But There's No Climax.

"A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way."
- John Tudor

A/N: 1) I do not hate Kairi. I am not a Kairi-basher. I'm quite fond of her. I think her skirts could be a little longer, and she might consider pants in the long-term future, but overall she's a perfectly nice character. Even in this story. She gets better.

2) …just, if it seems worse than usual, this was hard to write.

3) Ignore the AN at the end of the chapter.

Sora tapped his foot against the inside of the car door, worrying his lower lip with his teeth. The car smelled stale and warm; the radio was on very quietly and Belle was humming to the tune. The school seemed to be the one that pulled up to the car and stopped moving, big and looming and scary and big.

He coughed. "I," he began, "I really don't feel so great, still, and I mean, it's a Friday anyways so if I just miss one more day of school – "

"Sora," Belle said quietly. She had that condescending Mom sound in her voice. "You have to go to school today. You've missed four days this week."

He took a second to evaluate what the best approach was here to convince her. A sort of scared, weak "trying to be brave" tone, or an "I'm very sure of how much I can handle" voice? He could get all his important assignments from Riku, anyways, and there was no point in getting him to go to school if he wasn't going to be able to pay attention. Right? He pulled the dark sleeve of his sweater over his bandage. Cast. It was a cast now, that's why it was so big and he couldn't take it off, and why his fingerless gloves couldn't fit over it. It was a cast now and he had to wear a big black sweater to cover it up, even though it was almost April. Even though people would see it.

The doctor hadn't cared.

"Sora, I know the big cast seems like a hassle, but you just have to bear with it for a few weeks!"

The doctor didn't have to go to high school any more. He didn't have to go see a bunch of teenagers and come up with some explanation for being out since last Friday.

But he'd only been in the hospital less than a week, weren't they supposed to keep you in for longer if it was big surgery? Wasn't a skin graft big?

"Just bear with it today, sweetie," Belle said, reaching over to put a hand on his knee. "If it's really so bad you can call me from the nurse's office, okay?"

Sora sighed. Belle was probably the only parent, foster-or-otherwise, who said things like that and meant them. Most people said things like that and implied that only a big old crybaby would actually do it. But now he felt bad.

"Yeah," he sighed. Maybe nobody would notice. Teenagers were pretty self-involved. But either way he wasn't going to have a fun day.

It really hit him when he got out of the car, backpack slung over just one shoulder, and saw it drive away. Goodbye, my one last chance at happiness.

But he just blinked real hard, shook his head and thought of all the good things today. Science was first, and he didn't have any tests today, and of the five blocks today one was sex ed and another was math with Mr. Leonhart, who never made people learn things on Fridays anyways. He grinned. And he could probably rope Riku into some sort of social activity. And Riku didn't give a flying duck how he was feeling and wouldn't ask stupid questions!

The day was looking up.

Riku Tepes hated Fridays. People seemed to talk more than usual. And they usually talked a lot.

His fingernails were getting too long, too, and now he was going to spend seven hours feeling like he had claws or something before he could go home. He hated that feeling, too, plus by some horribly cruel cosmic twist of fate his locker was right next to Kairi's, who apparently had more friends than brain cells. And she always brought one of them with her to her locker. And her friends always leaned against Riku's locker while they were talking to her.

So while he was dragging his overly-large biology textbook out from the menacing pile of crap in his locker, he was grinding his teeth trying not to listen to the fast-paced conversation going on over his head.

"But I mean oh my God, she totally hates me! I'm telling you, like everyone got an A on that essay except for me. I was doing really well in her class, and then I guess she overheard me talking or something outside of school, I don't know what about, and now she hates me!" she was saying. Her friend was nodding empathetically.

"I know what you mean! My bio teacher is like mean to everybody in the class except for like two people, because they always do the extra credit. It's totally unfair how they play favorites! It's screwing my grades up so much!" her friend said, huffing. "I have some teachers who just don't play favorites, and I know that I totally try harder in those classes because I can, like, do good!"

Superheroes "do good", Riku thought sarcastically. And I can only hope that someday you realize what an idiot you are and find a cure.

He did his best to tune out for the next few seconds until the emphatic cries of "Sora!" registered. Oh. Sora. Um, wasn't he in the hospital on Tuesday?

"Oh my gosh, Sora! I totally thought you were gonna be out all week!" Kairi said, running up to talk to him in the middle of the hallway. Of course, this prevented Sora from moving forward and created a roadblock, which Kairi didn't notice. Riku called people like that hallway snot.

Still fiddling with his lock, he stood up, catching a glance of them out of the corner of his eye.

Kairi was full-on Japanese, but you wouldn't know it if you looked at her from behind. She dyed her hair red, and she wore blue contact lenses and lots of soft pink and flip-flops. She wasn't a person's traditional image of the perfect Japanese high-school-age daughter.

She laughed. For such an annoying person, Riku thought, she had a nice laugh. "Are you alright, though? Really. You left so fast last week! I was like, actually worried!" She laughed again, and Sora kind of laughed with her. He looked kind of uncomfortable, though. He was dressed strangely. No bright colors or dream-demon clothes. Baggy khaki shorts and a black sweater that looked too big for him, the sleeves of which hung down over his hands.

Oh.

"I'm, uh, no," Sora grinned. "I'm fine now, actually, don't worry."

Kairi placed one hand on her hip. "So what did you have, anyways? Was it like a cold or the flu or something?"

Riku clicked the latch on his lock, turning the dial a few times to make sure it didn't come undone, and tightened the straps on his backpack.

Sora's eyes widened and he gulped a little, coughing once very quietly and fisting his visible hand. "I, uh – " he began awkwardly. Was he supposed to lie? He didn't want anyone to…he just didn't - .

He didn't like lying to people, because he always suspected that they knew he was lying when he said what he said. That people just felt too awkward to point it out to him. But the cast was big and white and itchy and it felt a million times bigger than it was. It felt a million times bigger than he was. He couldn't imagine a person not noticing it like one big zit on a face, like one stain on a white shirt. It was a big white stain on Sora, and he knew he couldn't lie it away, but he kind of hoped that if he starved it for attention it would shrivel up and die like a weed.

Which was a funny thing to say, because Sora really liked dandelions.

But Kairi was still waiting for him to talk, and he didn't know what she meant by "what did you have." He hadn't pre-fabricated a lie. What if there was a rumor going around the school that he was sick? Wouldn't it be easier to go along with that than to make up his own story? Being sick was a lot less awkward than a skin graft. Getting a skin graft meant telling people why you needed one, which meant telling them why your hand was burned. And then he'd be the kid whose parents died in a fire.

(Sora was a bunch of sticks tied together with string) Sora was not made of glass and he didn't want anyone to treat him that way. The way he would treat a kid whose parents died in a fire.

So he ended up just staring at Kairi for a second, feeling like he was breathing through bubble wrap.

On his way past Sora, Riku Tepes did a wonderful thing. He leaned in very swiftly and whispered against Sora's cheek, "I told people you were sick," and for all the world it looked like he was muttering a resentful good morning as he walked by an acquaintance. While Sora's ear was turning red from the stream of hot air, he turned around and shouted back at a rapidly repeating Riku:

"Oh, thanks, so can I get those assignments after school?" One of the only good things that had come from dealing with so many social workers for Sora was that he could lie fluently now. You had to, when they were looking for every excuse to send you to therapy. You practiced smiling in the mirror.

And Riku, who was a teenager and could lie fluently to any adult and often lied to classmates so that they'd leave him the hell alone, just turned around, rolled his eyes and grumbled "Yeah, I guess," like that's what they were really talking about.

Sora smiled a more relaxed sort of smile, turning back to Kairi. He wondered, sometimes, if Riku Tepes even knew that half of the amazing things he did made Sora feel like kissing him full on the mouth, just for the heck of it. Not in a gay way. Just a happy way.

So yeah, kind of a gay way.

Sora turned back to Kairi. "So what was that?"

Kairi wrinkled her nose in a typically cute way. "Um, did you have the flu?"

He shrugged. "No," he replied, "Just a really bad cold." He didn't know what would happen if she saw the cast around his hand, and hoped he wouldn't find out. "You know, sore throat, cough, stuffed nose, puking, the whole deal."

"Aw," Kairi laughed and shook her head, "Ew, too much information! So that's why you bolted for the bathroom on Friday?"

In French, there wasn't much differentiation between a headache and a sickness that stuffed up your head. J'ai mal à la tête. I am bad in the head. In sounded funny in English. J'ai mal au main. My hand hurts. J'ai mal au coeur. My heart hurts.

So maybe if they were speaking French he could say j'ai mal au main and pretend he had carpal tunnel but not in English, so he was wearing a big black sweater near April on a tropical island.

"Ah, yeah," Sora said, "I…felt funny." Which was, at least, mostly true.

He wasn't feeling himself, of course. He had this sort of sick dread because thin cloth bandages could be hidden under fingerless biker gloves. But Kairi was smiling at him, and Kairi wasn't the smartest person, but she was nice and she never hurt anybody with her words, and Sora really liked her. He wished more people were like that. Any person was a good person who didn't want to make other people feel bad.

"Aw," she said sympathetically, cocking her head. "Are you feeling better now?"

He grinned. "Yeah, plenty," he lied. "Thanks!" He hated lying to people, but he didn't want Kairi getting upset.

Riku Tepes had lied for him! It probably wasn't a big deal for Riku, almighty-superior Riku to go lying to the inferior and ignorant fools who plagued his life. Sora giggled and rolled his eyes, heading for biology. Riku was kind of a drama queen, but he was a better friend than he realized. Sometimes he just put Sora in the best moods.

It wasn't until the bell rang that Sora saw his sweater sleeve didn't quite cover the cast, in all probability, Kairi had at least seen the edge of it. It just hadn't occurred to him that it might be showing.

I think I can, I think I can, I have to because the world won't stop turning.

Riku yawned, blinking his eyes open again and licking dry lips, watching orange plumes of dust roll by outside as Dr. Zexion just kept going on about cytoplasm and Louis Pasteur and peas and…genetic things. Of course he could name more, but he didn't like Dr. Zexion, and so refused to. It was Riku's own little mental rebellion. He knew it didn't do anything, but it helped.

Time seemed longer today. Maybe it was just the lab. It always seemed like tiny weights were tied to the clock hands during biology. He had some stupid pop song stuck in his head because someone had been humming it before class started, and just looking at Sora's sweater made him feel itchy and overheated even though he just had on a muscle shirt and shorts.

It wasn't like he was learning anything, anyways. Sometimes he just wished life would fast forward the useless parts like in TV shows. It was Saturday night at a party and then all of a sudden it was the afternoon of a Monday, and school was magically over and done with. It was because nothing ever happened in school.

Course, that probably didn't count as a valid excused absence. "Reason for absence: life to live, drama to survive, better things to do." Denied.

He was sleepier than usual. His mind kept wandering from thing to thing, flitting around and refusing to settle. Like a – well.

A fly was buzzing around one of the windows angrily. People kept staring and pointing at it. They were not, apparently, that great at dealing with actual nature.

He noticed that about people. The way they picked and chose from things. "I love all animals, oh, except I hate bugs except for ladybugs and butterflies." It kind of sucked. People always liked butterflies and ladybugs because they were pretty because people were shallow because ladybugs didn't bite. But nobody liked moths. Even Riku didn't like moths, but he…wanted to.

He stuck his hand through his hair again.

He just kept thinking about that one moth. It wasn't like he'd never seen a dead moth before. It was just that…he didn't know. Just something.

People didn't like flies, either. Maybe that was why he was thinking about the moth again. He wondered if it made him sappy, or girly, or something, that he kept thinking about a dead bug. He wished it would start raining again. It still might; it was spring now and it rained a lot in spring. Sort of.

He looked up at the clock, just like the clocks in every other room. Simple and round and white with black letters and never more than halfway through class. "8:05!" the face seemed to mock him; "Only thirty more minutes! Thirty minutes, 1800 seconds or 45 suicides. That's all!"

He was thinking about death way more than was really normal for a seventeen year old non-goth kid. He wasn't really morbid. It wasn't like he thought about knives and stabbing and stuff in context with…death. And it wasn't like he visited graveyards or anything. He was just confused. He was allowed to be confused as long as he knew he was confused.

The fly took off from the wall again, and a couple of people visibly winced as if it was some horrible deadly venomous thing. The housefly buzzed around one of the lights sporadically and ended up touching down a few tables away from Riku on somebody's binder.

Sora was watching it too; he started to smile when he made eye contact with Riku and then looked back at the fly.

"Look Dr. Zexion, it knows you're talking about fly genes!" somebody obnoxious said, and people laughed.

Dr. Zexion smiled sort of grudgingly and sort of sarcastically, raised his eyebrows, and grabbed a stack of paper from his desk. "I'm going to allow you to work in groups of up to three on these packets, but you may work by yourself or you may work in a group of only two, if you so desire," he deadpanned, depositing worksheets on each person's desk as he walked around. Riku rolled his eyes. "I trust you to make your own groups," he continued, "But if you prove unable to form yourselves into groups successfully, or I deem these groups unable to work together, I will make them for you." He sat down without another word, adjusting his gold-rimmed glasses and opening up a large book. This was usually the signal for them to start.

One thing Riku admitted, Dr. Zexion sure was a fucking character.

Sora turned his body in the chair to face Riku almost immediately, grinning. He tucked one of his pieces of hair behind his ear with the thumb of his cast hand, since it was unbound.

Riku frowned. "I thought you were trying to hide that," he said, motioning to the plaster.

Sora paused for a second, his hand still behind his ear, until he shrugged. "Yeah, I guess, but it's kind of useless to anyways. I have to wear it for three weeks and there's no way people won't notice. I'll just say…I don't know. Whatever. You know already," he laughedand then looked at the worksheet sparingly.

"…thanks, though," he said quietly. "I mean, for the telling people I'm sick thing." He looked up at Riku and smiled a sincere sort of a smile.

Riku shrugged. "It wasn't my place to tell them anything else. But, um," he looked for something to say that wasn't about phenotypes, "How…uh, how are you?"

Sora licked his lips and perched his chin on his hand, "I dunno, better, right? It doesn't hurt as much. I kind of feel like I should be doing before and after pictures or something." He laughed. The fly came buzzing by his ear and he batted at it without thinking, shaking his head and almost-sneezing. "Hey, do you think anyone even knew I had bandages on my hand before this?" he asked, staring at his cast absently. He wiggled his two loose fingers and made a snort-giggle sound. Riku looked at it too.

"Don't know. People don't notice things. Even I don't notice things." He realized, when he talked, that saying "even I don't notice things" made it seem like he ought to be the exception, and it was funny, because he'd thought he was one. Or had he? He couldn't remember changing how he thought, but he couldn't remember not, either.

"That's not true," Sora chided him jokingly, toeing him in the ankle. "Stoo-pid. You know it isn't."

"Boys," Dr. Zexion looked up at them harshly through apathetic marble eyes and cocked one eyebrow. "Work, please."

Sora shook his head, again, and laughed and Riku shook his head and laughed and they started to do the worksheet, and…things felt mostly okay, until English.

Kairi came up to Riku, at lunch, standing in front of his table awkwardly. She gripped the strap of her purse with one hand, kept trying to push back bangs with the other, and shifting her weight from foot to foot.

"Hey," she said. "I was wondering…I mean, I know it's…" she trailed off, biting the side of her lip. She looked like she didn't want to bother finishing her sentence. "I know it's, like, really none of my business, I mean – " she laughed awkwardly, "I mean I even feel bad for even like asking or something, and I mean I wasn't going to but when I saw he wasn't here – " she sighed.

Riku knew what she was going to ask. Not word-for-word, maybe, but he knew what she was going to ask. Is it true what people were whispering in English, and in third period, and in hallways and bathrooms and over lunch tables. Did Sora the new kid really try to kill himself over the weekend. Did he really slit his wrist, did he really go to the hospital, was it really because he was clinically depressed over moving. Riku didn't remember how it had come up, or see how it did; he didn't hear the machine start to turn or the match being lit. In a way, he was still kind of in denial about it. It was such a horrible TV thing to happen. It was fast, too. He didn't think – he hadn't really, really thought that gossip spread like fire, that people always assumed stupid things.

He knew he told himself they did, but he hadn't thought the world was that awful. Not really. People in movies exaggerated everything else, why not this? They yelled at each other and kissed at each other and had babies at each other but actual people didn't do that to actual other people because it was stupid, and only entertaining if you knew it was fake, and - . It wasn't…it didn't seem right.

What kind of a moron could ever come up with the idea that Sora would even attempt something like that? It was Sora. He was happy even when he was sad. He'd come in to school the day after being let out and joked about…stuff and made fun of Riku and laughed and smiled.

Riku supposed that high school kids on Destiny Island were starved for drama. It suited them to make up melodramatic shit that didn't even make sense because they'd seen YouTube videos about "emo kids" who cut their wrists and so assumed that any teenager who injured his wrist had attempted suicide and it wasn't fucking fair! Because how the hell did you explain to them that's not what happened without…explaining what really happened? Hadn't Sora said it? "I don't want people to feel uncomfortable." What a fucking selfish thing to say. He'd said it, out loud, and now Riku couldn't explain to Kairi who was, apparently, yet another gossip vulture, that Sora was not suicidal that he was the bravest fucking person Riku knew and – it wasn't…fair.

"…but I mean, he's not here now so is Sora…okay? Did he get upset and leave?" Kairi was saying. "I know it's none of my business but I'm kinda…worried, you know."

"Oh," Riku replied. He hadn't expected Kairi to go asking that. "Yeah," he said, leaning a bored head on one hand and picking at his food. "He's fine. He just had to meet with a guidance counselor or something about his schedule."

Did you hear that, Kairi? About his schedule. Not about his emo suicide attempts.

…Sora was in the library.

"Really?" Kairi was saying. "Ugh, that sucks, I hate it how they never let us like, miss class or something because of school stuff. They always have to take up our lunch periods. What a pain."

Sora was in the library sitting in the reference section at a table, staring at a wall full of encyclopedias after telling Riku that he wasn't hungry.

"Yeah, I guess," Riku said. He didn't say anything else, not "bye," not "see you later," not even a cursory wave. He just looked back down at his food and started eating again without making eye contact. Which was how Riku Tepes said "leave."

Sora was in the library sitting in the reference section, at a table, staring at a wall full of encyclopedias after saying he wanted to be alone and trying really hard not to imagine people asking him if he'd tried to kill himself and counting the minutes until school was over, and he could go…someplace and goof off with Riku, and wondering was it really so bad to just say "I burned my hand?"

"It's just," Kairi started talking again, raising her eyebrows and making a "concerned" face. She slid onto the bench across from Riku, planting her elbows on the table. He could smell her from here, a smell like fruity shampoo and too much perfume and girly things; it was too sweet. "Listen," she said. "I was in the girls' bathroom, just now, and," she paused, taking in and letting out a long, quiet breath. "I can't believe I even have to say this," she whispered. "But on one of the stalls someone had written all of this, like, awful stuff about Sora, and…" she sighed. "Well, it wasn't like making fun of him, but it was like 'did Sora seriously slit his wrist' and then somebody wrote 'omg, I don't know,' and then someone else had written something like 'I bet it's because he's adopted,' and I just thought that, you know, since you're his friend you should know that…" she licked her lips, looking up at him and then down at her purse. "I mean, I erased it," she said. Silence stretched between them, propagating itself, and Riku just stared at her with this slightly confused sort of stare that was still mostly angry.

Sora was in the library hating himself for not being willing to tell people to truth and making Riku lie for him. He couldn't assume Riku liked lying, just because he didn't like talking.

"It's only a few people saying that, anyways. Most of the people I talked to don't believe it. It's just like…I don't know, I just…" Kairi took a big breath and dug at the corner of her eye with her palm. Was she crying? Riku couldn't tell.

He knew it was awful, but all he could think of at the moment were terrible jokes and jabs about how many times she can say "like" in one sentence and how many minutes he had until his next block. Listen, are you doing it to annoy me, or do you actually have a chronic inability not to use "like" as a comma? He knew he shouldn't say things like that when she was honestly trying to help.

Riku Tepes did that, sometimes, he thought of things he shouldn't say and then really wanted to say them. His stupid teenage mind thought up stupid dirty jokes, but he didn't say those, either. He liked to think it made him a higher brand of teenager, not saying everything that came into his head. Of course, Sora would probably just call him snobby and then make fun of his eyes or something.

Riku liked Sora. Not in a sexual way (that would be gross), but he respected him. Enjoyed his company, sometimes.

He wished his friend would come out of the library.

He knew it was awful, too, that he was hoping Sora would want to be alone after school. But he hadn't had a Friday to himself in ages. Just because other people needed things from him didn't mean that he suddenly became a selfless person. He still basically hated people. He just had a conscience, was all. Fuck, people needed to stop taking advantage of it. It was the reason he hadn't told Kairi to leave yet.

"Yeah," he said after a while. She smiled at him. "I don't really…yeah, I'll tell him that," Riku said.

(…he just kept…thinking about that moth…)

He didn't finish his lunch.

And he fell asleep in study hall.

Sometimes days felt longer than they had any right to. You sat diligently behind a school desk and stared at your teacher, pacing, for as long as you could, but the clock refused to acknowledge it. By the time last period had rolled around, Sora felt he'd spent more than enough of his day in the school.

He just needed it to be over. He was running out of gas. He needed to cheer himself up over the weekend, psyche himself into returning on Monday with his head held high and an explanation ready. He liked having plans. His plan now was explaining things; it seemed good enough.

But not…today.

He yawned, sitting down in the first empty desk he saw, looking at all of the half-assed, bored scribbled lines on the faux-wood surface. Wiggling into the seat a little further, he glanced at the clock (not for the first time today). Well, fifty-five minutes wasn't a very long time, was it? Time passed in jumps for him; it took ages for five minutes to go by, then all of a sudden it was fifteen minutes later.

"Sora?" It was a girl in his sex ed class. Was she in his math class, too? Now he felt bad for not having noticed.

"Yeah?" He smiled at her a bright-bright smile and sat up a little.

"Are you…okay?"

He frowned. Was this…? It wasn't going to be about suicide, was it? Only one person had outright asked him, and he'd scuffed his answer by accident.

"Some person told me that you…I mean, this sounds silly, but that you tried to cut your wrist, so…?"

"Huh? Wh- no, I mean – what? I mean tha-"

"I know, I know! It's none of my business, oh God I'm so sorry! I shouldn't have asked! Okay, um, I hope you feel better!"

It was because it was the first he'd heard of it.

Boy, news traveled fast, didn't it? People were looking at him like – like he'd…

…like he was the kid whose parents died in a fire. People were uncomfortable, talking to him, and laughing with him or around him. People spoke quieter, people didn't say mean things to him not even as jokes but it seemed kind of…fast. He had expected, at the worse, that he'd show up in school today, and that would be fine, and then the rumors would start over the weekend. And he'd be prepared for it on Monday.

Not that he'd expected to be accused of suicide. He didn't blame them, really, any of the people with the macabre curiosity about what kind of a person could even try to…take their own life. It was a scary thought.

Sora looked at the boy nearest him; a head of short blond hair. What if somebody told him – just came up behind Sora and whispered in his ear – that kid cut his wrist on Friday, can you believe it? He'd have no reason to disbelieve it. He barely knew the kid in front of him. Why would he choose to question that? It then became a fact, didn't it; it became a fact that that one boy slumped over in his chair had slit his wrists with a razorblade like in the movies.

He couldn't blame the kids in his class. Not if he could have done the same thing.

He looked back at the girl from his sex ed class, who was looking at him earnestly and smiling. "Yeah, of course!" he laughed. "But jeez, for a Friday this day just won't end, you know?" He rolled his eyes and shrugged and she gave him a puzzled sort of a look. Crap, did that make him seem manic depressive? Maybe he was. Today was suddenly seeming fucking hilarious.

"Oh," she said carefully. "I guess so, sure," she coughed, smiling too hard and turning to the other side of her desk to talk to somebody else.

"Um," Sora began and ended. You didn't really casually tell someone "oh about that suicide thing actually it's a lie," did you? He snorted a little laughter, covering his face with his palm and shaking his head when Riku sat down on his left.

Riku didn't say anything.

Sora liked Riku.

"Hey guys," Mr. Leonhart was saying, "Guys!" He tried again. He stood in the front of the classroom glaring hard enough to break glass. "Guys, you need to quiet down, I've got something to talk to you about – guys!" he shouted.

So it had taken a few seconds longer than it strictly should have, but people shut up once the relatively grounded, but still relatively nice math teacher started to yell. "Quiet down," he said again. Probably for effect.

"I want to talk to you guys about something that I know has been going on in the school, alright?" he asked. Mr. Leonhart crossed his arms, leaning his back against the desk. There was nothing on the white board behind him and he was holding no papers. Sora shifted in his chair uncomfortably and wondered, did news travel that fast did it really travel that that fast?

He looked at Riku, because maybe something else had happened in the world, or at least in the school, something to detract from Sora. Something that had nothing to do with him. The world could be amazing, just sometimes, just maybe just now.

"Now," their teacher said, "How many of you have heard from friends or teachers about the graffiti going on in school?"

People were quiet, and heads were bowed; nobody said anything. Of course graffiti happened, graffiti happened all the time. Kids wrote things on bathroom doors. In fact, when Sora had gone to the bathroom earlier that day, there was a fresh scrawling of "sneakypenis" on the wall.

Which was…off-putting.

Mr. Leonhart raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, like so many teachers did, and sighed. "Really? No one? That's surprising," he remarked. "Well, a few teachers here have been subject to some severe…" he paused and licked his teeth, like the words were stuck there, "Some entirely inappropriate and highly offensive homophobic…writing." He paused for a while, completely still like a New York statue, and started again. "And I just wanted to talk to you guys about that, and about homophobia in general, okay? I mean, the principal asked us to, but it is an important subject – " he cut off and glared at someone on the other side of the room who was talking. "Girls."

The world was funny sometimes. Sometimes it avoided a big problem for you only to go crashing into one that you were entirely trying to avoid. Sora shot a glance at Riku to see if he was even looking at him. Riku just looked bored, staring at the door and playing with a piece of his hair.

"You guys know that about ten percent of the population is gay, right?" their teacher was saying, licking his lips and breathing through his nose.

Sora winced. The seconds passed slowly like pinpricks, stick stick stick and tick tick tick, and every part of his head was hurting.

"So how many kids are in this class? Twenty-five, right?" Mr. Leonhart said, sweeping his eyes over the kids. He laughed. "So even in here, statistically at least, two of you are gay or bisexual, yeah?" and his students laughed nervously and looked at each other and shifted around in their squeaky blue chairs. "And one of you is kind of on the fence about it," he said to more awkward giggling.

Of course now was when Riku chose to look at Sora. It wasn't an accusing look, but Sora started to squirm under those eyes. They were too clear and too sharp, like pieces of glass; they didn't seem like eyes and Riku had turned them on him but he wasn't glaring. Sora met his eyes and Riku smiled, kind of, like he was out of practice. Sora smiled back, kind of, and then stuck his tongue out jokingly to break the awkward.

Riku rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair, snapping his eyes to their teacher when Mr. Leonhart threatened to give them a "Boys."

"And I really doubt that anybody in here would write things like that, but – " he paused, "Okay, raise your hands if you've ever heard somebody use 'that's so gay' as an insult, or call somebody a fag or – yeah," he said as hands began to lift, "You see? And that makes it seem like it's okay. It makes mild homophobia an everyday thing and it makes it just that much harder for any gay person to be honest about it, do you guys – Phil, if you have to go to the bathroom, just go," he said, waving towards the door. A kid bolted.

Sora twirled a pencil between his fingers and looked out the window. It had been four minutes. Four minutes.

"This is a pretty important topic to me, okay? I don't want to bore you guys with facts and data, but I just wanted to show you – uh, crap, where'd I – " he went behind his desk and opened a drawer.

The air smelled thick and flowery and hot; was it really always this hot on islands? Did it really never snow? It would be funny, when Christmas came, and there were still palm trees. He wondered if Christmas was really depressing here because it never snowed. He wondered…he was tired.

Mr. Leonhart was copying some sort of chart off of a sheet of paper. It had two columns, and four rows; he labeled the columns "gay students" and "straight students." He labeled the rows "considering suicide," "making a suicide plan," "attempted suicide," and "requiring medical attention for a suicide attempt."

"Really wish my overhead wasn't broken," he muttered. He had pretty awful handwriting, for a teacher. His Ks looked like Ls and Cs squished together, his As looked like Ns, and his Ms were barely even letters. Somebody laughed and Mr. Leonhart smiled, starting to fill in percentages.

In a beam of afternoon light flecks of dust shone gold and floated by like a river of old.

Sora settled in for a long, silent wait.

On the walk home, dandelions were the only flowers and mosquitoes littered the air like dust. Sora sighed and ran a hand through messy hair, though it got stuck halfway in and he had to pull it out.

He looked at his good hand in slanted light, wondering how long it would be before he was toasted golden on the oven-half of the island. Northern France wasn't really known for its great tanning spots. He stared until a building he passed blocked out the sun.

"Hey," Riku said, tapping his shoulder. "Why are you spacing out?"

Sora jumped a little and turned his head to look at Riku, who had his eyebrows raised and those glass-glass eyes trained on him. He shook his head. "I dunno," he grumbled. "Haven't you ever had just a really, like a really bad day?" he asked in earnest, scratching at his ear.

"Yeah, duh," Riku said. Sora took some small pride in the fact that Riku seemed to hate everything but him. He talked freely when it was just him and Sora. Riku laced his fingers and put them on top of his head, his elbows sticking out like stunted (moth) wings. He grinned a real shit-eating grin and laughed. "But sometimes, when I have a uniquely terrible day, I end up in a really good mood just because…I don't know," he shrugged, still smiling, "I just find it funny. Somehow. That things can suck this badly, and then I sort of calm down…or, sometimes," he said, his smile dying, "Usually I just get really angry. You're handling it better than I do."

Sora nodded, licking his lips as they turned onto the dirt road. Light was yellow today. Everywhere he went, light was yellow. "I know what you mean," he said carefully. "Like…there are carpet slaves in India, so compared to that it isn't so…" he ventured.

"Yeah," Riku said, letting his hands down and sticking his thumbs in his pockets. "I'm, uh," he looked away, "Sorry your day…sucked, or…yeah."

Now Sora laughed, shoving Riku with his shoulder. Riku stumbled just a little, laughed and shoved Sora back, lightly. But hard enough so that Sora knew he wasn't made of glass. "This week, in half-assed sincerity…" Sora began.

"What? Oh, screw you," Riku stuck his tongue out. "I'm new to this…um,"

"Nice crap?"

"Yeah."

Sora shook his head, and spikes of hair caught the yellow light; Like spears, he thought. He sighed again. He didn't…whatever.

He suspected Riku of hiding a really great friend underneath his glass-glass eyes. The kind of guy who thought about other people more than he wanted to admit. But sometimes Sora wondered if he just looked for himself in other people, anyways. Because Sora always thought about how other people felt, and…anyways.

He looked down at the ground and the mosquito that zipped by. The sound of waves roared dully in the background, like muffled thunder, and no matter how hard he tried his day still sucked and he was still unhappy. It was like a little pulling in his stomach and his throat that didn't go away.

When they got to his house, Sora just went right up the stairs without saying anything. Because it wasn't fair.

Riku just dropped his backpack next to Sora's and watched him head for his room for a few seconds, impassively. He shrugged and followed after him at a leisurely pace.

Forty-nine percent of gay, lesbian and bisexual students are considering or thinking about suicide.

Sora was a beautiful person. But Sora looked like he was about to break. There was someone Riku didn't know living inside of Sora.

Riku liked Sora.

He followed Sora into his room and stood in the doorway, glancing at the TV and gaming system in the corner, dusting over. "Sora?"

Sora just wiped at the corner of his eye with his too-big, ridiculously hot sweater and went over to his bed, falling down on it with a fwump and staring at the wall. He sandwiched himself between the covers like a cocoon, with only his face visible, after arranging the blankets for a minute or two with awkward cloth sounds. His eyes were red.

"Sora…?"

Sora didn't say anything. His eyes got redder.

Riku came to sit by the side of the bed, knees bent and arms draped over them. He leaned his head back and touched the cover covering Sora's knee. "Have you been hold- um…are you upset?"

There was a little rustle when Sora nodded.

"Oh. 'Kay," Riku said calmly. He snorted. "You've had a pretty shit couple of weeks."

Rustle.

He licked his lips and started to wiggle his toes, watching the fabric of his sneakers bulge and stretch. He sighed. Sweat was sticking his arms to his sides.

"Well," he said after a while, because he wasn't about to give a pep talk, "I'm gonna play video games. Do you mind?"

Rustle.

"Well, don't blame me if I beat your high scores," Riku said, crawling forward to turn the television and game system on and grabbing a controller.

There was a muffled snort of laughter and a "Yeah, because I care so much," from the blankets, and Riku smiled.

There were a lot of moths in the world.

A/N: About the circus. Listen. It is ridiculous to put that in this story. It is going into another story. I have already started it, but uhm, I've never written (grown-up) Axel before so...right. Well. Even I don't care.

Point is that I MET TAYLOR MALI BECAUSE DID I TELL YOU I MET TAYLOR MALI AND THAT WE TALKED AND THAT HE'S ACTUALLY JUST AS AWESOME IN REAL LIFE AND THAT HE SAW MY HAND AND I'D WRITTEN STUFF I HAD TO DO WITH LITTLE CHECKBOXES AND HE SAW THE CHECKBOXES AND WAS LIKE "LOL :D" ONLY NOT IN SO MANY WORDS AND TOOK A PICTURE OF MY HAND WITH HIS PHONE AND PUT IT ON HIS BLOG YES THAT IS MY HAND ON TAYLOR MALI'S BLOG ALSO HE MADE ME READ A COUPLE OF MY SENTENCES FROM HIS PROMPTS AND HE LIKED THEM BOTH SO ANYWAYS HOW WAS YOUR WEEK

YOU SEE THIS IS WHY I TOLD YOU TO IGNORE THIS PART OF THE CHAPTER