Previous disclaimers apply.

Chapter 22: Differences of Opinion

"I'm sorry to hurt Aoko, but we are invisible."

"We? Kuroba, whoever took you, whatever happened, it shouldn't have. Come back with me. We can help you." Hakuba lowered his gun a fraction, reaching out with his off-hand towards Kaito, face a mixture of pleading and concern.

Something roused in the back of Kaito's mind. He watched, mesmerized, as Hakuba took a tentative step forward to the edge of the stairs, hand still outstretched. Then, footsteps echoed on the stairs below—

and whatever possibilities there might have been—

Beep!

Kaito jerked awake, eyes flying open in response to his alarm clock's welcome intrusion into his dreams.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Smack.

He sat up and swung his legs out of bed in one smooth motion, switching the alarm clock from snooze to off and not bothering to silence a curse of frustration. He'd had nightmares before—usually involving the death of his mother, Aoko, his father or himself in some way or another—but this was getting ridiculous. Not only was the focus on Hakuba, which was unusual right there, but if he discounted the night's sleep assisted by Solomon's tea, then he'd had the same damn nightmare every time he'd slept since the opal earring heist.

...And while he'd woken up in the middle of it, again, the rest of the dream was now unrolling itself across his mind's eye with eidetic clarity.

Kaito prepared to leave home once again, gathering his scattered things from around his bedroom in record time as he tried to escape the memory of empty blue eyes, never mind that they were set in a face five years too old to be the one he knew now. Without bothering to consult the faint sense of presence in the back of his mind that he was beginning to recognize as Méraud, Kaito reached out for the resonating sense of detective-rival-friend-alive-NOW and pulled.

The irritating fatigue that accompanied the portal opening warned Kaito that by the time afternoon rolled around he was going to want yet another nap, and breakfast was starting to sound extremely good, but he cared less about that than the fact that he could now access the Motou's study. Hakuba sat in a chair with his back to him, hunched over and utterly focused on something Kaito couldn't see, but the blond was still unquestionably alive. A split-second later, since the study's wards didn't block rooms connected by holes in reality, Hakuba seemed to register that there was someone behind him and whipped around in surprise, rising to his feet.

Kaito grinned at Hakuba and stepped through, letting the Shadows close behind him. It wouldn't be as hard to open another one here, in Domino.

"I'm a living Portal gun!"

The surprise drained out of Hakuba's eyes in an instant as he recognized Kaito. However, rather than be replaced with amusement at the quip, cold reserve came to the forefront.

"...Congratulations." The word should have been capable of giving instant frostbite.

Hakuba turned and sat down again, giving Kaito a brief glimpse of the 5x5 Rubik's cube the blond had been solving before the chair hid it from view. In the brief, half-stunned silence that followed, Kaito heard the cube clicking sharply as blocks rearranged at an insane rate of speed.

Kaito stomped down on stung confusion over Hakuba's behavior and kept the grin pasted on his face, hoping the blond wasn't picking up any of his stronger emotions. Whatever he'd missed that had caused Hakuba's abrupt change in attitude was a good thing, really. If Hakuba had decided that he'd had enough of Kaito and Riku, then he'd be more willing to go home. And no matter how nice it was to have him around, present and tangible, to counteract the lingering dream-memories and convince his subconscious mind that Yes, the stubborn blond was still alive... Hakuba was still better off back home rather than trying to tag along.

"Anything else, before you leave again?" This time the controlled tone wasn't icy, simply... flat.

"...Yeah. Since I've figured out how to travel now, I can take you home after breakfast if Solomon-san thinks your shields are good enough."

Hakuba didn't respond, and Kaito couldn't see his face to gauge a reaction. After letting the silence hang in the air for a short while, Kaito gave up and retreated to the kitchen.

Riku was already there, eating breakfast, and waved for Kaito to join him. "I thought I heard the study door. Was that you?"

Kaito nodded, filling a plate from the food available on the table and taking a seat. "I can travel through the Shadows now, for the most part; I wound up coming back by way of the study."

"Did you talk to Hakuba-san, then?" Judging by Riku's look of concern, he'd probably already been on the receiving end of Hakuba's attitude.

Kaito ate a few bites before he replied, "If by 'talk,' you mean 'be given iceburn,' then yes. If he's got the basics of shielding down well enough, I figured I'd take him home today. He should be happier when we're out of his meticulously styled hair."

He wasn't going to ask if Riku knew the reason behind Hakuba's abrupt change—easier to pretend it didn't bother him, and let it lie until it didn't matter anymore.

Riku gave Kaito a long, incredulous look, before his expression twisted into one of exasperated anger and he slammed his palm onto a bare patch of tabletop. "What is wrong with you? I won't even pretend to know what's going through your heads right now, but you're both so damn focused on keeping your own masks intact, you can't see each other!"

Kaito stared.

Riku took a deep breath and slowly exhaled as Kaito stopped himself from shifting uncomfortably. If Hakuba wasn't willing to go home, that would make things... complicated. And Kaito desperately wanted something in this entire mess to be simple for once.

Riku continued in a quieter voice, "Either you're too blind to see that he's trying to shut you out because he's hurting... or you just don't care."

One of Kaito's hands, hidden beneath the table, involuntarily clenched into a fist. "He's safer back home."

In response, Riku leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. "So are you. This was never your fight, but I let you come along anyway, because you wanted to. I didn't take you home even after you damn well nearly died from one of the Darkness corridors, Kaito-kun."

Kaito looked away, jaw working. When Riku put it like that, there wasn't anything he could say to that without sounding hypocritical.

He spent a minute trying to think of a decent response, until his thoughts were abruptly interrupted by Riku standing and hauling him out of his chair by the back of his shirt, heedless of his knees banging against the table.

"Oi! What're you—"

Kaito's protests fell on deaf ears; still gripping his shirt, Riku marched him into the study and forced him to sit down in the empty chair across from the chair facing the study door, which Hakuba currently occupied. The detective had looked up in renewed surprise at their abrupt entrance, hands freezing on the Rubik's cube, but he then just as quickly returned to a carefully neutral expression, eyes guarded behind the emotional equivalent of bulletproof glass.

Kaito noted absently that Hakuba didn't seem to be affected in the least by Riku's anger. Either Hakuba's drive to practice had really paid off, or it was a side effect of his recent return to distance and then some.

Riku let go of Kaito's shirt but kept his hand resting on Kaito's shoulder while he looked at Hakuba. "This has gone far enough."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You've both forgotten that you decided to trust each other. You keep expecting to go back to the same old song and dance, so you ARE, and you aren't even fighting it! I won't let you two self-destruct like—" Riku paused for a fraction of a second, "—I won't let you keep doing this. Talk."

In the renewed silence, thief and detective exchanged discomfited glances. Kaito was half-surprised that Riku'd gotten any reaction out of Hakuba at all, but the rest of him was torn between not wanting to have this discussion and not knowing where to begin if he decided to try anyway.

Riku sighed, hand leaving Kaito's shoulder. Kaito glanced up to see Riku massaging his forehead with it. "Start with something simple. Will you tell us what went wrong since last night, Hakuba-san?"

"You're just going to send me home," Hakuba responded coolly. "I see no point in rehashing irrelevant matters."

"I told you before we left why I didn't want you coming along, Hakuba-kun," Kaito countered with deliberate calm. "Even if you have shields now, there no telling what we might run into, and if they break..." His jaw clenched.

You'd be a sitting target for whatever had gotten through in the first place.

"As you say." The blond's indifferent tone was compounded by the fact that he returned his attention to the oversized Rubik's cube, setting the last few squares to solve it and then breaking the colors up in order to begin again from scratch.

"Why do you want to come so damn much?" Kaito demanded quietly, voice falling into the steel-edged tones that typically only made an appearance when he was Kid and angry enough to drop Kid's deliberate purr. "There's no telling how long we'll be gone, and if you're caught by a Heartless or a Nobody, you'll be worse than dead."

"But it's all right for you? Or do you have some type of protection that makes you as immune to them as you seem to be to gravity and everyone else's worry?"

"I won't feel like I'm standing in a black hole if they manage to hit me when I'm fighting them," Kaito shot back, ignoring the rest of Hakuba's response.

"...I suppose I am a liability. But you don't have to cloak it in worry for my welfare, Kuroba-kun," Hakuba continued, what emotion had crept back into his voice fading away again. "I understand the situation quite well."

"Your welfare IS what I'm worried about, you idiot!" Although despite his best efforts, Kaito's worry was expanding to encompass Hakuba's current state of mind. He didn't want to have to deal with this... he just wanted Hakuba home.

"Sending me home won't save me, you know."

Caught off guard, Kaito blinked at Hakuba and managed: "...What?"

"What will I do? No thief to chase, no magician to spar with... I'll have to go back to solving murders to keep myself sharp." Hakuba looked down at his gloved hands. "The gloves and shields should be sufficient, but should they break..."

Kaito closed his eyes briefly. Criminals were not the same as Heartless; if one broke Hakuba's shields the blond still had a better chance of remaining functional. "You'll have to go home sometime, regardless. At least with murderers you know what you're dealing with, and can throw them through a wall."

"Assuming I don't go into a coma like the last time."

"...Last time?" Kaito cocked his head, hoping that his suspicions were wrong.

Hakuba answered after a moment's hesitation, gaze fixed on the cube as he solved it for a second time and began breaking the colors apart again. "I awoke this morning from a nightmare—a memory, of the first time my... abilities surfaced. I was six years old... A woman kidnapped me because my father had arrested her son for his crimes. Her hatred and insanity were in my head. I... ran away. Inside my mind. And I didn't wake up for some time."

"...The hospital. And when you did wake up... you'd blocked it all."

"Everything. Even memories. My parents told me I'd been kidnapped, but no details."

"And then your mom took you to England, and you were so busy adjusting to an unfamiliar routine that eventually you just... forgot you'd forgotten." Though the need for control had obviously stayed, buried beyond conscious recall. "...But why get mad at me when I didn't know about the nightmare?"

"Because you forced your way past the walls I put up, and now you're dropping me. Like everyone else." Hakuba finally looked at Kaito again, face impassive. "If you're going to walk away again, you could have had the courtesy not to break in in the first place."

"I could say the same to you, because I sure as hell hadn't planned on letting you close enough to see anything when we first met—" Kid-Dad'sdeath-Pokerface-Deliberatetarget-Stillsearching "—and then you did anyway! I'm not dropping you, damn it," Kaito added, voice rising, "I can't lose anyone else!"

"Neither can I!" Hakuba growled back, dispassionate mask cracking slightly.

"I've survived this long, I'm hardly going to die now!"

"Yes, I forgot, you're immortal," Hakuba replied in a biting tone.

Kaito gave him a darkly amused smile. "I am a ghost."

From the moment he'd stepped into a dead man's shoes and chosen to finish his last work, despite knowing only anonymity protected him from following Toichi beyond the grave, he'd played the phantom... And as time had passed the teenager had dwindled, first into the roles of Kid and class clown, two sides of one coin with no place for the intermediary, and then out into other worlds...

Why had he followed Riku, that first night? Because he'd cared so much about places he'd never heard of, or because he'd couldn't let pass an opportunity to be that balance of himself again, just for a little while?

"Bugger that." Hakuba's voice startled Kaito out of his thoughts. "You're flesh and blood, even if you're doing your damnedest to fade out of everyone's lives. You've been incredibly lucky so far, skill or not... but luck runs out, even your ability to beat the odds. And you just want me to go home and wait for you, and hope one day you'll turn up at school again... Wait and lie to Aoko-kun that I don't know where you are, and I'm sure you'll be home soon. Wait and watch her try and smile while she's breaking apart inside..."

Kaito's lips thinned, the only outward sign he allowed that Hakuba's words might have struck home. Hakuba had no idea—admittedly because Kaito had never let it show, but that was beside the point—how much it hurt to have to leave Aoko in the dark and let the distance between them grow.

But I swore when dad died that I would never do to a girl what he had done to mom, so until this is over... I can't.

"Would you rather she be waiting for both of us, alone?"

"...Why do I even bother? It's obvious you won't change your mind." Any of Hakuba's defenses that might have been lowered during the conversation returned so completely that in an instant, there was no emotion at all in his face. It was as if someone had flicked a switch, and a human being became an automaton. "Since you seem done with breakfast, shall I go back? I have a great deal of work to do."

He gave Kaito one of the perfectly empty smiles that he'd first brought over with him from England, the ones that had made Kaito want to know what went on behind the detective's immaculately cultivated exterior in the first place.

"By the time you come back... if you come back... I shouldn't care anymore. I'm good at shoring up the walls."

Over his smile-that-wasn't, Hakuba's eyes were almost as empty as his counterpart's in the dream.

:Kaito-kun.: Méraud's quiet voice stopped Kaito before he could begin formulating a reply. :If you send Saguru-kun home like this... if you turn him into a treasure to hide behind a glass wall rather than a friend whose choice to come with you is equally as valid as your choice to follow Riku-kun... You will be losing him, in any way that matters.:

...Damnit.

Hakuba set the Rubik's cube aside on the nearby table. "I just have a few things to gather, if you're ready to leave..."

Kaito closed his eyes again, this time against the sheer lifelessness in Hakuba's voice. "No. Stop. I'm sorry. I'm being—" a hypocrite of spectacular proportions "—an idiot."

...This isn't what I wanted...

When he opened his eyes Hakuba hadn't moved any further, but the detective didn't say anything either, simply watching him. Kaito took a deep breath and slowly exhaled.

"I... I'm sorry. I've been getting wrapped up in my own problems and..." Kaito trailed off briefly. "I've been ignoring too much else. It's... not fair for me to bring you into a situation you didn't ask for, and then try to shut you back out again."

No matter how much I still want to. When the number of people you actually give a damn about is maybe half a dozen, you get really touchy about the prospect of losing one.

Hakuba spread his hands slightly, palms up. "I don't want to be left behind. Not after everything that's happened, not when you don't know when or even if you'll return."

"Mmm."

"...You're not the only one who has nightmares, you know," Hakuba added quietly.

"I know. But at least mine used to fade after I woke up," Kaito grumbled, unable to squash a hint of bitterness.

He leaned back in his chair with a resigned sigh, because at this point... he obviously wasn't going to win this one. Not without losing the tentative friendship he and Hakuba had, anyway, which defeated the whole purpose of trying to protect the detective in the first place.

"...All right. If you really don't want to go home... I won't force you."

"I'm not leaving. Not unless I have to."

The small portion of Kaito's mind that he'd been trying to ignore as it worried about what he'd wind up doing if he had another nightmare after Hakuba'd gone home, betrayed him by relaxing.

"...Blasted stubborn detective."

"I have to be, to go head-to-head with a blasted stubborn thief."

Kaito cracked a smile. "Just so long as we're clear on the fact that if anything happens to you, I will follow you into the afterlife and drag you back."

The corner of Hakuba's mouth twitched upward, frost melting away as Kaito's sincerity about finally accepting the detective's company seemed to sink in. "Likewise."

"All right." Kaito paused for a few moments, switching gears from trying to convince Hakuba to go home, to instead planning the best way to keep the blond intact when they left.

"If you really are going to come along... guns run out of ammo, and you hardly need to tempt fate by fighting Heartless hand-to-hand, even with gloves. Can you use anything else?"

"Well, I'm fairly advanced in staff fighting."

Kaito raised his eyebrows. "Somehow I'm not surprised, even though that's not on record anywhere.Why the staff?"

Hakuba smirked. "Because if there's one weapon you can find almost anywhere at any time, it's a big stick."

"True," Kaito conceded with a soft snort. "Okay. We'll have to talk to Solomon-san about getting you one." Hakuba nodded. Kaito continued, "You should probably also talk to him about where your limits are, and some potential practical applications for this whole empathy thing. I know that empaths in some stories back home could project, and that'd be a good way to at least temporarily stop being a giant receptor in case a situation goes bad..."

"I'd... originally planned to do so. Before this morning." Hakuba glanced away.

Kaito smiled again out of habit, even though Hakuba couldn't really see it, but the attempt came out slightly lopsided. "I didn't think my being gone for a while would matter that much."

"I thought you'd decided to move on without me..." Hakuba tugged his gloves more securely onto his hands, eyes on pale leather. "This place is reasonably safe, after all..."

Kaito shook his head. "I'd never have stranded you with a bunch of near-strangers."

"Yes, well..." Hakuba glanced back up. "I have a bit of a problem with trust. You may have noticed."

Kaito gave him a wan little smile. "Only because it's mutual."

You expect people to leave while still living... I don't trust the people I care about to not die.

Hakuba seemed about to answer, but then pulled up short just before Kaito heard the unmistakable sound of the study door opening and closing.

"That was Riku-kun leaving, wasn't it?" he asked resignedly, trading an embarrassed look with the blond.

"Yes. He sat down behind your chair quite some time ago. I suppose he was trying to unobtrusively slip out."

"Could have been worse. He might have started applauding." Kaito sighed again. "...It's a sad day when a kid two years younger has to knock our heads together."

"Mmm. Quite."

"Hey..." Kaito turned to look at the door. "He was still gone when you woke up, wasn't he? He never went to bed last night, so that means he was gone almost... eight, nine hours."

Hakuba gave Kaito an inquiring look. "Perhaps we should ask what he was up to? It might be important."

"Yeah, if he wasn't willing to wait a few da... Oh, hell." Kaito quickly rose to his feet as memory struck him, leaving the study with Hakuba following behind.

"What is it?"

"I told him that checking up on someone could wait a few days, the first day we were home," Kaito answered, checking the guest bedroom to confirm that Riku wasn't there before heading back downstairs. "The guy is extremely bad news. If Riku-kun'd remembered, and gone by himself because we were both out of commission last night..."

"...Perhaps we should go talk to him now."

Kaito paused in the living room, gaze straying to the kitchen. "If it had been a real emergency, then he would have brought it up before having us talk. He didn't let me finish eating breakfast, though, and I'm starving—using the Shadows has shot my metabolism through the roof. Since he doesn't seem to be here right now, let me eat and then we can find out how good I am at finding Riku-kun through a Shadowrift."

Hakuba shrugged. "Very well."

Sitting down at the kitchen table again, Kaito reclaimed his chopsticks and glanced over at Hakuba uncertainly. Silence threatened to become awkward at this point, but while Hakuba had relaxed again Kaito wasn't sure what, of the questions he could ask, might be considered poking too far.

"So... if you had that dream this morning... do you remember things from before that, now, too?"

"Only a few fragments, nothing remarkable," Hakuba replied, watching in amusement as Kaito wolfed down the remainder of breakfast. "More impressions and a few broken images than anything, even of the kidnapping. There's simply... nothing else it could have been, and it correlates with what I already knew."

He lapsed into a short, contemplative silence, and then asked, "If I may ask, how, exactly, does this sort of travel work?"

Between bites, Kaito recounted a quick summary of the explanation Méraud had given him earlier, which Hakuba listened to with apparent fascination. Kaito wound down as he finished eating, then finally cracked his knuckles.

"So much for theory." He grinned, and quickly cleared the dishes and leftovers. "Want to see the real thing?"

Hakuba nodded, and Kaito leaned back against the kitchen counter. He didn't close his eyes, since that was a dangerous habit to develop given where and how he might eventually have to use this, but he did raise a hand slightly to accompany the mental reach for the resonance of Riku-friend-calm-over-ache.

Oddly enough, in the fraction of a second it took for the shadowrift to open, Kaito thought he heard a whisper just at the edge of hearing: an unpleasantly dark purr, too faint to make out any words. He made a note to ask Méraud about it, but was immediately distracted by Hakuba moving forward, eyes alight with interest.

The detective examined the rift much the way Kaito had the first time, and even went so far as to take off a glove and brush his hand against the shadowy tendrils defining the edges of the portal.

"...Fascinating."

"I know. Can you see the Shadows?"

"Mmm... No, but I presume they are the source of the faint prickling sensation along the edges of this. It's rather odd."

"And you can't even see the colors." Kaito joined Hakuba at the rift and looked through it to see a grassy park spreading out beyond. "Hmm. Looks fairly out of the way, less likely for someone to see us show up. Come on, let's find Riku-kun; I can always make another one of these for you to science to your heart's content later."

Hakuba turned and gave him a Look. "...Did you just use 'science' as a verb?"

Kaito grinned, unrepentant. "Yep!"

Hakuba merely sighed and shook his head, stepping through the rift onto the grass beyond. He glanced around briefly, then turned around to look at Kaito through the opening. "...This is highly disconcerting."

"Fun, though, isn't it?" Kaito joined Hakuba on the other side and looked back into the doorway-shaped hole leading to the Motou's kitchen. Not far behind the rift, a hedge of tall bushes blocked the view of what lay beyond. Reaching out, he experimentally brushed the rip -closed- until the edges nearly touched, but without releasing the underpinning Shadows, like he'd done when he'd visited Conan.

Hakuba cocked his head slightly to one side in a curious gesture. "Is it still there?"

"Yeah, just too small to see."

The blond's brow furrowed. "What would happen if someone walked into it from this direction? Would a pinpoint-width's of matter pass through while the rest remained behind?"

Kaito opened his mouth to reply, realized he didn't actually have an answer, and closed it again.

:I am... uncertain,: Méraud's voice murmured in the back of his mind. :Nothing Dark Sage or I have studied mentions such a thing. The sole treatise we have discovered on Shadow-walking describes rifts forming on the sides of otherwise solid objects. Shadows only know why you seem to form them in thin air.:

...Because I seem to make a habit out of the improbable?

"No idea," Kaito said aloud, "but there's no reason to find out." He let the Shadows dissolve. "Riku-kun's probably in walking distance of the Motou's, or I can do it again if I have to."

"Speaking of which, is he not supposed to be here?"

Kaito looked around. "Exact aim is really tough, and one Shadowrift-parameter that I'm trying to make a habit of is to be out of sight of people, if possible."

"Ah. Wise of you, I suppose. Behind the bushes, perhaps?"

"Yeah."

They walked in silence to the end of the tall strip of hedge. On the other side the grass continued to a small grove of trees backed by the city skyline. In the space between, Riku held a solid branch of wood in one hand with similar size and heft to his sword, traveling with intense focus along an invisible line in the unmistakable movements of a sword kata.

"...Huh."

"Is this a bad sign?" Hakuba inquired quietly.

"I don't think I've seen him practice since we met."

"I'll take that as a yes, then."

"Probably." Kaito didn't say anything more until Riku finished the kata, not wanting to distract or interrupt the other boy, but once Riku finally lowered the branch Kaito called over to him.

"Oi, Riku-kun."

Riku turned his head, acknowledging the other teens' presence. "Yes?"

Kaito walked towards the islander with deceptive casualness in his gait, Hakuba following behind. "Practicing a kata on no sleep isn't the smartest thing to do. Where'd you go that you were gone all night?"

Riku looked faintly uncomfortable. "...I was looking for a moogle. It kind of took a while to find one..."

"Moogle?" Kaito raised an eyebrow, not recognizing the term.

"They make potions. I was out."

"As in... Drink this and you'll be magically cured, potions?"

"Pretty much. They're really useful when traveling worlds."

Kaito sat down on the grass, gesturing in invitation for Riku and Hakuba to do the same. They did.

"Okay, why have I not heard about such a ridiculously useful thing before?"

"Because I didn't have any, and I really didn't have the time to get any. We kept getting... distracted."

Okay, true for the most part, but still...

"Riku-kun, you had at least a month before we even got home, and two weeks where I was in school for over six hours almost every day."

One thing Kaito hadn't missed much while traveling worlds. Learning, he enjoyed. Formal learning, stuck at the speed of the slowest student in the class, left him stuck doodling in the margins, doing his homework from the previous period, or flat-out zoning after the first explanation. It didn't help that he still intended, if he could make it through high school graduation alive, to apprentice under a magician rather than attend university. Anything he really wanted to learn, he did on his own time.

"Originally? I hadn't wanted to risk..." Riku hesitated briefly, "...crossing paths with Sora. Then it was just easier not to think about it, because we didn't run into any big enemies until Xigbar... and then I got distracted by going to your world and trying to take your advice to actually relax for a while."

"Mmm." Kaito waited a moment to be sure Riku didn't have anything else to add, then continued. "Even factoring in travel by a darkness corridor, eight hours to find a... moogle... is pushing it when the easiest thing for you to reach is a person or place you've encountered before." He eyed the light stiffness in Riku's body posture. "...Did you go after Xigbar before or after that?"

Riku twitched slightly, his eyes widening in a passable imitation of a deer in headlights. "...Uh..."

"He's the only thing I can think of that would have made you go out by yourself." Kaito sighed faintly. "Riku-kun, you're training, for the first time since we met. What happened?"

Riku looked down at the ground. In the long pause that followed, his sword-stick changed hands a few times before he finally dropped it in the grass and rubbed a hand over his face.

"I... ran into Sora. At the worst possible time."

Kaito slowly sucked in a breath. "That bad, huh?"

"...Xigbar found a dragon."

Yeah, that bad.

"I went to the nearest city to warn them, but they'd fought the Heartless. Didn't trust someone with gold eyes and darkness when I tried to get to the one in charge... I lost my temper, tried to force my way through. That's... when Sora showed up."

Riku absently plucked at the grass growing near his fingers, systematically shredding the small green blades into so much confetti as he spoke.

"He and Donald and Goofy, they all think I'm still Xehanort's Heartless... that I came back and attacked one of the world's defenders. If they see me again, they'll attack first and ask questions later. Frost and fire..." Riku shook his head. "I couldn't do anything but run, so I did. The world where I ended up, I met an old man a lot like Solomon-san. We talked for a while... he helped me see a few things. Then I came back. That's all, really."

If I believe that's really it, you've got a cheap bridge to sell me, too. But I doubt calling you on it right now would do much good, either... hopefully it's something that can wait a little while.

Kaito leaned back, palms pressing into the grass. "Well... that could have gone better, but it's too late to change it now. When we catch up with Sora-kun again, Hakuba-kun and I'll just make sure to explain what's really going on before anything else happens, ne?"

He gave Riku a little smile and received a slightly wan one in return.

"Your presence might surprise them enough to make them pause, I guess."

"Good. Then barring any better ideas, we'll head after Sora-kun when we've finished up here."

"So soon?" Riku looked... not panicked, but close.

"We've probably got until at least tomorrow, because Hakuba-kun still needs to get hold of a staff, but... nothing's going to change by putting this off any further. And the sooner we talk to him, the sooner we can explain."

Riku sighed. "All right. I think I'll stay here for a while longer, though... I am out of practice."

Kaito nodded, aware of how dangerous losing an edge over the Heartless could be. "Sure. Think you could give us directions back to the Motou's? Shadowrifting doesn't give much information about the surrounding area."

Riku gave Kaito an ironic smile. "Neither do the corridors. I didn't walk here from the game shop."

"...Right. Okay, here goes."

Still sitting on the grass, Kaito reached out again, this time for the vicinity of Solomon Motou, focusing on out-of-sight and present-time and not-in-thin-air rather than worrying about an exact location. The Shadowrift opened along the side of the hedge to reveal the guest bedroom, facing the beds, in tandem with the now-familiar energy drain that left Kaito wishing it were already lunchtime.

Hakuba rose to his feet and stepped through, turning around to face Kaito from the other side for a second time. "...Well, you seem to have made a rift so close to the surface of the closet door that it appears to be a hole."

Kaito grinned, then glanced at Riku. "Want me to leave it open for you?"

Riku shrugged. "If it's not a problem for you. It's out of the way enough that people shouldn't see it, and I won't run into it."

"At this point, I don't think it'll make much of a difference... and you might as well come home this way rather than risk opening a corridor where Yugi-kun or Solomon-san could see."

Riku's lips curled faintly in a wry smile. "We're probably better off not knowing how they'd react to the unexpected presence of Darkness."

"Yeah. We'll see you a little later, then. Don't overtire yourself, and when you get back I'd really like to get my hands on one or two of those potions for my bag of tricks." He smiled. "If we're going to be in this kind of universe, we might as well take advantage of it."

Riku simply nodded with a small smile, then stood and walked a little ways away from the portal to continue practicing. Kaito joined Hakuba on the other side and they headed down the stairs from the guest bedroom, pausing in the living room.

"I believe Solomon-san is in the shop, and won't mind talking further with me when there are no customers distracting him. I don't know if you would care to join us, or..." Hakuba trailed off uncertainly.

"Nah, I'll just hang around for a while." Kaito grinned. "I'm good at keeping myself entertained."

That earned him a brief flicker of a genuinely amused smile. "I'm aware. I seem to recall being the target of more than one self-concocted method of entertainment."

Kaito simply let his grin widen further. "Only because you made such a good target."

"I'd appreciate it if you refrain from further efforts in that capacity," Hakuba informed him dryly. "It took me nearly a week to find where you'd hidden that bloody cricket-chirper."

Hakuba must have seen a faint gleam in Kaito's eye, because he quickly added, "And if you even think about pranking my actual person, I will be forced to harm you."

Kaito laughed and waved him off. "No pranks, I promise. Don't forget to ask Solomon-san about a staff—we can pay for it."

"I won't."

Hakuba went through the door to the shop, leaving Kaito to raid the kitchen for a snack and then settle on the couch in front of the TV. He didn't feel like doing much, but it would be a few hours before school got out to see about meeting Bakura and improving his deck, and the last thing he wanted to do was try napping again after waking up mid-nightmare only a few hours ago. He'd take the first chance he'd had to simply relax in... way too long, instead.

Switching on the TV, Kaito settled down in the couch cushions for some mindless entertainment. The last channel watched had apparently been a children's network, because the first thing Kaito saw on the screen was a large scale battle against the ridiculously-powered Monster of the Day™.

...A sentai show? Those are almost as ridiculous as... if they made a show where all anyone does is play Duel Monsters, or something.

AN: Portal is not mine, nor is sentai or Duel Monsters but some opportunities are too good to let pass unreferenced.

Next Chapter: Worldhopping returns with a vengeance as Kaito uses Riku to practice Shadowrifting. Now is the time for readers to weigh in again—who or where would you like Riku and/or Kaito to see?

8/08