a few minutes, looking at Sora in the bed - who didn't look likely to wake up any time soon, anyways - and estimating how long it would take for him to go there and back.

And eventually, of course, he drew out a crumpled dollar bill from his pocket and stood up, gripping the arms of his seat.

When he left the room, though, he was very careful to avoid stepping on the moth, which was still resting next to the metal leg of the plastic chair. He returned in a few minutes.

"There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed."

- W. Somerset Maugham, 'Of Human Bondage', 1915
English dramatist & novelist (1874 - 1965)

When Sora started to feel conscious again, when the world started to settle itself around him like a concrete blanket, he kept his eyes closed. This hospital smelled different, more like bitter old paper or something. The other one had smelled like...well, he didn't remember, but sometimes he went places that smelled like it and it made him feel sticky inside. He didn't like smell memory all that much.

But the point was, he didn't open his eyes. Because once he opened his eyes, he was awake, boom, awake-awake-awake, and if he was alone when he woke up he didn't know if he could handle it. He couldn't handle being alone again, in a hospital that smelled funny at night, not knowing if anybody was going to come. He didn't want the first person he saw when he woke up to be a nurse, he just couldn't - he just can't - .

But he remembered that, this time, there was somebody - maybe two people, even - who knew he was there, who weren't dead and weren't going to be taken away, that he wasn't alone, that Belle had promised to be there...so it was okay. It was okay, because he hadn't opened his eyes yet, and he could almost hear somebody else in the room, breathing, waiting for him. He could open his eyes.

He did, sitting up a little and yawning and smiling.

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 scooted back to lean all the way up against the wall his bed was touching and staring at the door.

He paused. He felt like something had just happened. Like maybe he'd made a realization. Or maybe somebody had reached inside his chest, just reached right in there and took out his heart, and maybe his stomach and his throat too, and that someone had lit fires behind his eyes. And that the fires were chasing the water out the front.

He started to cry, very quietly, pulling his legs up to his chest and burying his face between his knees. And oh, he was such a sad little boy, in a dark room on a Tuesday night trying to hold himself together when he knew that what held people together was sticky stuff, like kisses and hugs and being there when you woke up. His poor body in nothing but a hospital gown, which shook.

He was almost asleep a few minutes later, though. Crying was one of the most exhausting things a person could do.

And just a minute after that, Riku came back with a bag of cheese crackers, which were the only non-chip-or-candy-bar option. It was almost dinner time, and even if he'd had a late lunch, he was still a teenager. He liked food.

To him, Sora had only rolled over a little in his sleep. He didn't know about his impressively awful timing, he didn't hear Sora crack.

But when he went to go sit back down in the chair again, he impulsively looked for the moth, just to see - out of curiosity - if if was still there, settling and twitching and settling again, next to the leg of the chair. He almost smiled when he saw the little brown blur on the floor.

The moth was dead. It was lying on its back, the lower half of its body horribly mangled and part of one of its wings crushed. He must have smushed it when he stood up before, with the chair leg, when he so carefully stood up to walk around it.

Sitting on the chair now, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he just kept staring at its tiny dead body. How strange. It had been alive until just a second ago, did things really die that quietly? It was strange, that not five minutes ago it had been flying around the room, livelier than any stupid butterfly, and now it was dead. Dead dead dead.

Riku just kept staring at the dead moth, next to his shoe, taking a deep shaky breath. He blinked repeatedly, trying to get rid of the telltale sting in his eyes, because it didn't make any sense to cry over that. So he stood up, scooped the tiny corpse into his hand, and brushed it into the nearby trashcan.

He came and sat back down in the chair, looking at Sora. He looked at the trashcan again, and he knew his eyes were red.

"Shit," he whispered, toeing off his shoes. He dug the corners of his palms into his eyes. It wasn't right. Stupid moth shouldn't be dead. He could have avoided it so easily, if he hadn't pushed the chair forward that one centimeter when he stood up. He shouldn't want to cry over a stupid moth, he thought to himself.

He came over and sat on the edge of the bed, looking at Sora, who was now sort of curled up, facing Riku, with his bandaged hand still flung out to one side.

"I - I think I might be gay!"

What a brave thing to say to a mostly-stranger. Weight of the world on his shoulders and he had to do that, too.

In the same vein of thought that made him wonder what it was like to be stabbed, he wondered what would happen if he kissed Sora. He wasn't about to go actually kissing another boy any more than he planned on shoving a knife through his ribs, but it couldn't hurt to wonder, like if it would be any different kissing a boy than kissing a girl. He wondered if it mattered, when you were actually kissing the person; if when you were kissing you actively thought "I am kissing a boy" versus "I am kissing a girl" or if it was just "I am kissing Sora," or if it was anything. He supposed it was kind of insulting to assume Sora would want to kiss him back, since gay people weren't attracted to every person of their gender, right? They taught that in sex ed class.

But that proved a fruitless and, ultimately, boring train of thought. It wasn't very interesting, since it wasn't going to happen, since Riku didn't give much of a shit either way about relationships, gay or otherwise.

He just kept thinking about that moth, alive ten minutes ago, now dead in a trash bin. And in two days the trash guy would come pick it up, along with all the other garbage a hospital produces, and it would be dumped in a land fill and eaten by other, smaller bugs. But if it wasn't for him, it would have gone on to - he didn't know. Mate with another moth and lots of happy little moth babies and eaten wool, or something. Didn't moths eat wool? Or was that cotton?

Didn't matter.

He just kept thinking about it, and then looking back at Sora, until he finally shook his head and sighed.

He reached out, wrapping an arm around Sora's shoulders as well as he could and sliding down on the bed so that he was practically lying down on it, pulling the kid to his side. Sora was warm and solid.

To Riku's surprise, though, Sora took a big, heaving gasp, wincing and burying his face in Riku's side.

"Hey," Riku said, since he was evidently awake.

Sora nodded, squeezing his eyes shut and taking a shuddering breath. There was a little bit of color coming back to his cheeks, blotchy and uneven from tears. He sniffed loudly.

"...so, the snack food in this hospital sucks," Riku said, opening the bag of cheese crackers.

Sora just smiled, with his eyes still shut tight and his face against Riku's ribs. He was still crying. Because people couldn't always make things better. He was crying, and Riku felt like he wanted to cry, and somewhere far away another moth was being crushed by a chair.

The thing about real life is that it doesn't go away just because you've stopped believing in it.

The sun was basically gone in Liverpool, England. It was just that hazy sort of dusk where the sky was a pale grey, fading to dark blue, and everybody was starting to feel sleepy.

Except Roxas. Always Roxas. He was walking around, like he'd been doing for the last half an hour. Anything to get out of that house. They always acted like he was some stupid charity, not a person. After dinner, every night, they'd come up and talk to him in little shifts of time, "How was your day?" and "So, Roxas, what sorts of movies do you like?" and "How are you liking England, huh? It's so funny that we had to move away from America so fast." They weren't a family. They were zookeepers, and he had to get out of that house, because he was sleeping in a guest room, and it felt every bit a guest room even after four months.

It wasn't that he didn't have friends. He had Hayner, and Pence, and Olette. But sometimes it was hard to break through the bond they had with each other. They'd been friends since kindergarten. He'd been their friend since ninth grade. It wasn't the same thing, at all, and even though they didn't show it he suspected he was always going to be the odd one out.

A tiny woman with an impressively black Labrador was across the street from him, pulling her trenchcoat tighter around her waist as wind blew harder. Roxas felt his cheek slapped by part of his hair, and ignored it, sticking his hands in his sweatshirt pockets. He headed where he always headed.

It was funny, that Roxas liked the church so much. He was a definite atheist. It was Sora who wanted to believe in God so badly.

Which was another funny thing, now that he thought about it. The same event, the same repercussions for the both of them, and it sent them in opposite directions. But Sora never talked about going to any churches on Destiny Island. And here Roxas was, a week away from fifteen and headed for a place that worshipped a God he refused to acknowledge.

It was a nice church, even if it was always a little empty. When Roxas stepped inside, he felt his innards jiggle a little, like the stained glass windows were hissing at him to get out, get out, get out, non-believer. But the priest - when he was there, anyway - always smiled at him.

But it wasn't the building he liked, anyways. The building was dank, and a little depressing, the wooden benches sagging tiredly in their middles with the varnish almost completely chipped off. There was never enough light, even though they had electric lamps, and there were little New Testament quotes on pieces of construction paper taped to the walls.

Roxas shook his head and sneezed; the lights were off and what little amount of street light coming in through the windows was pale and thin like that man no.

He shivered, heading for the stone staircase, which he suspected was older than this part of the building. It was practically medieval. Heck, it could have been. It was England. People only ever made a big deal about the old things in England.

The stairs were wrapped in a vicious and tightly wound spiral that would have made anybody sick with dizziness, but he was used to it. The smell of wet rock and the black hood of his sweatshirt, pulled up around his head, pervaded the air. He could hear his blood pump-pump-pumping in his ears, louder and louder in a familiar pattern the more tired he got and the closer he got to the -

Belfry.

It wasn't big, or impressive, or high. It was damp concrete, and it was just a small square of it. It was always windy and depressing, and it wasn't very high up for a bell tower. He could probably jump with only a broken limb to show for it.

The bell itself was old and decrepit, held up by one long thick rope. Roxas guessed that it used to be bronze; now it was just rusted over brown and green and covered in a crumbly and uneven layer of bird poop. It smelled disgusting, but he didn't care, because it was too windy to smell anything.

He sat down on its edge, dangling his feet down and kicking his legs against the wall. He didn't care that his butt was getting cold and wet. He liked heights. That and ice cream, he liked.

Sitting on the edge of the belfry always felt familiar to him. Sitting high up and looking down at a sad little city filled with tar-covered roofs and chimneys that didn't work. He always felt a bit lonely, though, up there by himself. But it was good for thinking.

He didn't care that his foster family treated him like a pet.

He didn't care that Hayner and Pence and Olette went places without him but not without each other.

He just had to wait until he was eighteen.

"What, you're just gonna abandon your family and like, your life and shit to join the fucking circus as soon as you can? What are you, retarded?"

"You did it."

"That - aw," he grinned. "That's different, you retard! It was an - um - a delicate domestic...situation. You, you'll start crying like a pansy for your mom three weeks in."

"I was orphaned and I hate my foster family."

Axel paused, snorted and grinned. "...well then let me give you a welcome-the-fuck-aboard handshake three years early, kiddo."

If you ran away when you were eighteen, they weren't allowed to come and get you.

Inside the bell, a tiny moth flapped its silky brown wings.

A/N: So...uh, yeah, I didn't get to everything I said I would. I have causes:

1) The chapter would have been twice as long. It's already freaking long.

2) Artistic...difficulties?

3) LOOK LOOK ROXAS GO GET ROXAS AND LEAMME ALONE