Lo and behold, I got up off my lazy ass and did something. Wow. I give you chapter fourteen and it's full of ANGST.
Usual warnings, of course. Language. Violence. The like.
Chapter Fourteen: Landslide
Riku met Kairi in the summer before second grade, at the magnificent age of seven-and-two-months. It had, so far, been a summer rife with boredom as his usual partner-in-crime was currently being held hostage at the pure evil that was summer school. Axel would, of course, be home sometime around two in the afternoon, but that left an entire day during which Riku had to entertain himself.
The moving van that pulled into the parking lot of the apartment building that fateful morning had promised many things - mainly new victims for water balloons. It was when they begin pulling out things like a bicycle and boxes marked "TOYS" that he began to think that this could possibly be the cure to his boredom; there was a kid moving in.
He'd never been more disappointed to see a bright pink dresser in his life.
Axel came home at about the same time Riku headed out to play in the tiny playground behind the apartment building. To his surprise and dismay, the monkey bars had already been claimed by a girl, daringly hanging upside-down and humming. Riku felt a flare of jealousy, as well as flash of resignation. One, he couldn't hang upside-down. Two, she was a girl, and therefore couldn't be played with.
"Hi!" she said, waving when she saw them. Her bright red pigtails swung with the breeze. "Wanna play?"
"No!" Axel replied emphatically.
Her little brow furrowed. "Why not?"
"You're a girl," Riku said as though the answer was obvious - and to him, it was. Axel didn't play with girls, so Riku didn't play with girls. That was all there was to it.
She swung up to grab the bars and right herself, dropping to the gravel with practiced ease. Riku had to admit, it was impressive. She put her hands on her hips, pink nail polish catching the afternoon sunlight, and demanded, "So?"
"So you can't play with us!" Riku explained as though it were obvious. "Girls are gross," he said as Axel looked on approvingly.
And then she tackled him.
He came out half an hour later, after his mother had stopped the blood flow from his nose, and she taught them how to swing upside-down on the monkey bars.
The drive was silent.
There was nothing to say, Riku thought. Nothing that could be said, really, that wouldn't sound hollow and empty, a tiny Band-Aid over a gaping, bleeding wound. Even if he could find the words… No, even if the words existed, Riku wouldn't have been able to choke them out past the insistent lump in his throat that wouldn't vanish no matter how many times he swallowed. Sora was close to him, the side of his body pressed warm to Riku's, just a small comfort for the brunet as much as it was for Riku. His eyes were closed, head resting not-quite on Riku's shoulder, when Riku pulled free of his thoughts and turned his eyes away from much happier memories.
Roxas, he noticed, had managed to wedge himself as close to Axel as humanly possible, very nearly in the redhead's lap, and it would have made Riku wonder if he hadn't first noticed the way Axel's face was completely hidden in blond hair. Roxas had his head on Axel's shoulder, his own face turned into Axel's neck, and Riku thought to himself – and his voice sounded dead and emotionless in his own head – that it would have been better, maybe, if Roxas hadn't fought him so hard. He couldn't tell if the slight tremors of Axel's shoulders meant that the redhead was crying, and if he were, it was silent. He looked away, turned his eyes back to the darkness and tried not to see, because if Axel – their fucking rock, cool and calm and awesome under pressure – was breaking, then the whole world was falling to pieces beneath their feet.
Maybe, Riku thought, a little hysterically, maybe Axel would be able to repress this too. Maybe he'd be able to go out with a jester's grin and walk through fire and think that Kairi was alive and well and safe and that, in that way at least, they had survived.
Demyx… Demyx was blank, eyes staring unseeing into the early morning darkness that filled the van and threatened to swallow them whole. Riku couldn't tell what he was thinking, didn't really want to be able to, though he was sure that his thoughts echoed with the same despair that filled Riku's own. He didn't know Demyx, didn't know how to read the man like he could read Axel. He had just known an undercover agent who was nearing his breaking point. He had just known the idealized version of the man Kairi had loved.
Three hours after they had left the parking lot – after they had left her behind – the van stopped. The sense of dread that had been growing ever since Naminé had stepped into his office dropped like a weighted stone in Riku's stomach. Sora tensed beside him and edged just a little bit closer. Axel lifted his head from Roxas' hair, dry-eyed. Roxas disentangled himself from the redhead, a hard set to his jaw. Even Demyx blinked out of his desolate stupor.
A minute passed. Ten. Fifteen.
Nothing.
"Help me up," Sora whispered. Somehow, between the two of them, Sora managed to wriggle up onto his knees, just high enough to be able to see out the windows of the van's doors. He flopped down a moment later. "They've got a couple of guards outside. Maybe a breakdown or something?"
Roxas shrugged, dropping his head back to Axel's shoulder. "Sora, they take your knife?"
Sora shook his head, managing a smile that was nothing compared to the one Riku loved to see – tight in the corners and forced. "Gimme a minute." He shifted, twisting in ways that Riku cringed at, especially when he was pretty sure he heard every vertebra in Sora's back pop. Finally, Sora managed to bend just enough that he could slip his legs through the hole his arms made, putting his bound hands in front of him. He reached down and fumbled with his shoe, finally able to slip his fingers and finagle out a small pocket knife.
"…You're kidding, right?" Axel said, disbelief coloring his tone. "That's so cliché. They can't have not thought of that."
"Did you think of it?" Roxas retorted, and there was absolutely none of the scorn behind it that Riku had been so used to hearing. "Not that it'll do anything against Tweedledee and Tweedledum's semi-automatics out there."
"We'll think of something," Sora said, and hadn't Riku just been thinking about hollow, empty words not twenty minutes before? "Turn around."
Riku twisted, putting his back to Sora and his knife so that the brunet could saw through the duct tape. Immediately, Riku ripped the rest of it off, ignoring the sting as it effectively took every single hair off of his wrists and found that his breathing came just a little bit easier – he hated not having the use of his hands. Sora pressed the knife into his hands, that sad facsimile of a smile still on his face – it hurt to look at – and Riku freed his hands as well before setting about releasing everyone else.
"Alright, so here's what we've got," Roxas said once they were all situated and rubbing feeling back into their arms. "We have Sora's knife, a lighter, and…"
"A screwdriver," Axel added. "It's been digging into my ass this whole time." He held it up for emphasis.
"And a screwdriver. All of our outside contacts are officially unreachable or –" He stopped, swallowed. "Unreachable," he finished. "Any ideas?"
"The guards are at the back," Demyx said after a moment of stretched silence. He sounded exhausted, voice rough and soft, and looked just as bad, scrubbing the back of his hand across his face. "This piece of junk has manual windows, so we could go out that way if we were quiet enough."
Axel shook his head. "It wouldn't work… There are cars in front of us, too. They'll have us again in five minutes and it'll piss Marluxia off enough to separate us, probably."
"So what then?" Demyx snapped. "You wanna just sit and wait to die?"
"Don't bite my head off 'cause your idea's suicidal, asshole," Axel snapped right back.
"My idea's suicidal? Whose great plan was this whole thing anyway?" Demyx hissed. "I don't remember telling you to jump headfirst into this mess, so it sure as hell wasn't mine."
Axel stiffened. Roxas looked worriedly between them, as if unsure if he should step in or not. "You tryin' to say something, Demyx?" The redhead's voice dropped to a tone that Riku knew meant trouble.
"I warned you!" Demyx slammed a hand down on the floorboard. "I fucking told you this would happen! You didn't listen and now…" He stopped, and in that instance, Riku could see every bit of pain and bitter knowledge on his face. "Now she's dead."
Riku's mouth went dry and he suddenly found it hard to breath as his chest constricted painfully. Axel reeled back as though he'd been struck. Roxas slid between them, hands held out, placating, which was probably enough to keep Axel from lunging for Demyx's throat, but wouldn't get Demyx to shut the hell up.
"You killed her." It seemed as though now that Demyx had started, there was no stopping him. "You didn't care. I fucking told you they'd kill her and you didn't care. You didn't set the bomb, but you sure as hell put her in that car."
And that was it. Something stretched taut in Riku just snapped, broke in half and whipped into the walls of his chest, stinging like a bitch and leaving something dark echoing through him. He moved before he was even aware of anything beyond the sudden wave of righteous, blinding rage, before anyone could react, and for the first time in his life, landed a perfect, solid punch, right to Demyx's left eye.
He got a couple more good blows in before Sora and Roxas managed to pull him off, but they couldn't hold him, and he had Demyx by the collar of his ripped and bloodied jacket in a moment, pretty sure that he was cutting off the blond's air supply and not caring in the least.
"We were there," he growled, and his face was barely an inch from Demyx's. "We picked up every single fucking piece you broke when you left her behind, so don't you dare." He shook the blond, one good shake for emphasis. "Don't you dare say we didn't care enough."
Roxas and Sora pulled them apart again, and this time Sora wrapped himself firmly around Riku's arm. Riku let himself be pulled away to sit sullenly beside Axel, who held his lighter clenched tightly in one hand.
"It's no one's goddamned fault," Roxas said, looking from Axel and Riku to Demyx, who was nursing his eye. Yeah, Riku hoped it fucking hurt. "No one but the Organization's, and fighting each other sure as hell isn't helping, especially since everyone out there probably just heard everything."
"I'm right," Demyx snarled.
Roxas rounded on him, one finger very close to his face. "Shut the hell up or I'll punch you," he threatened, and Demyx finally, finally closed his mouth. "So why don't you put what little intelligence the three of you have collectively and try to figure a way out of-"
The van doors swung open. Demyx tumbled backwards, landing with a thud on the concrete at Marluxia's feet. The man took a step back as the guards from before pulled the blond to his feet roughly. The bright light from Marluxia's flashlight danced over them, pinning them in their place, and Riku's jaw tightened as he winced away from the light.
"Not exactly good form," Marluxia said, "fighting your own. Friendly fire is frowned upon, after all." He glanced over at Demyx. "But then, you never really know who you can trust, can you?" He paused, studying them, flashlight pointed at Sora's hands.
Where the knife was still visible, plain as day.
"Well, now, what do we have here?" Three different guns leveled at them, with Sora directly in the sights. "Grab them," Marluxia ordered. "Put them in separate cars, I don't care how you break them up, just do it, and for God's sake, check for weapons this time, idiots."
Riku watched silently as they pulled Axel away from him, and couldn't help the little bit of selfish relief at the thought that maybe he wouldn't have to watch him die.
Kairi had given up knocking on Riku's door at the age of twelve, mostly because his mother finally got tired of answering the door every morning when the early bed decided Riku needed to be graced with her presence at eight in the morning. She managed to find inventive ways to wake him up far earlier than he thought was really necessary nearly every Saturday morning until college, including, but not limited to, buckets of ice, fire extinguishers, loud music, Axel screaming, puppies, rubber chickens, pop music, and occasionally more of Axel screaming. It was one Saturday morning when he was sixteen that Kairi didn't wake him up, but he still rolled out of bed at half past eight, and he knew something was up.
So he padded up a flight of stairs to her apartment, padded back down to get a pair of pants before he scarred anyone else for life, and ran into Axel halfway there.
"My Kairi-senses are tingling," the redhead yawned. His hair looked like it had at least had a brush run through it, which was more than Riku could say for his own.
"Creepy," Riku yawned in response.
"Selphie called. Said something went down at the Sadie Hawkins' last night," Axel went on as they approached the door to her apartment.
"You got the shovels and a body bag?" Riku asked, and knocked on the door. He, at least, still had decorum, and didn't go around bursting into people's houses and Way Too Early in the morning.
They were surprised when Reno opened it. "Thank God," he breathed, looking harried and vaguely annoyed. "I hate to say it, but I'm glad to see you two. Mom and Dad are on that stupid trip and I don't speak teenage girl." He let them in without a fuss, which was surprising, to say the least. "She's still in bed," he went on, closing the door behind them. "Let me know if I need to kill anyone."Axel looked at Riku, seeming just a little bit panicked, because the world was officially ending, and they headed down the hall.
They didn't receive a response when they knocked on her door – decorated with a brightly painted wooden sign that she had made when she was eleven – but they went in anyway. It didn't take long to figure out that the breathing lump under the covers was most likely Kairi, or else a really, really good sneaking-out-dummy, and they sat down on the bed gingerly.
"Hey, princess." Axel laid a hand on the not-quite moving lump, deliberately using the nickname she usually whacked him upside the head for. She didn't so much as move. "Rise and shine, morning glory."
Riku peeled back the covers just a little where he was pretty sure her head was. Her face, blotchy and eyes red from crying, peered out at him from her cocoon. She sniffled rather pathetically. He mustered up the patented just-woke-up-teenager grin.
"We'll skin him alive," he said sweetly, and she smiled.
Riku opened his eyes as the sun was just coming up, painting the sky an odd assortment of pastels outside the small window of the crappy, ancient camper they'd been shifted to. He was aware of honking horns, his alarm clock of the day, and that the truck wasn't moving. He lifted his head and blinked, surprised when his pillow shifted to accommodate him, and rubbed his eyes with one hand. "I fell asleep?" he asked, sitting up and finding that his pillow had been Sora's thigh.
Sora nodded, face bright in the early morning light and expression that same pathetic attempt of a smile. "Rise and shine," he said quietly. "We're stuck in traffic."
"Fantastic. If we had a Sharpie, we could write for help," Riku replied, rubbing his eyes again and putting his back to the promise of a beautiful day outside. The sun didn't have the right to shine. "I can't believe I fell asleep."
Sora shrugged, shoulder bumping against Riku, and pulled his knees to his chest. "Adrenaline wore off, I guess."
Riku nodded in agreement. "Where are we?"
The brunet shrugged again. "Somewhere in Illinois, still. Traffic's been hell… I'm guessing a wreck." He sighed, his already fragile smile fading. Silence filled the camper, heavy and sour. "I'm sorry, Riku," Sora finally said softly.
"Did you shove me in a camper and try to kill me on multiple occasions?" Riku attempted to head this whole conversation off.
"No, but –"
"Then don't apologize."
Sora looked at him, chin on his knees. "I didn't want to get you mixed up in this."
"Sora," Riku stopped him with one hand on the top of Sora's head, fingers tangling in the surprisingly soft spikes. That lump was forming in his throat again, making words hard to force out. The brunet paused in his most-likely practiced, guilt-laden monologue as Riku gently pulled Sora's head to his shoulder, wrapping his other arm around the brunet's torso. Sora's heavy weight on his chest and in his arms would be enough to ground him, he thought, enough to keep him from dwelling on everything they had done wrong to get them here. "I can't –" He tried to swallow the lump again.
Sora's hand curled in his shirt, over one of the bloodstains (probably Larxene's, he thought, but wasn't sure) as Riku attempted to shove the lump down just a little bit farther so that he could fucking breathe, and God knew that his breaths were numbered now. The brunet's other hand slipped around Riku, and the position was awkward, uncomfortable, and only a taste of what Riku needed right then and wasn't going to get.
"It's okay," Sora said softly, voice just barely heard through the fabric of Riku's shirt, breath hot on Riku's neck. "We're gonna figure this out."
He'd been right earlier, he thought, about empty, hollow words. Nothing about this was okay, and Riku was staring down at the end of the line coming up too fast. Okay meant safety, okay meant his friends alive and well, okay was being able to go home to his crappy apartment and fat cat and waking up the next day to do it all over again. Okay was not taking what comfort he could from someone he wasn't sure he knew but was pretty sure he loved on the way to his death.
Riku buried his face in Sora's hair and breathed in deep.
It was lucky that they'd gone to school together. If they hadn't, Riku would be three or four states away, Axel would probably be on his couch, and Kairi would have been alone on that stupid campus in that stupid city. They'd only been there a week, how could something like this happen? At least, he conceded, they were lucky they were close enough that the hospital could call them, so she wouldn't wake up alone.
Or, well, they called Axel, at least. Everyone seemed to call Axel, simply because he was the bigger, louder one of the pair and the first one they thought of. Axel, in turn, called Riku, and Riku had to remember that he couldn't take the corded thing with him while he was trying to get out the door.
She was asleep when he finally got there, pale and in hospital blue. She looked… alright, he supposed, a little bruised and scraped, with one arm in a cast. Axel was already situated in the oh-I-wish-I-were-comfortable chairs beside the bed, tapping his fingers on the bed in a staccato that clearly meant he was itching for a cigarette, but unwilling to leave her alone.
"Meds," he said, waving a hand at her. "They shot her up when I got here – she wouldn't take 'em until we did. They're just keepin' her overnight."
"What happened?" Riku asked, taking a seat on the edge of the bed and settling in for the long haul. Axel had bribed the nurses to think that Axel was her brother and Riku was her fiancé so that they wouldn't have to leave.
Axel shrugged, and Riku could see the tightness in his muscles – he was angry as hell. "They mugged her. She was headed home from work and… she only had five bucks on her, man." He looked at Riku, and Riku realized he'd been wrong – Axel was furious. "They beat the shit out of her for five bucks."
He stood, fingers fumbling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, and stalked out. Riku let him go, settling in for his turn at the vigil. Somewhere between Axel's third consecutive smoke and him falling asleep at the foot of the bed, he thought long and hard about what he wanted to do with his life.
"I really did want to be a history teacher," Sora said, pulling Riku from his thoughts. He blinked, coming back to reality, and looked down at the brunet in his arms, back to Riku's chest, head resting on Riku's shoulder. "I started out going to school for it, even. But then Cloud and Leon got involved and asked us to do one little favor…" Sora shifted, just barely, and was silent for a moment. "Shit happened. And once you get involved like we did, you don't get out again, not really. You get retirement, when you're done, but you also get to be watched for the rest of your life, just in case you let something slip or if they need you for that one last time or something. Or you take a cushy job, like we did." He looked up at Riku. "You were our retirement, Riku," he said, grinning for just a moment. He dropped his head back to Riku's shoulder. "But, you know, at the time, it was exciting. We were eighteen. I'm twenty-four, Riku. It stopped being exciting a while ago."
"I thought you were twenty-two," Riku replied, furrowing his brow.
Sora shrugged. "That was the birthdate on the license I gave the cop for the yacht. It… stuck." He was silent again, for a long moment. The sounds of honking horns had ceased, Riku realized, and he looked out the window to find the interstate long gone, replaced by a gentle country road instead. Miles and miles of land where no one would find them. "I don't think I regret it, though," the brunet went one, even more quietly. "I wanted to be a history teacher, but I wanted to change the world more." He shifted again, turning his face to Riku's, cheek to cheek with the detective. "Do you?"
The million dollar question, Riku thought. He considered everything he had lost and given up. He thought about the people in his life, about Larxene and Luxord and bank robberies, about Kairi left behind in what was left of Demyx's van. He thought about Axel and Kairi bitching at each other in the way that only best friends could, about Kairi smiling into his cell phone, Axel kicking in the door in his underwear. He thought about Axel smiling at Roxas, completely unguarded, whether Roxas was looking or not. He thought about Strawberry Shortcake Band-Aids and cherry-red Firebirds.
Sora, worried and frantic over Riku on the concrete. Smiling at him, carefree in the sunlight. Purple Sharpie on the back of his hand. Sora, the folder on his desk and Sora, the wannabe history teacher on a motorcycle, one and the same and right here, warm against Riku like the sun on his skin. Sora pressed to him, between Riku and a motel door.
God, yes. He regretted it. He wished he could go back and change his mind and become an architect, and Kairi would be safe and sound and teaching kindergarten somewhere, and Axel would be crashed out on his couch or working in a tattoo parlor. Kairi would never get that far away, lost smile on her face. Axel wouldn't have diamonds on his cheeks. They would never have learned how to fire a gun, never have known the feeling of killing someone so that they wouldn't kill you, never have had to watch someone die and know that, somehow, it was your fault. They would be alive. Riku would never have seen Sora smile, Kairi would never have heard Demyx sing, and Axel would never worm his way into Roxas' heart.
"It doesn't matter," Riku finally said, and it was true. "Regretting it won't change a thing." He was pretty sure that this was just a continuation of their conversation in the motel room. Who was he reassuring this time? "We can't go back, so we have to go forward." Not that they had much forward left to go.
Sora was silent and still against Riku for a long enough time that Riku wondered if he'd put the brunet to sleep. When he did finally speak, his voice was quiet and mild, almost emotionless, and broke what was left of Riku's heart in two.
"I'm not ready to die yet, Riku."
Riku's arms tightened around Sora. "Yeah." His voice sounded foreign to his own ears, too rough to be his, as he choked the words out. "Me neither."
"So I was thinking," she said one day, sitting across from him at Axel's kitchen table. Axel wasn't even home – maybe they were a little too comfortable with each other. She tapped her pencil on the table next to their array of newspapers, a few jobs circled, a couple highlighted. Her hair had been cut short and clipped to the sides with little barrettes, framing her face in bright red.
"That's never good," Riku replied with a grin. She threw her pencil at him.
"Shut up, I'm awesome. But anyway, I had this idea," she went on. "DiZ doesn't need us anymore and you're done with the department, but you can still be a detective. Let's open our own agency."
Riku simply looked at her for a moment. "'Let's?'" he finally repeated.
She smiled wide. "I'll be the greatest secretary you'll ever-"
Riku was jerked roughly from his thoughts and sent suddenly sideways, Sora pulled from his arms by the motion. The world rolled and Riku collided with the side of the camper, his head knocking back against the hard surface and filling his vision with stars and bright bursts of color. There was, in the same instant, the terrifying sound of metal being crunched and wrenched, and a sound very much like glass breaking. Something warm and heavy landed on top of him, forcing his breath out in one long, unwilling sigh.
An eternity later, the pounding pain in Riku's head subsided enough that he could open his eyes, and everything around him stopped rocking. He blinked, disoriented, and everything came into focus. He was now lying on the wall of the camper he'd been adjacent to before, Sora a dead weight on his chest. He shifted, and Sora moved with him. He was bruised, he concluded, with a possible concussion, and he was sure as hell gonna feel this in the morning, but he was alright.
"Sora," he said, "you alright?"
There was no response. He moved again, looking down at the brunet and moving Sora's head as gently as he could, meeting no resistance. Sora seemed to be out cold, but breathing, and when he drew his hand away from the spikes, there was blood on his fingertips. "Son of a bitch," he swore softly.
The truck had wrecked, obviously. All was quiet now, silence after the storm, and Riku considered his options. The truck, if he remembered correctly, had been the last of the caravan, so there was a good chance that the other cars would be ahead and hopefully ignorant of the wreck. There was an equally good chance that the driver was unconscious or worse. And Riku sure as hell wasn't sitting around here.
He shifted Sora off of him, gently, and maneuvered over to the door of the camper, which were now above him. They'd been locked from the outside, but Riku was a determined bastard, or so he'd been told. He shimmied up and braced himself, and with every ounce of power he possessed, he slammed his foot into the door. It took a couple of tries before he managed to get the damn thing open, and a while longer before he managed to get Sora stable enough across his shoulders that he could clamber out of the camper and onto the soft grass of the ditch they'd nosedived into.
Riku took a moment to breathe after that. He laid Sora out on the grass and looked around, up at the steep bank of the ditch, then down to the wreck. He ached, his shoulder throbbing and his arm sore – Sora wasn't exactly light – but he carefully made his way down to look inside the cab of the pickup. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel. Riku didn't think twice before wrenching the door open and pressing his fingers to the side of the man's neck to check for a pulse – there, strong, so he was simply unconscious. Riku undid the seatbelt and carefully pulled the man out, laying him down on the grass as well. There was a handgun holstered at his side. Riku took the liberty of relieving him of it.
"Well, you're just a regular good Samaritan, aren't you?"
Riku turned at the unfamiliar voice, gun in hand. Halfway up the bank stood a girl he didn't recognize, grinning widely and hands on her hips.
"Relax!" she said. "I'm on your side, Riku!"
Oh God, she was cheerful. "Just for the record," Riku replied, lowering the gun as Leon slid down the bank behind her, "it's unnerving that all of you people know who I am."
"We're just that awesome!" she replied brightly, and knelt down next to Sora. "He'll be fine," she assessed.
"Glad to see you alive," Riku told Leon. The brunet gave him a not-quite smile. "How'd you find us?"
"We had a little help," he replied. "Heads up."
Riku caught the car keys before they hit him in the head, and looked up the bank. His heart caught in his throat.
He was officially in a motherfucking soap opera.
"Let's go kick some ass," Kairi said.