And That's Where You Renew Your Springs that Never Dry Up.
A/N: (Wow, I felt a little pervy writing this chapter even though like nothing sexual happens.)
Um, does it go question-mark-exclamation-point or exclamation-point-question-mark? When you're putting emphasis on a question. (i.e. "What are you doing to that hamster?!" vs. "What are you doing to that hamster!?") I had thought it was the latter, but very few people do it that way...it just seems more final to me, or something. Like the question mark is a close-parentheses.
...by the way, what are you doing to that hamster?
"Let us make one point, that we meet each other with a smile, when it is difficult to smile. Smile at each other, make time for each other in your family."
- Mother Teresa
Riku shifted uncomfortably in front of the Cinnabon stand. There was something hideous and unnerving about an airport. It was an open space, and you couldn't tell what the walls were made of besides "speckled grey something". And the windows were too high up, and too big, and let in too much light. He couldn't help but feel like it was a really good place for a bird to get stuck and die trying to ram its way out.
He hated watching people walk by, heads bowed, muttering into cellphones and dragging luggage in and out. He knew they were silly, the things he was thinking. An airport was about going from one place to another place, it wasn't for fun, and people had just gotten off of red-eye flights or had woken at five in the morning to be here on time, or something. But he couldn't help what his brain was doing.
Useless people, cranky for no reason, won't even make eye contact with each other or anything. What makes the whole world so unfriendly?
He kept thinking these things, even though he knew he looked pretty unfriendly, even though he was pretty unfriendly, even though all these people were not at their best anyways. Everybody was tired and cranky at an airport. You were...allowed to be. Riku was tired and cranky all the time. Oh well. At least he knew that now.
He pulled out one of the white plastic chairs from under one of the white plastic tables and sat down, propping his chin on his hand and watching Sora and Kairi order food. Maybe he should have said yes when they asked if he wanted something, it was an eight-hour flight and he didn't like peanuts very much. But they probably fed you real food on the plane.
He yawned and fingered the zipper on his vest absently. It was weird. It was - what? - maybe sixty-five, seventy degrees Fahrenheit here, and apparently when they landed it was supposed to be ten degrees and maybe snowing. Riku had never been in a place that was ten degrees and snowing. And he remembered wondering, a while ago, if snow really did look the way it did in movies, all pretty and magical and covering everything evenly. He doubted it. Sunsets in movies were always pretty, and they were in real life, too, but not much else was. Not ever. People in movies went from ugly antisocial pigs to pretty popular queens in a montage. People didn't do that where Riku was.
Maybe they did it in other places. Hell if he knew anything. Sometimes he felt like he didn't know a fucking thing.
Kairi and Sora were still waiting for there order to be given to them, standing in front of the food stand and chatting easily. Sora said something, started giggling, and Kairi stuck her tongue out and crossed her arms. The happy cheerful couple, right? Sure. Riku didn't care, he just didn't really care any more. He didn't know why they put up with him. And honestly, he was pretty sure that if Sora wasn't...the way he was, he'd be dating Kairi like there was no tomorrow.
Maybe.
Riku didn't really know. He was tired, and he was thinking depressing things mostly for the sake of it. He had had to buy a jacket, with long sleeves and a wool lining and everything, and he had it in his carry-on bag, and it seemed ridiculous to have that with him but...oh well. He smiled when Kairi and Sora came back with a tray of sodas and fries and something that was probably either a cake or a pastry or...something.
"Hey," Sora said, sitting down. The plastic chair scraped against the clean white airport tiles. "I know you said you didn't want anything, but it occurred to me that you'd say that even if you did want something, anyways, so we got you soda and I'm gonna jam some fries down your throat."
Riku just stared at Sora blankly until Kairi nudged him with her foot.
"Aw," she said distinctly, "Isn't that really sweet of your boyfriend, Riku? Huh?" She kicked him in the ankle.
"Ow! You two are psychotic!" he muttered, pulling his feet back and hooking them around the legs of the chair. He planted his elbows on the table and moodily watched Sora screw the cap off of a soda bottle and take a drink. He didn't really like soda, it made his nose itch. Riku shrugged, yawned again and looked at the window. And it's another bright and sunny day on Destiny Island, just like it was yesterday, just like it'll be tomorrow and it's a great day to get outside and play with the kids! Just like every day!
"Okay," Kairi took her phone out of her purse and flipped it open. "I think the flight leaves in like, a little over an hour, but I'm gonna go check with one of the teachers now. Back in five," she flipped her cellphone closed and scooted out of her chair.
Riku watched her go. She was wearing a miniskirt and a tanktop. He was pretty sure - he wasn't totally sure, but he was pretty sure - that that was a really bad idea. Sure, it was fine when you were on the island. But his mom had checked the weather reports, and it was supposed to be ten degrees and maybe snowing in Annecy by the time they landed.
Sora was wearing pants and a long-sleeved t shirt, which, to Riku, seemed a lot more sensible. Plus, Sora had actually lived in France before. Riku was leaning towards thinking maybe Sora was the authority on the subject. Kairi had been wearing flip-flops. Sora was wearing sneakers.
"What?" Sora said, tilting his head to the side questioningly. "What is it?"
"Huh?" Riku met his eyes.
"You were looking at me funny," Sora said.
"Oh, ah, no. Just...spacing out." Riku shook his head and ran a hand through his hair. "It still feels weird."
"What does?"
"My hair." Every time he brushed hair out of his face or combed through it absently, it stopped before he expected it to. He'd gotten it cut a few days ago on a sort of a whim. That and, well, he was sick of looking like a gay pirate. Of course, it still reached to just barely past his shoulders (instead of a good few inches), but any shorter and he wouldn't have been able to put it into a ponytail. And he didn't think he could handle a buzz cut.
Sora shrugged, "I like it short," he said, smiling. Riku rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair, resting his arms on the armrests. Sora leaned out to touch the hair on the back of his neck. "I dunno, makes you look more mature," he told Riku.
Snort. "You're one to talk."
Sora stuck his tongue out. "It's not my fault! I had a brief dreadlock phase when I was fifteen and they just...never came fully undone. And...Roxas copied me."
Riku started laughing when he said that. "Tch," Sora muttered, "Shut up, idiot." And he leaned in and kissed Riku on the mouth.
Sometimes, when Sora was kissing him, Riku found it kind of really hard to think, and especially hard to think full sentences. Or coherently. But only sometimes. It was starting to happen more often, from practice or something, Riku figured. Or when Sora did the swirly thing with his tongue which tickled. Whatever it was, it was getting really distracting.
He didn't let that happen this time. He pulled away from Sora almost immediately, glanced at the stream of people walking by past the food stands. Heads bowed, muttering into cellphones, no gawking. That he saw, anyways. Maybe it was because there were teenagers everywhere right now.
Which was another thing.
God dammit, Sora!
"Idiot," he muttered, "We're in public."
Sora snorted and giggled. "The public can close their eyes!" Riku pinched his lips together and pushed his carry-on bag underneath his chair with his foot. He kept looking for people gawking at them. "A boy just kissed another boy! Oh my gosh, are they gays?!" He rubbed his mouth on his sleeve. He felt bad for doing it, but it shouldn't be news to Sora.
Speaking of whom, Sora was looking at him with sad eyes again. "I'm sorry," Riku muttered.
"It's fine," Sora said earnestly, "I don't mind, I just wish you wouldn't get so freaked out about it."
Riku sighed. "Yeah, I'm sure I'll get over it," he said.
"Oh my God, you guys," Kairi jogged the remaining few meters to the table, "I leave for - " she checked her phone, " - three and a half minutes and you start trying to eat Riku's face?" She sat down and glared at Sora.
Sora smiled at her, scooted his chair closer to Riku and leaned on his shoulder in a sarcastic display of affection. After a time he stared blankly down at the table. "You know an expression I don't understand?"
Neither of them said anything. So, Sora gave up and just told them.
"Creamy skin," he said, poking Riku's arm. "How is that sexy at all? Comparing your skin to cream. Like 'Wow, your skin's so pretty it looks like it got squirted out of a cow's udder!' How does that make sense?" He picked up a plastic fork and started to pick apart the pastry on the tray experimentally.
"I don't think that people usually associate cream with cows," Kairi was saying, "Just that cream is sort of like...sweet, and like...just one color? I dunno. Like," she thought about it for a second, "Cream is probably sexier than cheese. Like if I said 'You've got cheesy skin,' that would probably be an insult."
"Insulting what, I don't know," Riku added and then fell silent. He stared moodily at the soda. Goddamn. Of course she'd have a counterargument. Of course she'd have something to say back. Riku was the only person in the world who couldn't come up with instant replies. Maybe he was just a really slow thinker. Maybe he was stupid. Whatever.
Coach seats were about as fun as a parasite, Riku decided, when the person in front of you insisted on reclining their chair all the way back. He hadn't been on a plane in such a long time, though, he was finding it hard to focus on anything else. He was careful with the seat belt, and he tightened it snugly against his lap.
He had an aisle seat. He knew that was a good thing, since it meant easy access to the bathroom and to food, or whatever, but he couldn't help thinking it was unfair Sora got a window seat. Kairi sat between them, she was probably worst off, but still. Sora had probably been on a plane more times than he had fingers. Why was he the one who got to leave his fingerprints on the glass?
Riku blinked a little harder. Their plane left at nine o'clock, sharp, which for some reason meant you were supposed to show up at the airplane at seven in the morning. Riku lived pretty far away from it, though. He was tired.
That wasn't saying much. He felt like he'd been tired for about a million years. He couldn't remember being not tired since before high school started in freshman year.
He sighed and rubbed his eye. He glanced at Kairi, who was still fiddling with her seat belt. She kept tugging on the strap to pull it further through the loop without much success.
"Here," Riku leaned over and gave the strap a strong pull. It tightened against her stomach. He sat up again and checked that his own belt hadn't come undone; he sneezed. The padded pleather seats were not really making up for the stale airplane smell. They had tiny televisions on the backs of the seats in front of them and those crappy static headphones wrapped in plastic and resting against the arm of each chair.
"Thanks," Kairi said. She laughed. "Wow, that would have been so awkward if it was like, anybody else!" she said.
Riku didn't really know what she meant by that, so he laughed quietly and nodded, then turned back to his carry-on bag. He considered taking his mp3 out but he didn't know if that counted as an electronic device that would mess up the plane's signals or whatever. He was pretty sure it wasn't, but he didn't want to risk it yet.
"Phoo," Sora said, two seats over. He had buckled his seat belt, but he'd left it loose enough to probably fit another person on top of his lap. He was kneeling on the seat, hands pressed against the glass of the tiny window. He breathed onto it, "Haa," and rubbed his sleeve in tiny circles to clear it up. "It's all scratched!"
"Sora, it's gonna be mostly a boring view of clouds the whole time, anyways," Riku said, turning the tiny television on experimentally. It was only maybe five or six inches wide. He didn't know about when they took off, but while they were grounded on the tarmac, he couldn't do anything but look at a little map of Destiny Island and a dotted red line leading to eastern France. There was a comically large plane icon on the Destiny Island end of the line.
"I like clouds," Sora was saying, "I know a guy named Cloud. He's a real nice guy, or was, last time I saw him."
Kairi made a face at him. "Sora, nobody is named Cloud. Either his parents are hippies or that's a stripper name."
Sora turned around and planted his ass in the seat again to stare at Kairi blankly. His eyes flicked to Riku. "I don't know what that word means," he deadpanned. Kairi started laughing again.
(It didn't really take that much to make Kairi laugh, Riku was learning, but he kind of didn't mind her anyways.)
"Ri-ku! What's that mean?" Sora whined.
Riku tried pushing some of the buttons next to the TV screen. A bar showed up when he hit the volume, and he played around with making it longer and shorter. It didn't make any sound, though; he didn't have the earphones plugged in.
"You know, Sora," he said, "I'll, uh, explain it to you when...uh, in private."
It was funny. That was probably the first time in a few weeks at least that Sora hadn't known what an English word meant. It reminded Riku of that first day, that first word, Am-big-you-us. Am-big-you-us, are you and we big? He didn't know, it was a weird string of words. Ambiguous. It almost sounded like a sentence when you said it like that.
Riku wondered if Sora would bother putting the definition of "stripper" down in his little French-English dictionary. Oh, Hell, he hoped not.
When they finally took off, Riku felt like his ears were about to pop, but he couldn't even look outside and watch the plane leave the ground without craning his neck and making it worse. It was probably the first time he'd left the island since he was ten. Sora was staring out at the ground, though, probably thinking of the last plane he was on.
The plane stopped climbing eventually, and when it did, you were allowed to start changing channels and things. Riku plugged in the terrible fuzzy earphones and started to watch a cooking show.
Kairi was starting to hate sitting still. Or, really, she was starting to hate it more than she did before. They must have crossed a date line or something, because it was totally dark outside, and most of the people on the plane were asleep.
She went on long plane rides at least twice a year, to and from Japan with her family (oh, wasn't that fun this year, right after the alcohol poisoning deal), but she usually didn't have to sit in the middle. Usually that was one of her parents. And they could fall asleep on each other's shoulders.
Oh, well. It was still pretty cool, the idea of going on a whole big trip to Europe. Ten days! Ten, Kairi mused sleepily, was a lot of days. It was three days more than a week.
Hm-mm. She looked around. Sora and Riku looked like they were basically asleep. Sora was leaning against the window awkwardly; Riku just looked like he was sitting with his eyes closed.
She felt a little bit dizzy, like something had come loose in the back of her skull and her brain was floating around in her head. Probably just motion sickness or something. Or scent-sickness, God, wasn't there some way of getting rid of the puke-and-sweat smell on this thing? Yeock.
She could see, in front of her between the seats, one person was still watching a movie. She watched a pale man in nothing but black pants stride into the middle of a pentacle and sink his teeth into the neck of a young woman. Vampire flick. Great. And she had a perfect view from where she was sitting.
Well, whatever, it wasn't like she had to look in that direction.
She leaned down and riffled through her bag. She felt the smooth plastic shape of a tube of mascara, some chapstick, her watch...it seemed like forever until she reached her book. She pulled it out.
She owned it, of course, but it was a hard-back, and she would have felt back dog-earing the pages. She flipped on the lights above her head and tried to remember the page she'd been on. It was somewhere around a hundred, maybe? Maybe a little further.
"What's that?" Riku's voice always surprised her, even now. He was so quiet, usually. Not shy quiet, really, just a sort of comfortable quiet.
"My book?" she asked, glancing up at him. She still sort of dreaded looking at Riku in the eyes. She held the book up so he could see, and he touched his fingers to the cover so he could hold it still.
"Cool," he said after a second, "Is it good?"
She nodded and smiled. "It's my third time reading it, but it's a travel book."
He looked at her again. "Travel book?" Gay or not, sexless or not, Riku Tepes talking to her on a plane in the middle of the night was a kind of surreal experience. She wondered what made him start up the conversation. Maybe he'd been faking sleep.
She shrugged at him, "I mean, since I already know the story, it's no big deal if I zone out for a little while while reading it, y'know? If I miss something this time around, I already know it. So I don't need to pay as much attention in case, like, I'm on a car or a train and I'm getting bumped around a lot."
He nodded once and rested his chin on his hand. His gaze lingered near the window, unsurprisingly.
It was a clear night. Or, above the clouds, it was, but Kairi supposed it was always that way, right? She didn't know. She couldn't get rid of that floating-head feeling.
Nobody said anything for a very long time. The glare of the tacky vampire movie was a little distracting, and more than once Kairi found her eyes drifting towards it, but she inevitably ended up staring at the tiny window again.
After a while, "D'you think Sora's really asleep, or is he faking?" Kairi asked with a sort of giggle.
"Uh," Riku rested one hand on their shared arm rest and leaned over Kairi's lap for the second time in the plane ride. He looked at Sora. "Nope, he's all the way asleep."
"How can you tell?"
Riku sat up straighter and yawned like a lion, with his teeth showing. "He's doing that foot-twitchy thing. He doesn't know he does it, so he can't do it when he's faking sleep. He's like a dog having a dream about chasing bunnies."
Kairi tugged on her skirt a little to straighten it out and glanced at Sora's feet (he'd kicked his shoes off fifteen minutes into the air), curled up on the seat of the chair. Sure enough, one of them was periodically twitching a little, and so did his nose.
She glanced at Riku and grinned, then back at Sora. "Aw," she said mockingly.
"You say that now, but wait until he starts kicking," Riku said. "You're gonna have a bruise on your leg."
Kairi scooted in her seat a little further towards Riku's side. "He kicks?"
"Hard," he told her. "I told you, he's like a dog." She thought about Sora and Riku sleeping next to each other. She wouldn't be surprised if Riku never said anything about the kicking to Sora. He probably just lay there and rolled his eyes and suffered in silence, because he was just like that.
It really did make conversation kind of difficult, without Sora as a buffer, but she was sure he was a very nice person. He struck as the sort of person who tries very hard not to stand out in school, the type that were always secretly good at something. Besides, it was sort of refreshing to speak to someone like Riku! You never knew what he was going to say, since he didn't say much usually, or at least not to Kairi.
She didn't want to think about passing out and leaning half her weight on his shoulders. She didn't want to remember that at all, the whole experience of that night. Her parents had barely agreed to let her come on this trip. Her uncle, on her dad's side, was a recovering alcoholic; they were certain it ran rampant in the family. Maybe they were right, but Kiari wasn't stupid enough to go drinking herself into a stupor again! If she knew it might happen, she wasn't going to risk it.
But they had been convinced that if she, "a young teenage girl," went to Europe where they must drink and smoke and give wine to babies, that she would have no self control.
She was pretty sure, too, that they'd only agreed because she told them she was going to be there with the people who'd brought her to the hospital in the first place. Even then, they'd went and called up all the teachers on the trip and told them to "keep an eye on her".
She felt horrible enough as it was. The school guidance counselor giving her talks about all the kids he'd seen die or become disabled from drinking, the kids in jail or rehab for substance abuse, the "this is your brain on drugs and alcohol" pictures. It was like her own mini sex ed class. She resented that she was the only one getting crap for drinking when easily over half the kids there had been doing it.
She shook her head to clear it. It was easy to get sucked into the pit of anger regarding last May; best to avoid it until it became a tale of the past.
Thinking to strike up a conversation, she turned to look at Riku, a question about where they were staying on her lips. Neutral ground.
He was asleep again, or pretending to be, his head lolling to the side and his eyes closed. His breathing was deep and even, and he made a little nasal noise that wasn't quite a snore.
Kairi gave up and turned off her overhead light. Plugging the earphone jack into its slot on her seat, she decided she may as well catch the rest of that horrible vampire flick that the person in front of her was watching. They still had two more hours to go.
Sora never really fell asleep on planes, or cars, or boats.
Well, he did, but it wasn't really sleep?
Like his eyes were closed and he wasn't really conscious but he could open his eyes if he needed to?
It was like dunking your brain in a cloud. He was basically asleep, but when he heard someone say his name in passing he pulled himself out of it. His forehead was pressed up against the window, which was cold and clammy, and he'd curled up on the chair. He didn't turn around. Kairi and Riku were talking, a little bit, but Sora just didn't feel like it.
Almosttherealmosttherealmostthere. He liked English, sure, it was a nice language. But going back to his country, even if it was the wrong end of it, to a place where he didn't have to guess at the meanings of casual slang or make that annoying "th" sound. To be in a place where he was the one who knew what was going on, and his classmates didn't. He knew that sounded kind of mean, which he didn't mean to do. But it was like he'd gone on an English binge for a year and he'd been letting his other language slip, really slowly, or get bottled up.
Roxas was supposed to get there two days from now. Sora wondered where they were gonna sleep. The class (which was only about thirty people) had arrangements to sleep in the unused dormitories of a boarding school while the students there were on Christmas break with their families. There were gonna be a couple of kids who were just hanging around since they lived too far away to bother going home, but the school had a couple of empty buildings, anyway.
Sora kind of doubted that they'd let Roxas and that Axel guy stay in them. Especially since Roxas's friend was like twenty-one.
What was up with that, anyways? He was glad his brother had a good friend, of course, but five or six years was a pretty big age gap when you were barely fifteen. And what did a twenty-one year old guy want with a fifteen year old boy?
Sora liked to believe the best in people. He really did. He wanted people to believe the best of him. But any normal person would question that scenario! Well, Roxas was mature for his age. He'd see.
He wondered if his little brother had gotten a decent grasp on the language yet. He hid it on the phone, sort of, but Sora knew what to listen for. It made Sora a little sad, but Roxas would probably be glad of it when he got older. It'd given him that sexy Frenchman vibe.
"He had occasional flashes of silence, that made his conversation perfectly delightful."
- Sydney Smith
The plane landed just before it started snowing. Literally, just before. They hadn't even been allowed to get off of the plane before it started, falling in big chunks, flakes stuck together.
So the first time Riku saw snow it was three seats in and through a tiny window.
The bus ride there they had to crowd in with a bunch of tourists, which meant three kids to every two seats, which worked out pretty well. One, two, three, Riku, Sora, Kairi. Riku didn't remember how it was that Kairi was just included with them all the time now, but she was.
Sora made good on his nine-month-old promise to sit on Riku's lap, and they took the window seat while Kairi sat next to them and threatened to take pictures with her camera phone. Riku would have preferred that Kairi sit on Sora's lap, or even Sora sit on Kairi's lap, because it was all good and funny to have the joke about a guy sitting on another guy's lap, but it hit a little too close to the mark for Riku's paranoid mind.
So yeah, the British tourists were looking at him a little weird, but after a few minutes he forgot. Blame it on the pachydermatous skin of perpetually ignoring everyone around him at school. You start to realize that people don't think about you as often as you think about people thinking about you.
Sora pulled Riku's hands up to latch around his waist as a sort of human seat belt. Riku let him. He was staring out the window.
For one thing, it was...cold. Everywhere. It was like walking into your refrigerator. And it was snowing, everywhere snowing, and snow was not as cold as ice when it landed on your face at first. It was like somebody was grating the clouds in the sky, or some cotton, or a bunch of flowers. So that the shreds fell down.
He'd seen snow in the movies a million times, but it was different when it was him seeing it. When he was the one who could feel it. He was that stupid guy in the fake suede coat with the wool lining on a bus in France watching the snow fall a few days before Christmas. He was that stupid guy in the movies. Well, Riku thought with some small satisfaction, at least I know I won't get the girl in the end.
He leaned his head against the window and watched his breath condense on the glass. On the other side, the snow had melted back into water on the window. It was a fine mist with a few droplets running down the side, like tiny, warm snowballs. They collected the beads of water in front of them and tracked down the surface of the glass, leaving behind a smooth trail of wet. Water snails. Sometimes, if there weren't enough beads in front of it, it would stop where it was until enough collected for it to keep moving. He watched one, in particular, as it tracked downwards. And he knew it was silly, but goddamn if he wasn't rooting for the little thing. It haltingly made its way to the lower seam of the window.
He shifted his focus to the mountains in the distance. The snow-capped mountains. The not-a-rain-shadow mountains. They were beautiful, too, even if he could see the stark black lines of a ski lift on one of them.
It was cold, and pretty, but not too cold.
It was true what the movies did with snow. Not the way it fell, unless it didn't always fall in big chunks, but the way it stuck to things. He thought so, anyways. It covered everything, thick and white, like other color was just an extra or an accent. Everything was perfect, and even, and purposeful. It was hard to believe nature just did it by accident.
He stretched his neck to try and see further down one of the side streets (the wool lining on the lapels of his jacket scratched the base of his throat) and ended up resting his chin on Sora's shoulder to do so. He saw a building that could've been a gingerbread house.
There were hardly any people on the streets at all, but he supposed that made sense. To him it felt like five in the evening but to these people it was something like eleven or twelve at night, wasn't it?
He watched the snow catch the orange street lights as it fell. He wondered from how far up the snow fell. Did it snow on the very top of that mountain? He hoped so, it was such a beautiful mountain, it deserved the snow.
He blinked. Did he really just think that? Oh well.
He sighed. "Wow," he breathed to himself when the bus passed by a gap in two buildings and gave him a great view of some snow-covered hills.
Sora jerked in his lap, "Jeez!" and started laughing.
"What?" Riku asked, his attention snapping back into place.
Sora wiggled around a little to face him and stuck his tongue out. "You were all quiet and sleepy and leaning on my shoulder, but all of a sudden I get this weird breathy 'Wooooow' right in my ear."
Riku rolled his eyes and shifted. His jacket squeaked against the back of the chair. "I didn't sound like that."
Sora laughed and shook his head, which made his hair swing back and forth for a second or two. He turned back around, leaned into Riku, and stared around the inside of the bus.
"I love how all the people on the bus are staring at Riku shamelessly," he said with some small satisfaction, looking at Kairi. Kairi nodded and adjusted her purse on her lap.
(Riku knew it, she was cold in her skirt.)
Riku groaned, "That's because I've got a boy sitting on my lap, Sora," he muttered quietly. He wasn't stupid. It wasn't like he didn't think there were homophobes. He just hoped that for now, there weren't any brave ones around. His eyes flickered to the other people on the bus. It was true, though not very true, that people were sort of sneaking glances at him. Nobody was really staring. Probably wondering about the gay boys.
"I don't think it's that," Kairi said, crossing her legs. "You aren't the only two who have to couple up like that. Look," she pointed to two other pairs of boys sitting on boys' laps, from their own class. Riku recognized them, sort of, or enough to know that they were friends. Maybe people thought Sora and Riku were just friends. Maybe.
"Yeah," Sora said, "It's 'cause of your hair, dummy."
Riku wrinkled his nose at that. That was just dumb. He'd gotten a haircut, sure, but it didn't look that weird. And it wasn't like these people knew what he looked like before he'd gotten a haircut. Jeez, Sora.
Sora laughed at the face Riku made. "It's white! Didn't it occur to you that that's kind of...I dunno, weird for a seventeen-year-old guy?"
"What?" What was Sora talking about? People on Destiny Islands sometimes were born with white hair. It just happened. Destiny Island wasn't that obscure, was it? Surely people knew things like that? It wasn't...no. Was it?
Sora rested his forehead on the window. He exhaled, haa, and a patch of fog formed on the glass. "You're being silly," he said quietly. He closed one eye and stared at his shrinking patch of fog, then drew the outline of the mountain he could see through it. He breathed on it again to make it bigger and wrote, underneath the fingerprint-smudge mountain with his pinky, Sora était ici. Sora was here. He dotted the last i with a flourish.
"Yeah," Riku agreed with him and put his sleepy head back on Sora's shoulder. He closed his eyes.
The snow would be there tomorrow.
Kairi didn't say anything, and neither did Sora, and Riku spaced out. He let his mind go wandering with whatever thoughts it found, because Hell, if it found something interesting to run with, it needed the exercise. Goddamn, that sentence didn't even make one kind of sense.
Sora smelled like dirt and vegetables and being on a farm in the fall after it rained. Riku didn't know how to think about it. It was clean, sort of, but it wasn't a soap smell or a shampoo smell at all. Maybe it was just a skin smell. He just felt sleepy.
Who cared if people looked at him funny. He was sleepy and the snow would be there tomorrow.
He almost laughed out loud when he heard Sora talking through the fuzz of his subconscious, when he heard Sora remark casually to Kairi, "You know what I like about people so much?" And Kairi made a noise in the negative. "How we're all so different but we're also so exactly the same. You know?"
On a bus in France wearing a new coat with a boyfriend on a lap in the middle of the night with the snow and a pretty girl with red hair and big eyes. Sora was a bit of an observant asshole, but Riku wasn't, so that was okay.
"I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position."
- Pat Conroy
It turned out that there were two people to a room at the dormitories. They probably could have fit three or four if people were willing to share beds, but they'd been given an entire dormitory building (of the three) which meant three floors and almost twenty-five rooms with two beds each.
There were more boys than girls, so the girls got the first floor and the boys got the top two, which was fine by them.
It was midnight and boys were running down the halls attacking each other with pillows and shouting "your mom" jokes at each other. The rooms echoed with shrieks of laughter; you couldn't get away from it.
"Zack! Give me back my phone!"
"Psh! I shall not, foolish slave! You should be honored that the king of Romania is even bothering to use your puny technology!"
"Romania doesn't have a monarchy, dipshit!"
"It fucking does now!"
Riku rolled his eyes and tugged a pillowcase over the pillow on his bed. He agreed with the general consensus. Teenage boys were useless and immature. He hated that he was one of them, but the good news was that wouldn't last long. Three years until he was twenty, right? Like that would make any difference.
It smelled slightly of cinnamon and wet clay everywhere you went in the dormitory. It was a vague smell and went away after you'd smelled it for about ten minutes, though.
Sora wasn't putting the sheets on his bed. He was leaning against the closed door, smiling lazily, staring out the one paned window in the room. It was a view of the inner courtyard, which meant a tiny field with a little poured concrete path and another dorm building across from it. But covered in snow, it looked pretty.
Riku crawled onto the mattress on all fours, which made it bounce a bit, and tucked the upper two corners of the sheet in. He turned around and did the same to the bottom two corners, stretching the elastic over the round edges and pulling his hand away with a satisfying snap sound.
He yawned again and flopped back onto the bed, twisting a finger in his hair absently. His body said it was maybe seven or eight o'clock, but here it was past midnight. It wouldn't be bad to fall asleep now, might help him get over jet lag or something.
It occurred to him that maybe Sora wasn't making his bed because he planned to sleep in Riku's bed with him. Riku was pretty sure that that was a really bad idea. For one thing, in the morning they were probably going to be woken up by a teacher. Maybe two boys sharing a bed wasn't that weird, if it was a sleepover or something and someone forgot a sleeping bag, but when there was another perfectly good bed three feet away? For one thing, they'd probably be forced to go to different rooms, and for another thing, people would ask why.
"Sora, you should make your bed soon," he said out loud.
"Huh?" said Sora. He blinked and looked down at Riku then back out the window, walking forward to lean against the window sill. "Oh, yeah," he muttered, "Yeah, I will. Soon, just in a little while." He smiled at the outside.
"Hey Riku?"
"Yeah."
Sora came and hopped up on his bed, bouncing a little. "We're in France!"
"I noticed."
Sora stopped bouncing and kneeled on the bed, looking sideways at the window again, still snowing. What was so interesting out there that he had to keep looking for it? "I missed it," Sora said very quietly. "I missed most of it. I found out we had to move a few days before Christmas, you know."
Riku watched him from where he was on the bed and felt vaguely nostalgic. Snow gave everything a different light. It wasn't the no-light-blue-light of early morning or the blind black of the night or the yellow of summer on the rooftop of a stucco house. It was grey and very, very soft. Why did it feel like these sorts of things happened all the time around Sora?
"That must have sucked," Riku said with as much sympathy as he could muster.
Sora didn't reply to that, and just kept talking in a way that was so Sora it hurt. "It didn't snow on Christmas last year," he said. Gee Sora, thanks for sharing. Riku liked that Sora never even asked about his parents or his life, and he liked it in a way that meant he didn't like it at all, really. But he was a little bit glad, maybe. There was hardly anything to tell. And what there was, was just...generic. The only thing interesting, maybe even a little bit, was the formal Japanese rigidity that hung in the air of the house.
"I hadn't really thought about it till now, but I guess I haven't seen snow in a while," he said. He looked down at Riku and grinned abruptly. "Prolly 'cause of you!" He reached down and ruffled Riku's snowy white angel hair.
Psh. Goddamn it, Sora, he thought, every time I get pissed at you. He smiled to himself.
His smile made Sora stop, sit back up and look all down and up Riku in his jeans and his stupid coat, which he still hadn't taken off just...because. Outside, boys their age were having sword fights with pillows and making lame innuendos and whacking each other with suitcases. Their shouts could be heard through the walls dully.
"You haven't seen snow before, right?" he asked quietly.
Duh. Duh, Sora, of course he hadn't, he lived on a sub-equatorial island. Hadn't he been - ? He couldn't remember whether or not he'd mentioned it to Sora. Or to anyone. He'd thought he had, but he couldn't think of when, and he didn't know how he would bring that up in a conversation.
Well, it didn't matter.
"No," Riku said. "Not until today."
Outside, "Agh! Don't throw a pencil at my eye, you asshole, that is so gay!"
When Sora heard that he glanced at the closed door, then leaned down and kissed Riku. A real kiss. Not the sort that you hide in an airport waiting for your female friend to get back.
Riku's heart started thumping faster and faster. Nononononono they're right outside they're right outside what if they want to come in or knock or oh God does the door even lock in this room what if they just open it - they - they can't - and started to calm down a few seconds later. For one thing, Sora was pretty good at this.
But...far more importantly, to his mind, was the sort of does-not-happen barrier in his mind that came with being raised in the happy suburbs where people didn't get run over or jump off cliffs, or if they did, nobody told you about it. Does not happen. Someone opening the door and having them be shunned as "fags" for the rest of their school lives does not happen, because it just doesn't, because it's too Hollywood or too real-life or anything else in between.
He kissed Sora back, even though he didn't think he was that good at it. Sora seemed to like it when he did that. But his lungs were about to burst open or collapse in on themselves if his boyfriend didn't pull away soon. He was getting dizzy.
He'd never drowned before. But whenever he watched a movie where the protagonist had to swim to the surface from a hidden underground cave or save a drowning civilian he always held his breath with them. He tried to hold on as long at the hero did in the movie, but sometimes he couldn't. What he didn't do was hold his breath when he went past graveyards. He knew some kids did that, or, did when they were ten. They said that if you didn't hold your breath when you went past a graveyard, you'd inhale the souls of dead people. He never held his breath then, because he knew that if he was buried in a graveyard, he wouldn't want anybody to be afraid of him.
He knew it was weird to think about graveyards when you were kissing somebody, but he was starting to feel like that. He wouldn't make a good hero. He would drown. He would drown and he wouldn't say a word.
Sora pulled at the back of Riku's neck until he was sitting up, and Sora was...straddling his waist? He couldn't tell, his eyes were closed, but it kind of felt like a sexy thing. Riku wasn't a terribly sexy guy, and he didn't think about it often.
When Sora pulled away they both took huge, awkard gulps of breath, and he stared at Riku strangely. He stared at Riku like he'd forgotten how to use his face.
Riku's heart was still beating hard from asphyxiation when he pulled Sora down again.
For certain is death for the born
And certain is birth for the dead;
Therefore over the inevitable
Thou shouldst not grieve.
- Bhagvad Ghita
When all of the lights were off, it wasn't really dark. The lights in the inner courtyard stayed on, and Sora had refused to draw the blinds because it was still snowing when they went to bed. He said they both ought to be able to watch it in case they woke up in the middle of the night.
"Hey Riku?"
"Yeah."
"Let's build a snowman tomorrow, while everybody else is learning to ski."
"Will we be allowed to do that?"
"I can say that I already know how, and you can probably just say that you don't want to. They won't force us."
Riku wondered how two boys could sleep on the same bed and still be barely touching, but they were doing it. "Okay," he said. It was funny, it was so goddamn funny when you actually had to try and keep warm.
He remembered a night last March when it'd been so hot he'd slept with his shirt pulled up to his armpits and only boxers with no blankets. And now he was huddled in a big old comforter in a pocket of warm.
It was nice.
It reminded him, in a way, of the sleepovers he had as a kid. When he still had sleepovers. He didn't know; he was tired.
"Riku?" Sora said again. Gosh, he could sound so...small sometimes. He rolled around in the bed to face his friend.
"Hm," Riku said, his eyes closed. He put one arm around Sora with a lazy flop, because Sora was warm.
"You had a pet octopus, didn't you? Didn't you say that a while ago?"
"...what the fuck, Sora?"
"I don't know!" Sora sounded bigger, and a little defensive. "I'm just...wondering. You said that, right?"
"Yes. We had a little octopus. I mean, my mom took care of it, mostly, so I dunno."
Sora snuggled into his pillow and Riku felt another pang of fear when he thought that the door was to his back. So he wouldn't see the shadows if somebody walked by, or stopped in front of their room and opened their door. He twisted his head around to glance at it then lay back down.
"How long did it live?" Sora looked like a little kid. He tugged on Riku's pajama shirt. "How long did you have it?"
It had stopped snowing. The sky looked just the same as it did on Destiny Island just before it rained, which Riku thought was kind of funny.
"A year," he grumbled absently. "I think we had it for a little over a year."
"What happened to it?" Sora's question was a quiet, sleepy whisper. Riku frowned at that. Why did Sora assume - ? Maybe it was instinct. When something happened to you, something else probably happened to other things.
"Nothing," he said. "Nothing happened to it. It just died."
Sora made a noise in the back of his throat and fisted his hand in Riku's shirt a little more. "How old was it when you got it?"
Riku blearily traced his eyes over the pattern of the wallpaper. "A month or two, I guess," he muttered, "It was the size of a ping-pong ball."
"But why did it die after only a year?"
Riku shrugged, which was hard lying down. "It just did."
"I thought octopuses were really smart. I thought they were like the smartest things in the ocean, or something."
"So?"
Sora squeezed his eyes shut.
Riku thought about the door again and looked down at his boyfriend, then at the other, unmade bed. How had this happened, anyways? They would have to set up the other bed, at least, tomorrow before anyone else came into the room. He really ought to do that now, but...he was comfortable. And Sora was half-asleep already.
Sora pressed his head against the underside of Riku's chin. His hair was coarse and a little scratchy.
"If it's so smart, how come it only lived a year?"
"They all live a year. Octopuses all live a year. Even in the wild," Riku echoed the words of his mother several years back when he'd asked "where George was". He supposed that was his first experience with death, but he didn't count it. For one he'd never paid attention to the thing. For two, when it had died, his mom had just taken it out of the tank and disposed of it when he wasn't around. He never saw the body, or whatever you called the corpse of an octopus. It was just there and then it wasn't.
He remembered the moth again. Half-crushed, newly dead, belly-up on the tile of a hospital floor. He'd been so careful not to step on it. So careful.
"They do?"
"Yeah. They die right after they lay eggs or something. I forget." His mother had said something like that, hadn't she? Oh well. If he was wrong, Sora wouldn't know.
"But they're so smart," he said again. It was almost a whimper, but it was too human. "How can something so smart live so short?"
Riku brought his hand up to pet the back of Sora's neck; he didn't know why. It seemed like the right thing to do. There was something different about the way Sora said that. There was nothing that was there before. None of the look-at-me-being-profound cocky naivete. He was like a little kid asking questions about a dead hamster.
"I dunno, Sora," he said. "Maybe they know something we don't."
"You're an idiot," Sora mumbled with a smile, relaxing his body. His breaths became more even. Riku felt hot puffs of air against his collarbone, haa...haa...haa...and matched his breathing to Sora's because he could.
He kept thinking about the door behind him.
Riku wondered if it was a good thing that Sora's phone rang at seven in the morning. Obviously it was bad because it woke them up after five hours of sleep, fitful as it was, but Riku's groggy mind immediately jumped to the unmade bed. "We were both just really cold" was probably not going to be a valid excuse for what they were doing.
His French teacher had said something about being woken up at eight? Was that right? He hoped so.
It took him a few seconds to think this when Sora's cellphone blared beeps. They were muffled. He and Sora hadn't even really bothered to unpack, had they? The phone must have been buried in a suitcase somewhere.
"Shit," he muttered, "Sora. Sora, answer your phone."
Sora was a pretty heavy sleeper. His weight was heavy and warm against Riku's chest when he squirmed and grumbled something. "Sora!"
"Yeah, okay," Sora said. He crawled off of the bed with a sort of dissatisfied groan, and Riku felt a little guilty for barely moving, but it wasn't his phone. He felt a sort of sleepy comfort that he didn't experience often, the feeling that in here is warm, and out there is cold, so he ought to stay in his tiny little pocket of warmth. Cool air rushed in the fill Sora's place.
"Allô?" Sora said, crouched over his bag a meter away in nothing but boxers and a t-shirt. Riku rolled over in his pocket of warm to watch him.
Sora listened for a few seconds wordlessly. "Ouais, non, non - Rox, écoute-moi, ce n'est pas un problème. Ouais. Quand tu arrives ici, je suis sûr que tu peux juste rester - " Riku tuned out. He was too tired to bother with French right now, and Sora was speaking far too quickly for him to really have any hope of getting anything out of it. Riku knew he'd probably never speak fluent French. For one thing, he just couldn't be bothered. And he was past the age where learning a new language was likely to stick with you.
After a few minutes, in which Riku almost fell asleep again, Sora crawled back onto the bed and woke him up again. "Hey," Riku muttered sleepily. "What's up?"
Sora wiggled underneath the covers and then drew them up over himself and Riku. It was like a tiny, supportless tent. Light filtered through the yellow blankets and created a sort of orange-sunlight dimness in it. "The spazzy motel that he got reservations at overbooked itself or something, so even though his plane gets here the day after tomorrow, he won't have a room until three days from now."
"Oh," Riku said, "That kind of sucks. What's he gonna do?"
Sora shrugged. "I dunno. I was kind of thinking we could sneak him in here just for the night? And then he can go in the early morning?"
"Sora..." Riku didn't bother telling him that there was probably no way they'd let a random kid from another country stay with all of the students in the dorm, because it wasn't like they were staying in a hotel (far too expensive, maybe) and could just rent out another room. But no, Sora had said the word "sneak," hadn't he? That kid was going to get them sent home early.
"I mean, he's my brother," Sora was saying, "It's not like he's a stranger." He laughed. "Maybe we can convince them that that Axel guy is just Mr. Reno!"
Riku rolled his eyes. "If you say so, Sora. ...c'mon. Let's make the other bed."
With a groan he slid out from underneath the covers. The hairs on his legs stood up and he felt actual goosebumps on his arms for the first time in a very long time. Ten degrees and snowing.
Sora laughed and jumped out of the bed right after him. He stood with his feet shoulder-width apart and his hands on his hips and said to Riku, "The best way to do it is to face it right away! If it's really that bad your legs go numb after a few minutes, anyways, so you'll get used to it."
Riku rolled his eyes and headed for the stack of sheets on top of the mattress. He pulled out the pillow case and grabbed the uncovered pillow.
"You're so paranoid," Sora said, coming up behind him and putting his arms around Riku's waist. He rested his chin on Riku's shoulder.
"Sorry," Riku said, tugging the pillowcase over the pillow. He glanced back at the door.
Does not happen.
They built a snowman on the first day, the second day was entirely consumed by mandatory, whole-class visits to museums, and the third day after a stupid group activity in the park, Sora dragged him to a coffee shop when it started to snow really hard and ordered something French in French from the French barista off of a menu in French. It felt surreal to Riku. Three and a half years of language courses and he still barely understood what was going on around him.
He supposed it was because he couldn't be bothered, again. He recognized words here and there ("Elle m'a dit," or "Oui, si tu veux," or "Non, maintenant j'habite au quartier Latin") and was very proud of himself for understanding French that wasn't synthetic classroom French. Because when they played you a little CD of people speaking very slowly and clearly having the millionth conversation about what they did last weekend in the imperfect past tense, you started to feel a little cheated. Nobody talked like that.
Sora was grinning like a maniac. He kept telling Riku things. On the street walking here: "People don't really buy like, premade stuff that often, like...like you always make your own garlic bread, and when you do buy bread you have to actually go to a bread store since you really shouldn't buy it at the grocery store chains, especially not the pre-sliced kind. Nobody buys that. And - "
Sora was the kind of guy who liked to tell you everything because he wanted it all out there. Apparently it applied to more things than trauma. Riku didn't really mind. Just another facet of Sora the fine-cut diamond, wasn't it? Sheesh. Riku wondered what he'd tell a person visiting Destiny Island for the first time. The only really distinctive thing was the beaches and the white sand from crushed shells. There was a surf shop like every few hundred feet on the coastline. He supposed all they really had was nature.
"Here you go," Sora said in mostly-unaccented English. "I got you hot cocoa and tiramisu." And goddamn it if it wasn't true. He put a porcelain plate with a piece of layered pastry on it.
"What the Hell?" Riku checked his watch. "It's barely past noon. Who eats a fancy desert barely past noon?"
Sora shrugged. "Aw, Riks, we're on vacation! Besides, it's not like to these people we could get any weirder."
"What are you talking about?" he asked, suddenly a little more paranoid. "What's that mean?"
Sora held up one finger. "One," he said, "White hair. Or, I mean, silver, if you want. Two, we're speaking English, and I know you probably don't notice it, but people from Destiny Island actually do have kind of an accent. So even the people here who don't think it's weird we're speaking English think that's weird." He giggled. "How's it feel to be the foreign one for once, huh?"
"I have an accent?" Riku asked. "Really?" He didn't think he sounded that different from the people on TV, and most of that was American or British television, really.
"Yeah," Sora said, "It's not very noticeable, it's just...softer. Kind of. I mean, if I didn't speak English pretty much fluently I wouldn't hear it at all. It's just like...English, but rounded on the edges. I guess it's not that much of a thing. Took me a few weeks to realize it on the island, anyways."
"Oh," Riku said. Sora picked up a fork and started to poke at the tiramisu. Oh, great job, Sora. Sharing food, that wasn't couple-y. Though, to be fair, France did have kind of a reputation for being flamboyant, right?
"Um," Sora said. "I told Roxas to meet us here. Today." He tugged on Riku's watch until he could see the face. "And, um, he's supposed to get here in ten minutes?"
Riku just stared at him. Well. Well, shit. Time to meet the family, Riku. Don't fuck this one up with your socially retarded monosyllabic grunts.
There was a jingle when the door opened. People never look the same in photos as they do in real life.
Roxas was a little short for his age, but not by much, and it was true. His hair did look like Sora's when he slept with it wet, pushed to the side a little. His eyes were blue, too, but they weren't the color of Sora's eyes.
He had a sharp little face. Riku didn't know what else there was to say about it. Roxas wasn't smiling, but the Reno-clone behind him was.
It was that guy - Alex? Probably - from the pictures Riku had seen. He was grinning.
"Rox!"
"Ah! Oh, Sora," Roxas said. His brother jumped up from the table and hugged him. Riku was the only one left sitting there. It felt kind of wrong, especially when Roxas pulled away from Sora and looked him in the eyes briefly. He said nothing, just turned to Sora again and said something in French. Riku was pretty sure he said something about the flight over, but Roxas spoke quickly.
"So, you're Axel?" Sora grabbed his brother's wrist and brought him and his friend over to sit down at the table. The redhead nodded.
"Ah, right," there was something funny about how Roxas spoke? Maybe? Riku couldn't tell yet. "Sora," yes, there was, "Zis ez Axel, euh, from ze circus?"
Roxas had an incredibly thick French accent. It wasn't thick enough that nobody could understand him, but it was almost painfully distinct. His Rs had that weird throaty French pronunciation, and he couldn't seem to make a "th" sound. Sora was right about him not speaking English nearly as fluently.
"Oh, right, yeah, I remember," Sora said easily. "You're a...trapeze artist, right?"
Axel seemed to find Sora's lack of an accent as intriguing as Riku found Roxas's distinct one.
Riku was almost silent the whole conversation. Roxas was barely more talkative. He kept glancing at Riku, awkwardly, maybe angrily, Riku couldn't tell. But he kept doing it for almost the whole hour.
Sneaking the two of them in had been almost disgustingly easy. After a day of silently worrying over it, all they'd had to do was wait until the teachers went to go talk to have Axel and Roxas run up the back stairs and into their room. And yeah, Sora made the rounds and pestered all his friends before they decided to come and pester him.
After a day of walking around behind the two siblings, who spoke together in hushed tones and a foreign language, it felt kind of nice to have Sora to himself in the bed.
And he wasn't being paranoid, this time, about the way the two boys had...been. Roxas was...he didn't know. But when Sora had mentioned that Riku spoke decent French, Roxas had stared at him for a good four or five seconds straight and then said something to Sora in lightning-fast French, his words slurred together and undecipherable to anyone who wasn't a native speaker. And he'd kept doing it that way.
They'd kept talking to each other the whole time. Riku understood it, sure, you didn't see your only living family for a year and you'd miss them, but...
Tomorrow. That was for tomorrow. Nononono, for now, for now, the snow was still pretty and there was a spider crawling along the sink of the bathroom.
"I have a right to my anger, and I don't want anyone tell me that I shouldn't be, that it's not nice to be, or that something's wrong with me because I get angry."
- Maxine Waters
Roxas couldn't sleep.
Since he'd gotten here, he'd just...
Sora had a boyfriend. Sora. His brother. His older brother. A boyfriend. Of course, he'd known that before he came. He'd known the name "Riku." He'd even heard Sora tentatively mention that he liked a boy before they'd apparently started dating.
Riku was just...he was just a douche! He didn't talk and he stared at Roxas like he was a freak for talking the way he did. It wasn't Roxas's fault. It was just so hard to pronounce these words right. He could speak whole sentences with an accent or he could talk like a halting robot without one.
It killed him, it really did, and there was no beating around the bush about it. Riku had been there on March fourteenth. He'd kissed Roxas's older brother. It was like Sora had made his own family without even telling him. It wasn't...fair. He'd talked and talked about Destiny Island this and that, when Roxas had spent so long struggling to stay sane.
The night their lives had burned down, Roxas was having a sleepover at a friend's house. He hadn't been there. Not like Sora, who'd come home late, who'd seen it glow red, who'd burned his hand so badly he was still recovering a year and a half later.
People - several people and always, always adults - had told him how lucky he was that he'd been unharmed.
Sora was the only one of the two of them with a real actual scar to show for it. He had a place to put it all.
Sometimes, Roxas wondered if Sora was the lucky one.
He didn't cry very often, and when he did, it was late at night when he didn't have anything to distract him and he was left all alone with his overactive imagination. Nobody knew it to look at him, but you could tell, with Sora, his hand told you.
Roxas lay on the extra bed, aware of Axel's snoring behind him, but what the hell else was new. Axel sort of took up an entire bed on his own, which meant Roxas was stuck curling in on the edge, and he still had to rest his head over his best friend's neck. Whatever. Axel was the deepest sleeper he knew. It probably came from always being towed around in a circus trailer.
He had a perfect view of the other bed. Sora and Riku had just gotten in, so Roxas half-closed his eyes to make sure he looked properly asleep.
His brother's boyfriend got in the side closest to Roxas, which pissed him off a little, but probably wasn't meant to.
Riku was...pretty. He would say that. Objectively speaking, even if he was the condescending gay douche dating his older brother, he had silver hair and green eyes and he seemed unsettlingly thoughtful. He wasn't what...Roxas had...expected. But then again, he was from Sora. Sora never did what you expected him to, and Roxas could testify to that in court.
The condescending gay douche that Roxas had met nine hours ago flopped onto a pillow and heaved a contented sigh before pulling the blankets up to his chest. Sora crawled in behind him and Roxas saw him grinning. He lay down next to Riku and muttered something in plain English.
His voice got a little louder and he sat up again. "Don't you think so?"
"I don't know, Sora," Riku said. "Maybe there isn't any reason. Sometimes there just isn't." What did that even mean? Jeez, look at Riku, acting like he knew all the answers. Roxas bet that Riku was the kind of guy that abused his boyfriends.
"But - "
"Sora," the guy said, and Roxas watched, still with half-lidded eyes, as Riku turned to his brother and put his hand on his cheek. Sora smiled.
Why, Sora?
They hadn't acted this way during the day. Roxas had kinda hoped he'd misinterpreted the whole dating thing for becoming good friends. Riku was still talking. "Don't worry about it, okay? Just go to sleep for now."
Why are you doing this to me?
"It's been bothering me, though." Riku patted the pillow next to his head, and Sora lay down all the way. Roxas couldn't see his face any more.
"Don't let it," Riku said, "It's...just an animal. And they've been around for a while, I guess, so they must know what they're doing."
There was a long pause. "...yeah," Sora said eventually. Riku made a grunting noise and there was a wet sound. Gross. They probably kissed. Sora! Your little brother is in the room!
You have to know I'm awake.
Riku flipped around so his face was to Roxas again, a meter away, with his eyes closed. Sora said something quietly and Riku smirked without opening his eyes.
You're paying enough attention to me to know I'm awake, aren't you? Don't you remember how I always snore like a pig when I'm asleep? Didn't you always tell me that?
He felt his insides ball up into a tiny sack of awful when his brother's arm came around Riku's torso and stayed there. Not the other way around, not Riku trying to take Sora away, which would have been bad but still bearable. Sora was...he was...Roxas was getting left behind. He squeezed his eyes shut really tight and hiccupped, but passed it off as a sleep sound. He couldn't stand it.
He flipped around in the bed and looked at Axel.
There was that same feeling. It was alright if he was with Axel. Shit happened and brothers abandoned you but at the end of the day you still had an Axel, or if you didn't, you emailed him and he sent you back some ridiculous rambling letter that had nothing to do with what you'd asked, but still reminded you he was there. He was snoring kind of obnoxiously. It was almost strange to see Axel without the stage makeup, two little inverted triangles under his cheeks, and for once not grinning like an ass.
He kind of, briefly, wished that Axel might do something like put his arm around Roxas.
Roxas wasn't gay or anything, by any means. He kind of wished he were because then he wouldn't be hopelessly in love with his foster-brother's fiancée. Or at least hopelessly infatuated.
But he kind of wished Axel would stop being Axel when he was asleep and show his friendly affection. See, Sora, I'm moving on, too! If you get to leave, then - then I -
He bit his lip really hard and squeezed his eyes shut. It just...wasn't fair.
"Hey, kiddo," Axel was kind of half-awake.
Roxas remembered the first time he'd been in Axel's trailer, all of a sudden, and that made him feel better for no reason at all.
"You 'ave only got ze two forks," Roxas pointed to the cutlery drawer. "For you and your roommate?"
"Yeah," Axel said in American-English. "Me and Dem. Why?"
"...don't you evair 'ave friends ovair to eat?"
At which Axel had shifted his weight awkwardly on his feet and rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. "I have a friend, but he doesn't have any hands," he'd said, glancing at the cat on the bed.
Roxas laughed.
"You okay? Roxie?"
"Don't call me zat," Roxas said halfheartedly, opening his eyes to stare at Axel. "But yes, I zink I am fine."
Axel glanced over his head at the two boys in the bed across from them. "Don't worry about it, man," Axel said. "I dunno what it's like for gay guys, but when you're a teenager and you get your first girlfriend, that's pretty much all you can think about for a few weeks. They'll get over all the lovey-dovey couple crap." Axel's whispers were really gravelly and a little unsettling if you weren't used to them.
Roxas rolled his eyes and flicked Axel's chest. But yeah. Axel. The feel-better circus man.
He fell asleep after a little while.
"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
It was the strangest thing that morning. When Riku woke up at just past six in the morning for an emergency bathroom trip (after carefully extracting himself from Sora's greedy sleep death hold, which was really kind of a little flattering) he'd seen Axel in there, brushing his teeth.
"Oh, hey man," Axel said through a mouthful of toothpaste. Riku blinked.
Axel spat in the sink, rinsed out his mouth and looked up at him again. "Circus instincts," he explained, "I'm on a total internal clock right now 'cause we have such a crazy schedule most of the year. I could tell you about it, but it gives me a headache," he grinned.
"Oh," Riku said. He tried to remember whether or not he was glaring at the guy in front of him, or if what he was doing just counted as staring.
The tiles were cold against his bare feet, but he hadn't bothered putting on his shoes.
"...yeah," Axel gave him a funny look, which Riku took to mean he'd done something socially weird again. He shrugged and headed for the stall furthest from where Axel was standing.
Just before he went in, a flickering of the fluorescent lights caught his eye. He looked up; they were fine.
But a you-know-what, of course, because they were the only thing in Riku's life that made sense any more, was flitting towards the line of bathroom mirrors. It was very small, but very there. That moth just about killed Riku.
It landed on a faucet briefly, then flitted up to the mirror, then to the next sink over. It kept crawling all over the place. Riku smiled.
"Damn," Axel said. "Hang on, I'll get it." With a smack! he clapped his hand against the sink and lifted it up. There was a little brown smudge on the sink and on his hand. He looked at his palm, shrugged, and wiped it on his pants.
Riku stood there and felt his eyes quiver sort of, his mouth a slightly open line. His jaw quivered, too.
"You okay, man?"
Riku knew it was stupid and dumb and pointless and a million other things, but it felt like there was a shelf fungus growing in his throat that wouldn't go down no matter how hard he tried to swallow.
He stared at Axel, the kind of stare that went right goddamn through you, and went right goddamn through Axel, too. He nodded, carefully closed the stall door and slid the latch closed. He leaned up against the cool wall of the tile and closed his eyes.
Riku Tepes was probably the loneliest person in the whole world.
A/N: D8 FUCK, AXEL. FDASJKGALJDSA. JUST FUCK. Excuse my French.
1) I know the Roxas-and-Axel-showing-up-thing was a little rushed. Trust me, there will be much more awkward acclimation next chapter (...fun). But there was some stuff I wanted to get in there right-right-away.
2) ...I have discovered that there is no way to write a French accent without making it look ridiculous and stereotyped. This bothers me. And yeah, there's a whole blurb about it, but that's in a different story (or will be soon) and you don't have to read it to understand this story.
3) I know I used that same quotation again, but it's important, and applies to virtually the same thing.
So this is pretty much a 13.5-thousand-word chapter, which means it's really long. So I'd like to know what you thought. I mean, if you wanna just go on to the next update in your email inbox, that's cool too, since I do that (~I'm such a lurker)...I dunno. Yeah. Thoughts are nice, good or bad.
GUESS WHO IS GOING TO BE THIGH-DEEP IN MARSH MUD TOMORROW~. This is a good thing. No it is not a spa treatment.