Someone Would Listen.
A/N: Listen, so last chapter was kind of depressing. And trust me, this chapter isn't me chickening out. It's meant to prove a point. But suffice to say that last chapter is to this chapter as Uchiha Sasuke is to sparkly rainbow unicorns.
...gay ones.
"The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself."
- Mark Twain
When Belle decided to adopt a teenage boy, she knew it wasn't going to be easy. She knew he'd have issues about his parents, possibly siblings, maybe refuse to acknowledge her as a figure of authority and all of that. And it took two years, two years of being vetted by people and having her private and work life invaded, her personal history researched. "A single parent? Aren't you a little young for this? Is there a reason you've never married? Do you think you will get married?" She shuddered to think what the process would have been if she'd wanted to adopt a baby.
She hadn't expected Sora to make it so easy. All of it. He had come to her like a happy-boy-kit, just add time and he sprung up to a cheerful optimist who talked about friendship like it was the most wonderful thing in the world. He even spoke fluent English! When she'd had to move to Destiny Island for her job, he'd said to her, word for word - "Cool, I've always wanted to live on an island! It's like a tiny little world all by itself."
If there was an ideal orphan, it was Sora. He maintained his relationship with his brother on his own, he made friends, did alright in school, even agreed to the skin graft. He never asked for much at all, and he never wanted much. He'd been only been angry - sincerely, hideously furious, and even that was mild, and kind of sad - once. About a month in.
"Sora? Sora, honey, you need to come out of your room. You've got a doctor's appointment."
"No."
"You have to. Sora, I'm coming in - oh, Sora! You haven't even gotten out of bed at all today!"
"I know that. I don't want to. There's isn't any point."
"Sora, it's almost two o'clock in the afternoon - "
"Why is everyone always telling me what time it is!?"
"...Sora..."
Sniffles. "I - I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, I didn't mean it..."
Which was why she was surprised and almost...relieved, the one morning on the first day of the last week of school, when Sora came up to her while she was poking around in the fridge and said "Belle?"
He called her Belle, not Mom, and she understood that.
"Yes, sweetie?"
"I just...I guess...uh, listen."
She closed the fridge and turned to him, smiled, placed a hand on his arm. "I am listening."
"I - I'm pretty much gay." He winced when he said that, closed his eyes.
Oh, Sora. Why that. Belle couldn't help him with that.
She pursed her lips. "Okay," she said. And he opened his eyes and he smiled at her so hard and so bright you'd think she'd told him that dragons really do exist. She put her hand on his cheek. She didn't have a problem with it, but it was so sad for her poor boy. He had a hard enough time of it, and being gay would just open up a whole knew world of bullies and hatred and loneliness. And she wouldn't be able to help him with any of it. Oh, oh, oh, Sora, and you look so relieved to be telling me. She wondered, sometimes, if despite all of the nasty things he'd gone through, he still didn't understand how the world was meant to work.
Didn't understand why people hated other people, because he couldn't bring himself to hate anybody.
"Okay?" he asked her.
"That's fine, Sora," she said, "I'm glad you told me." Oh, and she'd have to tell the therapist about this, too, wouldn't she? She knew she couldn't help him with this.
"Oh, um," he said, "The other thing is that, well..."
"Ah, no," she said, holding up one finger. "Let me guess. You crashed the car?"
"No," he rolled his eyes.
"You lost the cat?"
"Be-elle..."
She laughed and put her hands on her hips. "Well?"
"Um, you know Riku?"
"I should think so, you two are glued at the hips."
Sora sighed and hopped up onto the counter. It was a little awkward; his cast clicked on the surface of the granite and he nearly slipped. He was getting it off next week.
"'Bout him..."
Which was the only other event of consequence that happened junior year.
That summer, about, say, mid-August, Riku spent his first full night in the same bed with another person. He didn't count having nightmares as a little kid and making his parents comfort him, and besides, those weren't full nights. Just however long it took him to calm down.
Thinking along these lines, Riku wondered, just before he fell asleep, why there wasn't a verb for that. You could dream, and you could have a dream. But you couldn't nightmare.
But he fell asleep for the first time next to another warm body who made noises and kicked in his dreams, and was, to Riku's dismay, just as touchy-feely while unconscious as he was fully awake. It was so hot, it was so goddamn hot outside.
Which was why Riku was awake at four in the morning tonight, in Sora's room, on his bed. It was plenty dark inside, just tinted blue, and they weren't under the covers at all. It was far too hot, even if it was dry heat. Riku was wearing boxer shorts and a wifebeater and he was still in danger of becoming permanently glued to the boy next to him with sweat. There was a fan set in the window to his back, though he wouldn't have known it if it wasn't making and incessant humming noise; it was having no effect at all.
Sora was, naturally, fast asleep and had his obliviously warm arms wrapped around Riku's torso with his forehead pressed against Riku's exposed collarbone. God, it was so fucking hot, he didn't know how Sora could stand it.
It was at this point that Riku had given up on thinking about things as "gay" and "not-gay". He didn't really care. When Sora had told him to sleep on the bed, Riku had thought to himself "Well, he'll just sit on me if I disagree, anyways" and did it.
He wondered, idly, if he would have ever realized he was capable of having a boyfriend if it weren't for Sora. It wasn't that Sora was super-special, or anything, it was just that he always ended up being the one who forced Riku to try new things.
Riku thought about that, and looked down at the person curled around him. Sora's hair poked him in the chin, vaguely, and his eyes were shut tight. Riku could feel his warm, solid body deflate and expand with every breath, calm, even, perhaps content. He was covered in Sora-smell, but so was everything around him; the blankets, the flattened pillow underneath Riku's head, the giraffe poster on the wall.
It was strange, a little. Riku always felt like an impostor here.
He looked back down again to the kid who had wrapped himself up in Riku's arms; Sora's eyes were open, now, but he didn't move. He just stared at Riku's chest and blinked sometimes.
"Hey," Riku said, nudging him with his elbow.
Sora didn't say anything.
"Are you alright?"
He shook his head. "Sorry," he said, "Bad dream." Which was funny, because Riku hadn't heard him make any noises or talk in his sleep.
Very hesitantly, Riku patted him on the back; it was awkward and contrived, and he was sure it wasn't helping at all. But, Sora needed to talk, and Riku listened to him.
"Sometimes I can't remember their faces without pictures anymore," Sora said, squeezing Riku even tighter around the middle, "And it makes me feel so sick I want to get sucked into the pit of my stomach." Oh, he was such a sad little boy, sometimes, late at night, when only Riku could see him.
"Shh," Riku said, more for something to say than that he wanted Sora to shut up, and brought his hand up to cradle the back of Sora's head. He felt like a total idiot, when he did that. He felt sappy and lame. He couldn't turn off that part of himself; being angry, pessimistic, judgmental. It was inborn in him or, if not that, conditioned carefully for years and years. Things like that aren't undone in six months. If a person met Riku Tepes, and he was not with or near Sora Goodwin, he would probably still fix you with his nasty stare, because he didn't know what else to do.
He found his thoughts drifting in this direction as he stared over Sora's head to the posters on his wall, and listening to the monotonous hum of the fan's blades like a helicopter, fwumpafwumpafwumpa. Sora wasn't crying or anything; he was just staring at Riku's collarbone thoughtfully.
Sora took a shuddering breath and exhaled; Riku felt an uncomfortable rush of hot air permeate his thin shirt.
"S'okay," Riku muttered, even though he knew Sora didn't want to hear things like that. Didn't want to hear empty comforts. Riku didn't know how to do anything else. He slipped his fingers to massage the back of Sora's skull, spreading his fingertips out, then in under his hair.
"It's not like you've forgotten them," Riku told the top of Sora's head. Sora shook his head.
"I knew what they looked like in May," Sora said. "Every single day I thought about."
"Jesus," Riku grumbled, giving into a brief whim and bringing his nose down to bump Sora's head, "No wonder you're so screwed up."
"I was afraid of forgetting," Sora said defensively, "And then when I stopped - "
"You remember their names?"
"Yeah."
"And you remember they were your parents, and you remember that you love them?"
"Yeah..." Sora said, sounding a little apprehensive. Almost as if he knew what Riku was going to say, and had already decided he didn't want to hear it.
"I think..." Riku realized he had no idea where he was going when he started to say this. Well, he couldn't tell Sora that. Now would be the time to pull a Sora, which was to say to make something up that sounds poetic enough to fool somebody. "Well," he said, "You can't see those things in a photo. So...that's what's...important. 'Cause you can check a photo to remember what they looked like," he felt Sora wince against him when he used the past tense, "But you can't check one for...yeah."
"That's so condescending," Sora said offhandedly. He didn't sound angry about it. Only...underwhelmed.
"Sorry."
"No," Sora said, bringing his head up to look at Riku right in the eyes. "I think you're sort of right. Just...it doesn't work for this situation. I don't think anything anyone can say will make me feel better, anyways, though." Riku sat up on one elbow and Sora compliantly rolled onto his back to make room.
"Okay," Riku said, pulling a piece of Sora's hair away from his eye. "But you'll feel better in the morning."
Sora smiled at him. "Yeah."
They stayed like that for a while, and he didn't know about Sora, but Riku felt his mind go sort of numb in the hazy darkness. He didn't think about things being weird or not weird. They just were. Sora unhappy made him kind of unhappy, so he tried to make Sora happy, and they just were. It was pleasant, dark and thoughtless, even though sometimes he felt the pull of something else telling him no, you're wrong, this is dumb, it's stupid, it's really gay, stop acting like you know so much, something so easy to see again, it never came all the way in.
He just knew that he wanted to, so he leaned down when Sora leaned up and he kissed him. And Riku knew that it felt nice, kissing Sora, and he wondered if it was just because kissing itself felt nice regardless of your partner, but he didn't care about that either. He just knew he liked doing it, and he didn't really feel like stopping so he pushed a little further and Sora gladly let him, and started to move his lips and, eventually, his tongue too. And Riku just knew that it felt nice, at four in the morning, when you couldn't really sleep and your sweat was like glue.
It wasn't the first time they'd had a deep kiss, but Riku sometimes wondered if they were doing it wrong. There was almost never any hot-handed pawing at clothes or, or gasping or anything like that. The most there usually was was Sora would slink his arms around Riku's neck, push some hair out of his face, maybe cup his cheek. Riku didn't count that one time when they went swimming.
But it was nice, it was so goddamn nice, when there was no greedy lust, or whatever it was that made people act like that, in movies, or books. Even in real life. Riku rested the palm of his hand flat on Sora's shoulder, and ran his thumb along the edge of shirt collar and skin, keeping his eyes closed.
Sora was warm, but he was not bad warm. He was not warm the way the dry half of the island was warm with dry heat, and he wasn't warm the way the wet half of the island was, humid. Just nice warm. Human warm.
He had discovered, that summer, that Sora sometimes did not think that if something was nice they should just keep doing that. He curled his hand around the back of Riku's neck and pulled him closer, and deeper, and kissed him harder. But Riku didn't really mind if Sora wanted to do that. It felt good, a sort of ticklish tingling, when something brushed against the roof of your mouth. Like a tongue.
Without really knowing why, Riku detached from Sora with a quiet wet noise and lifted his head back up to look at him. Sora still had one hand on the back of Riku's neck, and he was smiling an idiot grin. Still laying belly-up on the bed, he brought his thumbs and forefingers together in a little square, squeezing one eye shut and holding it in front of Riku's face.
"Click," Riku said, hovering over him with his face set to neutral.
Sora smiled at him and put a hand on his forehead, pushing it up until Riku's bangs stood up. His hand was cool, pleasantly so, and he rubbed his thumb on the bridge of Riku's nose and giggled. "Yeah," he said quietly.
He took his hand away, rolled onto his side and switched on a bedside lamp; he stayed between Riku's hands on the covers, either side of him, and did Riku remember doing that? He didn't remember making an arm cage for Sora, but it was there, and nobody else moved his arms for him. Sora rolled back belly-up, and now the yellow wash of the light was in both of their faces. Riku didn't know about himself, but it threw Sora into fuzzy relief. His right cheek shone with a sheen of sweat, caught by the lamp, and his left was still a vague shadow, and he was still smiling between them. He laced his arms around Riku's neck, stopped smiling, and looked to the side.
"It was a really weird dream," he said, "But I remember almost none of it."
Riku sighed and buckled his elbows, so he was right on top of Sora, and his head was to the side. "Yeah," he said, "I know. I get those. It's fine."
Sora shook his head, ran one hand through Riku's hair, and wiggled a little, which felt really...well. "Let me up," he whined, "I'm thirsty."
"You're always thirsty," Riku said, even though it didn't mean anything and wasn't true, and nuzzled Sora's cheek before rolling off of him. When he'd come to his senses, a few hours later, he would wonder why he never seemed to mind things like this in the early morning. The girly behavior. In the morning, all that mattered was that it felt...nice.
--
Sora had his glass of water, downstairs in the kitchen, and he'd made Riku come down there with him. So, when he headed back upstairs, Riku held back. Not for long. A minute, maybe two.
He leaned against the granite counter, and let it dig into his back, because it was cold. He stared at the refrigerator across from him, old, and white, with a few novelty magnets.
He dug his hands into his hair, both of them, and knew that he probably looked ridiculous and was glad no one was there to see him. He tightened his grip on his head until he felt a dull ache in his skull, and squeezed his eyes shut. When they started to hurt, he opened them, waited for his vision to clear up, and went back upstairs.
Fuckity fuck fuck.
And summer passed like this.
"There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls."
- George Carlin
It was only one week until school started, and Riku had done something he'd never really thought about doing before. He sneaked out of his house just before when he knew his mother would call him for dinner, barefoot. And it felt like he hadn't been alone in such a long time, it felt like every time he'd tuned in to what was happening, Sora was there. Stupid Sora. Listen to this, tell me that, kiss me twice, Sora. Riku was an antisocial person by nature.
The sidewalk had been baking in the summer heat all day, and felt like hot coals under his feet. He imagined his skin drying, shriveling and cracking like soil in a desert in ancient hexagonal shapes with waving lines of heat coming off it. He imagined his skin finally coming off in flakes, like he himself was snowing, white as his goddamn hair, until all that was left was soft pale baby skin. He thought about things like that often, when he was dirty, or sweaty. He thought of his face like a mask, something he could just peel layers off of and have the same face, underneath - but with no scars or smudges. He knew, though, that if he started over it would just get dirty again.
He walked, barefoot, fancying that his feet were cracking like deserts, all the way down to the most hated beach on the whole island. It was right at one of the points of the island, at the base of the mountain range, and suffered all sorts of awful weather. Storms from both sides of the coast pushed giant rocks over the sand such that there was hardly a place to sit, let alone lie down in all the rubble. And it always seemed to catch the gusts of rain that were meant for the dry half of the island.
Oceans on Destiny Island, regardless of where, were almost always sickeningly blue and beautiful. There was a stretch of white sand that dipped into the water for thirty meters before a dark green bed of kelp began, a stark black line. You could always find animals crawling around, baby fish or crabs, tiny yellow snails, sea urchins.
Here was different. It was where the island met, in a peak, and things crashed together. Kelp and algae hung tiredly to the sides of weather-beaten rocks, rising and falling with the water, and there was always an angry wet rushing sound. And nobody came, ever. Biologists didn't come, because there was hardly anything to study here that couldn't be studied somewhere else less dangerous. The only animals were obstinate crabs which hunkered down underneath boulders and snapped at the slow-moving snails. Riku never really came here, at all.
But he carefully, so carefully, levered himself down from the path onto the rock nearest him. It was the size of half a school bus, grey like wet clay, and soaked from a recent rain. It felt wonderfully cold to Riku's cracked desert feet, and he walked all the way down it and hopped carefully onto a darker boulder, and continued rock-hopping until he got as close as he dared to the shore. He sat down and dangled he feet over the edge of the boulder.
There was a plastic bottle floating in the angry black water, which beat against the rock and, by extension, his feet, soothingly. He stooped down and snatched the bottle up, holding it up to the cloud-covered sun. It began to rain, quite hard, and so his view of the inside of the bottle of seawater was blurry. There was some tiny animal inside, like a shrimp or an underwater pill bug, swimming around with tiny little legs and bumping into the sides. Riku shrugged and upended the bottle over the water, then held it over his head like an exceptionally bad umbrella.
He tossed it back into the ocean, intending to get it out of his sight, but the waves soon brought it back and crashed it onto the rocks again. He laughed, quietly, and kicked it with his foot. And then he laughed louder and ignored the rumbling thunder, leaning back and folding his hands behind his head, staring up at the puffy grey sky. It was like being stuck in your own tiny world, with the rain. Like a little blanket. It kept everything else out and rained freshwater on saltwater.
He kicked his feet against the boulder absently, felt the dull thud as they connected and bounced back out. He closed his eyes and felt the rain on his face, like shower water but...softer, somehow, more purposeful and less abrasive, like it couldn't get anything clean.
And his mother would be furious with him when he got home, and his father would back her up because that's what the two of them did, and he would stand there like a wet dog in the rain and listen to them and apologize. He would go up to his room and take off his shirt and wring it out, right on the covers of the bed, and get every drop of rainwater mixed with seawater out and on there, and he'd do the same with his hair, and then flop down on the bed and let the wetness touch his bare back, and he'd think about flying and day lilies and dying and horses and lights and exacto knives and whatever the Hell else came into his brain, because he could, and needed to. He thought about leaving the island, and about college, and about graduation, and going back to school. And he fell asleep thinking about these things.
"In the end, you'll know which people really love you. They're the ones who see you for who you are and, no matter what, always find a way to be at your side."
- Randy Milholland
Kairi flopped down next to Sora and Riku on the wall.
"So," she said, "What'd you guys do over summer? My parents dragged me back to Japan." She sighed. "Again."
Both of the boys were silent for a few seconds, Riku because he was on autopilot, before Sora cheerfully replied, "Last week Riku ran around my house naked for forty-five minutes in a row!"
Riku sat forward abruptly with his eyes widened, coughing out quite loudly. Oh dear God, Sora. He would bring that up. You would think, with a girl being present, that some things were off limits.
"Hey," he said, waving his pointer finger at Kairi, "Sora is making that sound way worse than it is."
Sora was giggling very hard, and it wasn't helping Riku's dignity very much. Kairi raised her eyebrows and grinned.
"Well?" she said. "I'd love to hear this."
"I - it's just that we'd just gone to the beach, and - I was wearing a towel," Riku protested, prodding Sora in the arm. "First off, I was wearing a towel, because we'd just come back from the beach and I had taken a shower. And I needed to find my watch."
"Hey," Sora said, "I'm not complaining." He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. "I could look at you a-a-all day, baby."
"Dear God," Riku hissed, then whacked Kairi in the thigh when she started to laugh hysterically. "Is nothing sacred to you people?"
Kairi smiled at him and nudged his knee with her hand. "I think you guys are cute. It's cool, that you can be so normal about it."
"I just think it's funny," Sora said, and didn't direct it to anyone in particular, "How technically Riku should be the least fucked up of all three of us but - "
Riku reached an arm behind Kairi and shoved Sora so that he fell to the side, giggling, and flopping his flip-floppy feet onto Kairi's lap. He slid off of the wall and leaned up against it with his arms crossed, though Kairi and Sora (once he sat up) continued to sit, dangling their feet over the edge as if they were on big boulders in between the two halves of the island. Riku thought about sticking one earbud in his ear, but decided against it.
"Hey, Riku."
"Yeah, Kairi?" He was surprised by how readily he answered her. It felt completely natural, her sitting there, between them. It didn't feel like intruding. Maybe it was a familiar pose. After all, they'd dragged her between them when she was nearly dead from alcohol poisoning. But he didn't think it was that, either. Maybe she was like a referee, or something, or at least...the person who made their relationship or whatever official. Because she knew and she liked it.
That was a lie. He was trying to like her, and sure, he did. He just didn't quite know what to make of Kairi. She had decided, much like Sora had decided, that she was their good friend now, all of a sudden. She just casually came up and asked how their summers had been. And Sora acted natural, so Riku did too.
"You're taking honors French too, right?"
"Yeah."
"Guess who our like, sort-of-TA is?"
Riku frowned. "Our what?" She shrugged.
"You know how for, like, chemistry, they made some of the upperclassmen with free periods come in to make sure we didn't blow stuff up? Like that, only for French," she said.
"So?"
"C'est moi!" Sora cried, and flopped himself over dramatically so he was lying across Kairi's lap and his face was near Riku's.
"Why?" Riku admitted he had a slightly harsh tone then.
Sora raised his eyebrows. "Well, I'm doing it instead of taking an English-learning course or another foreign language. Like, I had the option to do either, but I wanted to do this since it seemed like more fun and I might get to go on the France trip with the whole class over winter break." He wrinkled his nose and sat back up. "Why do they call it winter break? It doesn't snow."
Riku absently put his hand on top of Sora's head and watched the stream of cars in front of the school building. "They have to call it something."
"It is winter break," Kairi was saying, "Just because it doesn't snow doesn't mean it isn't winter."
They had history together, this year, even though history was a joke. Riku already knew he didn't want anything to do with history once he got to college, so didn't bother taking an AP.
He slid into a chair, dumping his backpack underneath the desk. He sort of despised how the rooms were all built exactly the same. On this side of the building they face this direction with this configuration of desks, the whiteboard goes here. It was horrible, because it was just like Dr. Zexion's cell bio room, but with different posters on the wall. It was just lame.
He had even subconsciously chosen the exact same seat he'd been assigned to last year.
And Sora had - perhaps, also, subconsciously - sat down next to him.
"Hey," Riku said to his boyfriend (though still, he shuddered to think the word because it was...so high school), and Sora glanced up at him and smiled, scooted his chair a little closer.
"What's up," he said dully.
Riku shrugged. "Just had English, you?"
Sora didn't reply. He stared at the white clock with square black numbers, mounted on the wall, and rested his chin on his hand. Riku watched it too. The second hand was so odd, compared to non-school clocks. For one, it went in a steady circle instead of jumping, or ticking. And it was the red hand. Riku wondered why the second hand was red and everything else was black. It emphasized, almost, the slowest part. You waited all that time and only a minute passed.
"Somebody just committed suicide just now," Sora said. "Somewhere."
"Sora?"
"I'm fine." He rested his chin on the desk, flanked by his arms, and closed his eyes. Kids shuffled in around them. "Statistically it was a teenager. A gay one. Since like ten percent of gay teenagers try."
"...Sora - "
"It's been a weird day, Riku. I just want to go home. Okay?" He opened his eyes and slid them over to Riku's face and winced. "Oh," was what Riku said to him.
That's what he said. "Oh."
God, he was so fucking useless.
"Roxas tried to run away from home," Sora said. "For a couple of hours. He told me. He didn't get lost."
"Sorry," Riku said, because he was a stupid ass.
"'S no big deal," Sora sighed and sat up. "He snuck into a circus trailer, can you believe it?" Sora snickered. "He thought if he got far away enough he wouldn't get caught. But he told me he chickened out and got off."
Riku glanced at the clock, then at their teacher. She was arranging something on her desk. "That's good," Riku said, "He probably could have gotten into trouble if he hadn't gone back." Sora frowned at him then, the way he'd frowned at him that one night in summer.
"You think so?" Sora said. "I guess..." He leaned back and folded his hands over his belly and watched the teacher start to write on the whiteboard in blue expo marker. He sighed. "I'm missing school tomorrow."
"Why?"
"I have to go to the doctor's office or wherever to get my hand checked up," he said, which to Riku didn't seem like a good enough reason for missing a whole day of school, "and I have to take some test to check if I have OCD."
"You do? Why do you have to take one of those?"
Sora shrugged. "I've got no idea." He pressed a hand to the top of his head. "I don't think anyone with my hair could have OCD without going crazy."
Riku laughed, "Yeah," and then read the words written on the board. The teacher was just finishing up, and she dotted the sentence with a period and a flourish:
"Nothing ever goes away."
She stood to face the class and tapped the back of one knuckle against the whiteboard. "Okay, guys," she said, "I don't expect you to know where or what this is from, but I want you to keep this is mind all year, okay? It's important when you study history to know that we study it for a reason - " and launched into a speech Riku had heard twice before from different people, different years. It was dull. But he looked at the words written on the whiteboard, like reading the same passage in a textbook over and over because it isn't sinking in. Nothing ever goes away, nothing ever goes away, what does that mean? Well, he knew what it meant, of course, on a literal level. History is still relevant today, blah blah blah.
Was that a good thing? It probably meant some cheesy Disney motto like "even when people are gone, they're still in our hearts" or something. Or maybe it meant that the past always catches up to people, nobody can run away - ? And was a bad thing.
Maybe it meant both, Hell if he knew. Either way, it was at odds with the "change is the only constant" bull that seemed popular to spew around now. He didn't get it. Maybe there was nothing to get.
But he wrote it down on the inside flap of his binder, all the same, and circled it.
He kept thinking about Sora when he went home, and how funny it would be if it turned out the kid did have OCD. Of all of the stupid problems he could have. Of all the goddamn things that ought to be wrong with him, stress or anger or paranoia or depression, which he didn't have but ought to, if he had OCD of all things. Riku doubted he did, though.
He went into his room and closed the door, and dropped his bag, and climbed on all fours onto his bed. He crawled forward until he could look out the window at the foot of the bed, pulled aside a curtain which was just for show anyways, and looked at the side of the street that had the short end of the stick. Some twelve-year-old kid went by, getting dragged by her gigantic dog towards a car or a bush or something.
Riku groaned and hopped off the bed, going over to turn on his computer. He waited for it to boot up and pulled his cellphone out of his pocket, instinctively checking it for updates, even though there never were any. He hardly ever used it.
He opened an internet browser on his computer and sat down at his desk, and stared at the search bar and the line just inside of it on the left which blinked at him insistently. On off. On off. On off, on. Like it was buzzing.
After a while, and without even knowing why, he typed:
.
am i even really alive?
.
He didn't hit enter for a long time. First he sat there, and looked at what he'd written, and wondered why'd he'd written it, because he wasn't really thinking about it at the time. Sora was so full of answers. He just had a stupid question. Answer me this. Please. And the text bar blinked at the end of the sentence, reminding him how easily he could delete it.
He hit enter and winced before looking at the results, knowing full well what he'd find already.
Why am I alive? - Psychic and Medium Experiences
Michael Jackson is really alive - LiveTime Teen Forums
Why am I even alive? I never should have been born - Yahoo! Answers
2pac is really alive..autospy photo is a FAKE!! - Message Boards
Riku turned off the monitor and closed his eyes. He kicked the wall, SLAM!, as hard as he could, and waited for things on the desk to stop shaking.
Why, why, why, people only ever asked WHY, they never asked if! Not ever! Like it wasn't even a question. He dug a hand into his hair and landed his elbow on the desk. It felt like all of his limbs were buzzing.
He was so sick of himself. And he just...wanted to see Sora, who would have answered him, even if it was with something stupid. He needed something to make himself feel safe again. They always said that the problem with an open mind was that people insisted on coming along and putting things in it. And now he was sitting here typing shit into a computer even though he knew it would only spew detritus back at him.
He picked up his phone again and flipped it open. No new messages. He punched a few numbers in and stared at it for a second before hitting send.
"Hello?"
"Hey, it's me."
"Sup, Riks?"
He didn't even seem surprised to be getting the phone call or anything. Even though Riku almost never called anyone, ever, because he didn't need to. Didn't want to. Liked his privacy. But Riku just needed something.
"I don't know, nothing."
"Pff. You would never call for no reason."
"I just did."
"Riku? Are you alright?" Sora sounded worried.
Riku thought about that. No, not really, but it would pass. It always did. He couldn't have been the first person ever to get sick of something, or to get lonely.
"Fine," Riku said, "It's been a weird day."
Sora's laughter sounded purely like static over the phone. "Oh, very clever. Hahaha. I'm sorry I acted all weird in history. But hey, me acting weird is not really that unusual anymore, huh?" Riku laughed halfheartedly and yawned.
"But yeah, sorry about that. Are we cool?"
"Yeah, sure. Sora?"
"What?"
"...nothing. Call me after you've been diagnosed with severe crazy at the hospital."
"I will. I promise. -- oh, I gotta go, Belle's calling me for something. Love you, bye!"
Riku paused. "Ah," he said, "Yeah, me too, bye," and hung up really quickly.
And the next day, Sora sat on the bed and Riku leaned up against it and Sora wrapped his arms around Riku's shoulders.
"So?" Riku said, "Are you officially diagnosed with anything?"
Sora hugged him and bumped his forehead against his cheek, "Nope." He giggled and sat up again and started to play with Riku's hair. It wasn't so much playing as it was systematic pulling, really. "Well, yeah. They said I had really, really minor OCD, maybe, but that it's not enough to bother doing anything about, so they won't."
"Oh," Riku said, "That's good."
"Hm," Sora grunted noncommittally and pulled a notebook out of his backpack. He opened it to a blank page and looked at it for a good few seconds. He didn't really pay attention to the paper, of course. It was rare that he went to Riku's house. It wasn't that Riku didn't let him come, or anything, it was just that it was usually Sora who did the inviting. And you can't invite yourself over to someone else's house.
So he rolled onto his back and thought to himself, I am lying down on Riku's bed, and it's really soft. And after a minute, Mm, it smells like Riku, kinda. Didn't I have to talk to him about something...?
"Oh!" he sat up and poked his boyfriend in the back. Riku jolted and then swiveled his head around to look at Sora. The way he looked at people had really barely changed at all. It was still like sharp, like dead. "I have a question for you."
"Mm?"
Sora took a breath. "Do you want to meet Roxas?"
Riku blinked at him, was silent, and then spoke. "Why do you ask?"
Wow, that was such a Riku thing to ask. 'Depends on if you're offering, Sora, jeez.' Well, whatever. He was Riku. You can't get cats to swim.
"Well, for the France trip. I got home today and he called me and I was kind of thinking I could get him to fly over from England for winter break, and he says he might be able to if he can get somebody to come with him! And he has somebody he can ask, apparently, like a real adult. 'Member that Axel guy I told you about?"
Riku did more than remember, he'd seen the pictures in the email.
"Oh my GOD," Sora had said, and spun around in his chair to stare at Riku. "Is it possible that Reno has like, a twin he was separated from at birth, or like a secret clone!?"
"What?"
"C'mere, look at this picture Rox sent me."
Riku did. It was of a sort of Sora, a sort of Kairi, and a sort of Reno.
A blond boy with Sora's face and different eyes sat on a tree branch next to a girl with black hair and Kairi's face and a man with spiky red hair and Reno's face.
"The blond kid, he's your little brother?" Riku had said eventually.
"Yeah," Sora had said, "Roxas."
"That I get," Riku had muttered, "But that guy looks freakishly like Reno."
"Yeah. That's what's creeping me out. But I don't think he's related at all."
But Riku had not been paying attention; he'd been staring at that Roxas guy. It seemed...wrong. Having Sora's face. It was like the whole picture, everything in it, was off; something somewhere had been misplaced and somebody took a picture of it. Like there were two Soras, and they were completely different people.
It had taken Riku almost a week to realize what disturbed him about it. That Sora really did have a little brother. That he had a life outside of Destiny Island, always would, and would probably always cling to it. And Riku? He had nothing. He was the kid who grew up on the island and had never left the archipelago, didn't play any instruments, didn't really have any interests, didn't play sports, hated people. And he had no secret brothers hidden in circuses halfway across the world. He was plain old Riku and Sora was shiny-new-Sora. Riku could be summed up in a sentence, on the dry half of the island. And dammit, Riku was the dry half of the island and it seemed like Sora was everything else.
"Yes," Riku said, "I remember him. Reno's look-alike, right?"
"Yeah, since he works at a circus, he doesn't do anything during the off-months, and that includes like, basically all of winter. Like, he has to train and stuff, but he can prolly get out of it for a week, Roxas says." Sora beamed. "So? You wanna meet my little brother, don't you? I bet he wants to meet you more than anything."
Riku shrugged and zipped up a pocket of his backpack. "What makes you say that?" Although he remembered the conversation he'd heard on the phone when he was half-asleep. He wondered what Sora had said about him when he couldn't hear.
"Well, he knows you're my friend, and he knows that I'm..." Sora trailed off, "And he's not dumb, so he's probably figured...it's just, you know, I think he'd like you. He's a quiet guy, too, sort of."
Riku shrugged, and nodded. "Okay," he said, because winter still seemed a good few months off. And when you were a teenager, that was ages. It was six term papers, ten labs, fourteen essays, forty quizzes and twenty-five tests away. It was practically forever. It was like being in the beginning of summer and not even being able to imagine school starting again.
Sora didn't do anything except shrug and go back to whatever was on the bed that was so interesting. After a minute or two, he turned to look at Riku again, and said, "I'm going to hug you now, okay?"
"Mm, mmf," Riku grunted.
Sora rolled his eyes and wrapped his arms around Riku's neck from behind and squeezed gently. He kissed Riku on the ear. "Thank you for not being dead," Sora told him, "And also thank you in advance for getting to a ridiculously old age, like maybe triple-digits, and being one of those cranky wrinkly guys that yells at little kids whose bouncy balls land on his lawn."
"Are you done?"
Sora thought about it. "And for constantly talking about the 'good old days' and how everything sucks and that you miss nostalgia. I think that's it."
Riku sighed and turned his head to look at Sora, who grinned at him. "You're a weird kid," he said, "You know that? You're a really weird guy."
Sora kissed him full on the mouth, and Riku felt his cheeks get hot, and he thought about his mom being right down stairs. "Yep," Sora said, "Roxas says that too. I can't wait until you meet him."
Riku could.
A/N: I love how the entirety of this chapter can be summed up in "It's senior year, they're still dating, oh and Roxas is gonna show up eventually."
Other than that. Please tell me, honestly, if you thought this was entirely useless. I know what I meant by it, but that doesn't mean my intentions are clear to people who don't live in my head 24/7. So thoughts are really heavily appreciated, as is constructive criticism or, really, anything else you have to say.
I drew a koi on my cellphone (...cellphone...) but it's in pencil and I don't have any pointy black sharpies. This is a tragedy. I don't even like koi that much; I keep trops. I just like the idea of drawing on things that we put on such a pedestal as clean, perfect devices. And then it's like "no wait, I drew a cartoon with bat wings on the back of my iPod. Take that Apple. Hit you right in the minimalism."