6,581 Miles to Luma [ 9/?? ]
As luck would have it, I'm almost excessively happy with this chapter, so much so that I barely messed with it at all. Thus, it can go up earlier than anticipated. Hooray.
Tomorrow is my birthday, kitties. For the devout, know that I gladly accept offerings of icons and graphics. Whether they're yours or not is irrelevant; links are totally acceptable. If anyone knows where I can get a Roxas mood theme, you can have my firstborn.
Title: 6,581 Miles to Luma [ 9/?? ]
Author: Casey
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: R/M
Pairings: Axel/Roxas, Riku/Sora
Warnings: The holy trinity of language, sex and violence.
Genre: Post-apocalyptic sci-fi/fantasy road trip
Summary: A clone, a priestess, a fugitive and a knight are crossing the desert together in a V-class 1300-series armored truck. There must be a punchline.
Previous: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Nightfall, Part Two
"You know why paopus are lucky for travelers, right?" was Sora's fifth attempt at making conversation. Roxas's starfruit was sitting idly on the dashboard, the rest of them already eaten by their intended recipients along with breakfast, but Roxas expressed his distaste for eating anything frozen and waited for his to melt, instead.
He didn't say anything in response, figuring that Sora would tell him all about it anyway, and after a moment, he did.
"It's supposed to represent the star of destiny, the light that guides you along the path the gods laid out for you." Sora was slouched down in the passenger seat, hands behind his head and feet up carelessly on the console in front of him, crossed at the ankles. He watched the desert pass through the windshield with a marked lack of concern, enigmatic little smile on his lips. "Back when the sky god still had a temple, the high priests were all astronomers and could tell you which star was your personal guide, and whenever you set out on a journey in life--not like a physical journey, necessarily, but something big and important like going to University or handfasting or something--it was traditional to eat a paopu." Sora's eyes flicked sideways to observe him for a bare moment before returning to the windshield, and the wasteland beyond. "I guess a lot of the old traditions like that stopped after the sky cracked, but we still hand out paopu to travelers, like everyone still remembers some hint of the story."
Roxas avoided looking at him, meeting that stare or allowing anything to surface enough for the Truthsayer to read him, staring instead at the waxy yellow fruit on his dashboard and feeling the metal of the chain around his neck, hidden under his shirt collar and the little four-pointed star cold against the skin over his heart. He figured, after a time, that it would be sacrilegious for a devotee to avoid his own patron's traditions, grabbed the paopu off the dashboard and bit off one of the points. The flesh inside was still icy and made his teeth hurt, but it was pleasantly sweet, and Sora had been right about the chill enhancing the flavor.
He was about halfway through it when he finally sank down more comfortably in the driver's seat and asked, "You know a lot about this sort of thing?"
"Not really." Sora's voice was bright and unapologetically honest. "I don't remember anything before a year ago, so I read a lot of books."
Roxas held the fruit halfway to his mouth and watched Sora sideways, wondering if that was some kind of tactic. If he was telling the truth, if he was lying, if he was exaggerating, if it was a trick to get Roxas to prod too deeply and leave himself vulnerable. He hovered around the questions for a moment, then let them fall away one by one, taking the statement at face value. "I'm starting to wish that sort of thing was more uncommon."
Sora's head tilted down, attention turning from the window and ceiling and back to Roxas, slow, owlish blink at him before something about his features softened. "Who is it?"
"What?"
"The person you miss." Sora's eyes flickered, wandering down to the blank space of Roxas's chest like he could see his heart, just sitting there like an open book.
Roxas shifted in his seat, squared his shoulders and focused on the road. That one was a ploy--his shields were fine, but there was no heart in the whole of the world that could build a shield powerful enough to keep that particular emotion in check. When he spoke, it was a simple statement of the obvious.
"Someone I had to leave behind."
Pride was a funny thing. Roxas felt it like a twist of bile in his stomach when his eyelids started to droop and Sora called Riku up to take the wheel. True, he hadn't slept all that well the night before, true he was used to being awake at night and sleeping in the mornings and true that schedule had been screwed all to shit, but that didn't mean he had to like it. Didn't mean he had to just hand the wheel over to Riku when he came through the pocket door and stood there hovering behind Roxas's seat.
So instead he sat there, stubbornly, until enough time had passed that he could have Sora reach over and grab the wheel so he could slip out of the driver's seat, like it had been his own idea. Exchanged an impassive look with Riku and muttered, "If you crash it, you're walking," before squeezing past him and into the living area.
Kairi was at the control panel, door hanging open, fingers running down over a row of fuses that serviced the bank of appliances. She looked up when he came in, looked back down when he promptly flopped down on the lower bunk and rested his forearm over his eyes. He could hear her shuffling around, still, hear the movements growing closer, then passing, and for a moment he held his breath, but then the pocket door slid closed.
Quiet, padding footsteps on metal, and then the sink and give of the mattress when she sat down, right next to his knee.
"Are you mad at me?"
All the air escaped his body in a protracted sigh. Roxas shifted his arm, moved it so his hand was rubbing his forehead. "No, Kairi, I'm not mad at you. I'm tired, I'm frustrated, I really didn't want to have to do this but I did have to, there wasn't much choice in the matter and it's ultimately for the best and that just frustrates me more, but no. It's not your fault, you were just the catalyst." He said it all with a logical detachment, and left out the part where he was equally frustrated with her, albeit not necessarily mad.
He didn't open his eyes, because he didn't want to see her sitting there, perfectly and infuriatingly calm, because then he'd wish he could drop the veils just to see her freak out a bit. Just so she could experience a taste of the very real and imminent danger they were in. That wasn't part of the plan, though.
She was moving a little on the mattress, weight shifting forward. "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do, you know. I just... keep waiting and hoping for some kind of sign, or an idea or a memory. Anything that might point me in the right direction, but it hasn't come yet. So what am I supposed to do?" He could almost feel her eyes boring into him, his own shielded behind his hand. Blue-violet and unblinking, so much knowledge and years and experience behind them and at the same time absolutely nothing. Gray fog, a long and winding blank. "What is it that's going on?"
Roxas chose to answer her first question and ignore the second. "You can maintain my truck, seems how you've already proven that you're better at it than I am. Just focus on that and don't worry about the rest."
In the silence that followed, he felt the edges of sleep tugging at his senses and was glad when Kairi finally let out a breath, jostling the mattress when she stood, even though her voice was curt and annoyed. "All right, then."
She had the grace to dim the cabin lights enough that if he turned towards the wall it was almost dark. He fell asleep to the sounds of her sorting fuses, and the rumble of the truck beneath his cheek.
Roxas drove the first night, because if he was honest with himself, he didn't trust anyone else to navigate them through the Shadows. Kairi checked the lights without speaking more than two words to him at dusk, Sora switching through the fuses in the control panel while she worked, all quiet smiles and silence. Riku sat in the passenger seat the entire time, a simple dinner laid out in various places for all of them after the lights were replaced and the truck was secure--but before the world turned into a nightmare and appetite fled along with anything else save a healthy sense of self-preservation. He sat there, and Roxas sat in the driver's seat, and that was how the night progressed.
Riku wasn't anything he would ever remotely consider to be an enigma, and that much was at least refreshing. Clones were simple creatures, simple enough to be infuriating if one tried to apply something like humanity to them, or leaps of logic like free will and creative thinking, but at least they were uncomplicated. Riku was a mass of silence and blank stares, slow passage of half-formed emotions over his heart overshadowed by a layer of guilt so massive and deep and encompassing that it was like staring down brightly lit neon red letters ten stories tall. That much might have been interesting, but it was pretty easy to guess.
His master was deathly ill. The Replican, whether it was actually his fault or not, would undoubtedly feel guilty for being unable to make this right.
Roxas wished, often, that he didn't understand them so well.
If he was honest, Riku's silence wasn't the worst company in the world. He didn't stare or ponder or swing back in a way that was far too relaxed considering the wriggling darkness mere feet away from the thin metal walls of their vehicle. He just sat, and sometimes his eyes were open and sometimes they were closed, and either way it was comfortable enough having his presence.
At dawn, when the morning sunlight peeked over the distant hills and finally washed the road in gold, Roxas pressed the brakes and brought the truck to a halt. He went through the floodlights one at a time, flipping them on for a count of ten and then back off, assuring there was no nook or cranny around the vehicle's exterior for a stray Shadow to cling to. Then killed the engine and disengaged the pressure lock on his door, releasing with a hiss, and said simply, "Let's get some fresh air."
Sora and Kairi emerged from the back, stretching sleep-tired limbs and blinking in the sun, and by then Roxas was inspecting the tires and running his fingers along some tiny scratches in one of the side panels, three marks almost perfectly spaced enough for him to splay his palm against. They must have lost a track light just there, or one of the Shadows ventured close enough to try and get inside. Kairi nodded as she passed him, like she'd noticed it too, like a silent agreement to replace that bulb as soon as possible.
The morning was pleasant, the sort that called for sliced fruit and eggs and Roxas started preparing it himself, silently slicing up a mixture of velango and cakeberries and moormelon, eggs sizzling away in the boxstove, until Riku appeared at the back door, open wide to let in the cool morning breeze, and said that Kairi needed him on the roof. Something about wiring. He shrugged, handed Riku the knife and climbed up the back ladder to find her there with her kerchief and denim and the red toolbox that was more hers than his, now. She was sitting on her knees, open panel beside her forgotten, and staring down at the ground.
He'd parked in the gravel shoulder, and alongside the truck was the broad sweep of the road, dusty gray pavement wide enough for two of the biggest trucks to pass each other abreast, endless and completely empty in either direction. In the space right there, however, in the cool and gold light of the morning Sora was barefoot on the pavement, discarded shirt and the sheath of that eastern sword off to the side, and he was moving so fast that Roxas had to blink and refocus to keep up with him. Like a hummingbird, limbs so fast and sword flickering, glinting steel in the sunrise and it was amazing enough in itself that he didn't slice himself in two with how fast he was moving, how the blade spun around him, how he'd shift one foot back and stop, suddenly and so still it was like the clockwork of time had just stopped turning, inexplicably, one hand forward and the sword turned back against his side. And then, just as suddenly, he was moving again.
Roxas circled the open panel and knelt down next to Kairi, watching this with a slack expression, mouth open and eyes drooping, almost entranced. He shifted more comfortably, prepared to sink into her heart and wrap the netting tighter if she fell back too far. "Kairi?"
"He's..." Her voice was faraway, dreamlike, vague and there was something hurt and longing in the sound, like back in the meeting room, when she first saw this boy. Roxas wasn't sure what was triggering her memory; it was just something to chalk up, one more thing that wasn't going according to plan. "He's a knight," she finished, finally, certainty in her words, one hand curling against her knee. "He's a knight of the Holy Guard. I used to watch them from the tower when they practiced in the mornings, with..." Kairi trailed off, mouth opening further and closing, tongue wetting her lips. "They were like stars. Little flickers of silver, they moved so fast and all you could see was the light reflecting off their swords. It was... so incredible..."
She listed a bit to the right and Roxas reached out to catch her arm, pull her back, and used the contact to slide a little of his consciousness in to draw the veils closed, smoothing down the metaphysical fabric they represented until he was sure the memory had dimmed back into the fog, Kairi blinking rapidly in reality. She turned to look at him for a moment, that preternatural calm back in place, then looked down at Sora again.
"That's just really interesting, I guess. I mean, I didn't know people from the West knew those swordforms, too." Kairi shrugged, sat back until she could pull her legs out in front of her and cross them, watching a bit longer before her attention returned to the toolbox.
It was interesting, he supposed--interesting enough that a knight of Luma's Holy Guard was out here in the middle of the desert and had even less business being there than Kairi did. At least with Kairi there was an explanation.
For Sora, though, there was nothing; just questions and wonderings and the way none of his emotions ever slipped and skidded around, even when he wasn't paying attention. The way he was out there on the pavement performing a dangerous dance with a sword, and no one in the world would believe for a second that he was ill.
Roxas slept through the morning, deeper and longer than he had in days, frustration ebbing and giving way to exhaustion. It was fantastic, it was refreshing, and when he woke he stayed firmly under the covers in the lower bunk, stretching his limbs and sighing into the remnant of a nice dream, face turned toward the pillow. Riku's back greeted him, turned towards the laundry section on the bank of appliances, setting the washer up for a small load.
He wondered for a while, staring at the fall of silver hair on Riku's shoulders, what exactly was going on with them, anyway. Sora was sick but not sick, Riku doted on him like any Replican did on his master but carried around his giant shroud of guilt like a security blanket, other emotions swirling around behind it but as loud as the guilt was only bits and pieces could be seen, unless they came out front and center in obvious moments, like they had back at that meeting. Riku's fear telling him all about Sora's fate in simple, sad lettering.
The pocket door was open, and if he twisted his neck he could see Kairi driving, hands carefully on either side of the wheel, eyes on the road, but laughing brightly at something Sora had said from the passenger seat. Roxas couldn't see him, but could picture him there with his feet up on the console, arms crossed behind his head. Could picture that unquiet smile. He heard their talk continue, Sora relating a story slightly muffled by the rumble of the truck, and he only caught the words 'Leon' and 'hopper' and something about a watertower, and then Riku was turning around to face him.
"Morning," he mumbled, and then paused. "Afternoon, actually. You practically slept the day away."
Roxas shrugged, rolled onto his back and stretched his arms out over his head, as far as he could. "Did I miss lunch?"
"There's a sandwich in the icebox." Riku shrugged, reached down to collect a pile of folded clothes and carry them back over to the cubby where his and Sora's things were stashed.
Another peal of laughter from the front and Roxas sat up, straightening the blankets beneath him before sitting again to collect his shoes. "Sounds like they're getting along."
"Sora gets along with everyone." Riku said it as a simple measure of fact, knelt on the floor and rummaging for space. He was silent for a few minutes, until Roxas's shoes were tied and he was looking for a shirt, and Riku finished packing away the clothes and pushed the cubby shut. He sat with his hands braced on his knees, and looked up at Roxas over his shoulder. "Where did she come from, anyway?"
Roxas considered how to answer, and tried to not consider for too long on the chance that Riku would become suspicious by protracted thought. He could be vaguely honest or equally as deceitful as he was with Kairi, and wondered if a combination of the two was close enough. It wasn't exactly a lie, just not the entire truth. "I found her on the side of the road."
"Very funny."
"I'm not joking." Roxas stood up, kneeling by the drawers under the bunk to find something clean. The burlap bag he kept by the foot of the bunk for laundry was empty, and he ventured a guess that Riku had the grace to do everyone's laundry while he was at it. Always nice, how domestically efficient Replicans were. "She was just lying there, so I stopped and picked her up."
Riku continued to hold his position and stare for another minute while Roxas pulled a green shirt out, stood and closed the drawer with one foot while he pulled it on. He buttoned from top to bottom while Riku's gaze and expression dropped simultaneously, mouth settling into a flat, pursed line just before he turned away. Shoes rattled violently inside the cubbyhole and the shroud of distemper that fell over the Replican was more than enough to speak for him.
Roxas chose the wisest route and didn't say anything further. This whole issue of trust was going to cause a problem, so long as he couldn't safely tell anyone the truth.
He made the concession that night, and thought it was pretty big of him, to let Riku drive. It was only mildly harrowing, not having the wheel to clutch while the sun set, right hand instead wrapped around a sweating bottle of tea, glass creaking to inform him that he really was holding it too hard. He schooled himself to breathe, closed his eyes and realized that he really could do that since he wasn't driving, and willed his body to relax.
It would be a while, he figured, before he'd ever be able to go into the living area, close the pocket door and sleep like none of this was going on.
For the first hour or so, they sat in the same silence as before; Roxas finished his drink, Riku held the wheel steady and stared out at the spread of headlights on the road, the wriggle of darkness at the edges. The silence wasn't quite as comfortable as before, more disquiet, occasional bursts of mistrustful anger popping through the red swath of guilt over Riku's heart. He wasn't comfortable with this, with Roxas and this arrangement and the incomplete idea of what might be happening, who they were and why they were out here traveling alone in a V-class truck, barely protected enough against the dark and the desert to survive all the way to the East.
If he really thought about it, put himself in Riku's shoes for a moment--not that he had any idea what it was like to be a clone and so limited in scope--he didn't really blame him. Roxas would be suspicious and uneasy, too.
When the tea was gone, Roxas stared for a while, and when staring only served to set his nerves on edge, he closed his eyes and tried to think instead. Pleasant thoughts, childhood thoughts, the temple and his friends and Aerith and the little metal star against his heart. Cold winters wrapped up in a blanket, snuggled together so the younger kids could sleep by the fire.
The beeping noise brought him back to reality, inhaling in a rush and straightening where he'd slumped in his chair, grabbing the armrests for balance. "What?"
Riku was examining a monitor above and to his right, reaching up to fiddle with the dial and tap at the static on the screen. "It's the proximity alarm, but nothing's coming up on the videx."
Roxas swallowed, hard because his throat had gone dry, his tongue along with it and he stood up, moved behind Riku's seat to examine the videx screen. It was the rear camera, tilted down to show the truck's back door but all that could be seen were the tracklights there, the darkness on the edges and the road passing beneath.
"You have a scope?" Riku asked over the beep, increasing now in volume and frequency.
Roxas pushed open a panel in the ceiling above his head, dragging the scope controls down to eye level. He flipped the device on with his thumb and peered through the eyeholes, waiting while it powered up and swung a view around the roof once before settling. A flick of the toggle to raise it higher, then the knob that turned it to the side, around until it was watching the rear of the truck, track lights glowing in the night.
It was vague, back there in the dark beyond where the lights disappeared and the darkness closed in, but he could make out a shape in the dim reflection of light from the truck. Just an outline, but that was more than enough.
A sleek black hopper riding on stealth, lights out, bare yards of distance behind them and gaining fast.
Roxas flipped the scope off and all but shoved the controls back up into the ceiling panel, Riku staring up over his shoulder in concern. Roxas ignored him, turning the knob to keep the panel shut. "Turn on the rear floodlights."
"What are you doing?" Riku's voice was raising with concern alongside the angry beeping of the proximity alarm. "What's back there?"
"Just turn them on." Roxas slid the pocket door open and tromped into the back, flicking the interior lights on high. Sora and Kairi, in the upper and lower bunks respectively, glowered at him from their pillows. "You two, grab torchlights," he said in the same firm tone he'd used with Riku, stalking directly past them to the back door. "Have them ready just in case. Stay in the bunks."
Sora opened his mouth, eyebrows drawing together, on the verge of saying something and Roxas turned his back, put both hands on the wheel pressurizing the back door, and called to Riku, "Did you turn on the rear floodlights?"
"Yes, what--" Riku turned just enough to look back through the pocket door at Roxas, poised to spin the wheel and disengage the lock, and at that precise moment all three of his passengers screeched at him some variation of:
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"
Roxas paused, hands still on the wheel and scowled down at it for a moment before spinning around and addressing the truck at large, one hand flung out to indicate all three of them and spat, "Would all of you shut the fuck up and trust me for five seconds? STAY WHERE YOU ARE," he added, because Sora looked like he was about to jump down from the top bunk.
With silence at his back, aside from some hissing from the drivers seat that was probably Riku cursing his name to the Replican god, Roxas grabbed the wheel again, and turned it.
The door hissed, air rushing through it and past it and shuddered on its hinges as Roxas pushed it open, almost flung away from him in the tailwind the truck created. He grabbed the bar just outside to steady himself, raised one hand at the force of air blowing his bangs into his face, and ducked down until he found the space where it was least invasive, then opened his eyes.
The night was dark and bare around him, beyond the edges of the brilliant white floodlight, Shadows swarming, wriggling and writhing and racing now to keep up with the truck, limpid yellow eyes blinking up at their prey right there in the open, unprotected, and some ventured to spread reaching talons into the pool of light surrounding him. A tremor ran up his spine, looking down for a moment at the pavement speeding away beneath his feet before closing his eyes firmly and resolving not to look that direction again. Fantasies in his head of losing his grip and falling, faded blacktop eating away his skin as his body tumbled and skidded along it, followed closely by the Shadows finishing him off, his poor wayward heart left to be slowly digested into nonexistence in one of their bloated bellies.
When he opened his eyes again, he looked out, past the rush of air and road and away from the darkness, to the light providing a sweep of what lay behind them, and like knowing what he had planned, the hopper tailing them had edged into the light, revealing itself. It was an Organization model, that was for sure, oblong and black with four widespread wheels, designed for speed and stealth and not at all for being this far out in the desert. They must have brought a truck, somewhere further behind, to carry their supplies.
He wondered, just for a moment, who had finally caught up with him, but as the shiny black nose of the hopper drew closer to the truck's rear bumper, a small, resonating jump of his heart in his chest told him who was behind the tinted sheen of the windshield, even before he squinted to make out the sharp silhouette there.
Roxas smiled.
"Hey, baby," he drawled, lazy, leaning to the side against the door as though this was just a casual encounter, as though they weren't clipping along through the desert in the dead of night with Shadows swarming all around them, as though Roxas wasn't running and Axel wasn't chasing and all was well and normal. He might have been standing in the doorway to Axel's room back at the University, one arm on the frame, lazy smile spreading across his face and suggestion dripping everywhere.
It could have been that, and he played it just that way, just for Axel.
He could almost see the answering smirk through the windshield and lifted his free hand, raised it to his lips to plant a kiss there, slow and teasing, then held his palm flat and blew the kiss out into the night. Through the hopper's windshield, he thought he saw a hand raise up from the steering wheel to catch it.
"Sorry," he murmured softly, smiled beatifically, and raised his hand again. Two fingers pointing, and he drew a wall of blinding light across the road.
Roxas shut his own eyes at the intensity, and the sound of wheels screeching, and offered a prayer to whoever would listen that the hopper didn't overturn, or crash, or go off the road into the tribes' territory. He didn't think it would--Axel knew him, Axel knew the plan and he would have known what Roxas was going to do. He wouldn't have shown himself otherwise.
This time, when he opened his eyes, the light was gone, and the road behind the truck was empty aside from the mass of darkness.
He pulled back quickly and jerked the door shut, struggling against the wind holding it open until Sora appeared at his side to help haul it closed. He spun the wheel until the door hissed and pressured itself fully shut, not so much as a crack for a Shadow to slink through. "Take the torchlights, check everywhere, cupboards, drawers, panels, everything. Don't turn the lights out back here until morning, not even to dim. Okay?" He watched Sora, stared hard until he nodded, then stalked back to the front and pushed the pocket door closed tight.
Riku's hands were white-knuckled, gripping the wheel. "You didn't tell us you were being followed."
"You didn't ask," Roxas shot back, one hand grabbing his shoulder. "Let me drive."
Riku gave him a hard stare, for a long moment, then stood, one hand on the wheel as he shifted to the side to take the passenger seat until Roxas could slip in and grab it, hold it steady while he settled in.
"Is this why you didn't want us coming with you?" Riku asked at length, elbows settled on the armrests and still staring, eyes going narrower and narrower as he did.
"Not my fault it took you until now to realize that I was fucking serious." Roxas spat the words out at the consoles in front of him, reaching forward to flip the rear floodlight off, then slowly, one by one, he started turning the lights off. One set of tracks at a time, toggles flipping off in loud clicks of metal on metal.
He closed his eyes, and focused.
"What the hell are you doing?" Riku hissed, voice strained and panicked and two beats from jumping from his seat.
Roxas kept him in place with a sidelong look, brief but meaningful. "I told you to trust me. I'm not going to put myself in danger; you can believe that if nothing else." He closed his eyes again. "Don't break my concentration, or we'll all die."
He flattened his fingers on the wheel and dug down deep, drawing off the pool of the photology Art deep in his gut to create the field around the truck. It would take a lot to keep it up, but he could make it for a few hours, maybe. He licked his lips, spoke through the process for Riku's benefit. "There's a spectrum of light called infrared. It's invisible to the human eye but as far as the Shadows are concerned, it's still light." He flipped off the last of the exterior lights, opening his eyes and bending the spectrum in front of his face so he could see the road, the Shadows little green blurs on either side of it, still moving and scampering out of the way as though the headlights were still on.
"You can see it?"
"Yes."
Riku was silent for several minutes, aside from a bare gasp as Roxas reached up to flip off the cabin lights, nothing left but the few dim LEDs on the consoles. He could hear the creak of leather, Riku grabbing the armrests of his seat and the steady rise of breath, trying not to panic in the darkness. Finally, a swallow, and a long breath. "Can you see them?"
"Yes. They're staying away."
"How long do we have to do this?"
"I threw one of them off our tail, but there'll be more. So... as long as possible."
Roxas tried to settle in his seat, not willing to admit that his own palms were sweating against the wheel. Just a couple of hours. A couple of hours of green non-light and knowing, like his skin crawling, that everything around him was pitch black.
Riku's breathing steadied after a while, cautiously optimistic that Roxas's light trick was working. Sora and Kairi were still safe in the light, back in the living area behind him; he could hear them thumping around, still checking every nook and corner for stray Shadows. At length, there was another breath, and then Riku asked what Roxas was afraid he was going to. "Who are they? Why are they following you?"
"I took something of theirs." Roxas decided that was the safest answer, and left it at that. Riku made a dubious noise, and when Roxas flicked his attention over he was just as green as everything else. "You want the truth?"
"Of course."
"You're going to laugh." Roxas sat back in his seat, holding still in hopes his nerves would stop jumping, watching the green highway and the green bob of antennae all around them. "But I'll tell you, if you really want."
Riku licked his lips, a smack in the dark. "Tell me."
Roxas felt the corners of his mouth turning up, and if Riku could see it he probably wouldn't understand how self-effacing the expression really was. "I'm trying to save the world," he said, mouth still curling. Unable to help himself, especially at Riku's silence after the declaration, he snickered and laughed out loud.
[ NEXT ]
Tomorrow is my birthday, kitties. For the devout, know that I gladly accept offerings of icons and graphics. Whether they're yours or not is irrelevant; links are totally acceptable. If anyone knows where I can get a Roxas mood theme, you can have my firstborn.
Title: 6,581 Miles to Luma [ 9/?? ]
Author: Casey
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: R/M
Pairings: Axel/Roxas, Riku/Sora
Warnings: The holy trinity of language, sex and violence.
Genre: Post-apocalyptic sci-fi/fantasy road trip
Summary: A clone, a priestess, a fugitive and a knight are crossing the desert together in a V-class 1300-series armored truck. There must be a punchline.
Previous: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Nightfall, Part Two
"You know why paopus are lucky for travelers, right?" was Sora's fifth attempt at making conversation. Roxas's starfruit was sitting idly on the dashboard, the rest of them already eaten by their intended recipients along with breakfast, but Roxas expressed his distaste for eating anything frozen and waited for his to melt, instead.
He didn't say anything in response, figuring that Sora would tell him all about it anyway, and after a moment, he did.
"It's supposed to represent the star of destiny, the light that guides you along the path the gods laid out for you." Sora was slouched down in the passenger seat, hands behind his head and feet up carelessly on the console in front of him, crossed at the ankles. He watched the desert pass through the windshield with a marked lack of concern, enigmatic little smile on his lips. "Back when the sky god still had a temple, the high priests were all astronomers and could tell you which star was your personal guide, and whenever you set out on a journey in life--not like a physical journey, necessarily, but something big and important like going to University or handfasting or something--it was traditional to eat a paopu." Sora's eyes flicked sideways to observe him for a bare moment before returning to the windshield, and the wasteland beyond. "I guess a lot of the old traditions like that stopped after the sky cracked, but we still hand out paopu to travelers, like everyone still remembers some hint of the story."
Roxas avoided looking at him, meeting that stare or allowing anything to surface enough for the Truthsayer to read him, staring instead at the waxy yellow fruit on his dashboard and feeling the metal of the chain around his neck, hidden under his shirt collar and the little four-pointed star cold against the skin over his heart. He figured, after a time, that it would be sacrilegious for a devotee to avoid his own patron's traditions, grabbed the paopu off the dashboard and bit off one of the points. The flesh inside was still icy and made his teeth hurt, but it was pleasantly sweet, and Sora had been right about the chill enhancing the flavor.
He was about halfway through it when he finally sank down more comfortably in the driver's seat and asked, "You know a lot about this sort of thing?"
"Not really." Sora's voice was bright and unapologetically honest. "I don't remember anything before a year ago, so I read a lot of books."
Roxas held the fruit halfway to his mouth and watched Sora sideways, wondering if that was some kind of tactic. If he was telling the truth, if he was lying, if he was exaggerating, if it was a trick to get Roxas to prod too deeply and leave himself vulnerable. He hovered around the questions for a moment, then let them fall away one by one, taking the statement at face value. "I'm starting to wish that sort of thing was more uncommon."
Sora's head tilted down, attention turning from the window and ceiling and back to Roxas, slow, owlish blink at him before something about his features softened. "Who is it?"
"What?"
"The person you miss." Sora's eyes flickered, wandering down to the blank space of Roxas's chest like he could see his heart, just sitting there like an open book.
Roxas shifted in his seat, squared his shoulders and focused on the road. That one was a ploy--his shields were fine, but there was no heart in the whole of the world that could build a shield powerful enough to keep that particular emotion in check. When he spoke, it was a simple statement of the obvious.
"Someone I had to leave behind."
Pride was a funny thing. Roxas felt it like a twist of bile in his stomach when his eyelids started to droop and Sora called Riku up to take the wheel. True, he hadn't slept all that well the night before, true he was used to being awake at night and sleeping in the mornings and true that schedule had been screwed all to shit, but that didn't mean he had to like it. Didn't mean he had to just hand the wheel over to Riku when he came through the pocket door and stood there hovering behind Roxas's seat.
So instead he sat there, stubbornly, until enough time had passed that he could have Sora reach over and grab the wheel so he could slip out of the driver's seat, like it had been his own idea. Exchanged an impassive look with Riku and muttered, "If you crash it, you're walking," before squeezing past him and into the living area.
Kairi was at the control panel, door hanging open, fingers running down over a row of fuses that serviced the bank of appliances. She looked up when he came in, looked back down when he promptly flopped down on the lower bunk and rested his forearm over his eyes. He could hear her shuffling around, still, hear the movements growing closer, then passing, and for a moment he held his breath, but then the pocket door slid closed.
Quiet, padding footsteps on metal, and then the sink and give of the mattress when she sat down, right next to his knee.
"Are you mad at me?"
All the air escaped his body in a protracted sigh. Roxas shifted his arm, moved it so his hand was rubbing his forehead. "No, Kairi, I'm not mad at you. I'm tired, I'm frustrated, I really didn't want to have to do this but I did have to, there wasn't much choice in the matter and it's ultimately for the best and that just frustrates me more, but no. It's not your fault, you were just the catalyst." He said it all with a logical detachment, and left out the part where he was equally frustrated with her, albeit not necessarily mad.
He didn't open his eyes, because he didn't want to see her sitting there, perfectly and infuriatingly calm, because then he'd wish he could drop the veils just to see her freak out a bit. Just so she could experience a taste of the very real and imminent danger they were in. That wasn't part of the plan, though.
She was moving a little on the mattress, weight shifting forward. "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do, you know. I just... keep waiting and hoping for some kind of sign, or an idea or a memory. Anything that might point me in the right direction, but it hasn't come yet. So what am I supposed to do?" He could almost feel her eyes boring into him, his own shielded behind his hand. Blue-violet and unblinking, so much knowledge and years and experience behind them and at the same time absolutely nothing. Gray fog, a long and winding blank. "What is it that's going on?"
Roxas chose to answer her first question and ignore the second. "You can maintain my truck, seems how you've already proven that you're better at it than I am. Just focus on that and don't worry about the rest."
In the silence that followed, he felt the edges of sleep tugging at his senses and was glad when Kairi finally let out a breath, jostling the mattress when she stood, even though her voice was curt and annoyed. "All right, then."
She had the grace to dim the cabin lights enough that if he turned towards the wall it was almost dark. He fell asleep to the sounds of her sorting fuses, and the rumble of the truck beneath his cheek.
Roxas drove the first night, because if he was honest with himself, he didn't trust anyone else to navigate them through the Shadows. Kairi checked the lights without speaking more than two words to him at dusk, Sora switching through the fuses in the control panel while she worked, all quiet smiles and silence. Riku sat in the passenger seat the entire time, a simple dinner laid out in various places for all of them after the lights were replaced and the truck was secure--but before the world turned into a nightmare and appetite fled along with anything else save a healthy sense of self-preservation. He sat there, and Roxas sat in the driver's seat, and that was how the night progressed.
Riku wasn't anything he would ever remotely consider to be an enigma, and that much was at least refreshing. Clones were simple creatures, simple enough to be infuriating if one tried to apply something like humanity to them, or leaps of logic like free will and creative thinking, but at least they were uncomplicated. Riku was a mass of silence and blank stares, slow passage of half-formed emotions over his heart overshadowed by a layer of guilt so massive and deep and encompassing that it was like staring down brightly lit neon red letters ten stories tall. That much might have been interesting, but it was pretty easy to guess.
His master was deathly ill. The Replican, whether it was actually his fault or not, would undoubtedly feel guilty for being unable to make this right.
Roxas wished, often, that he didn't understand them so well.
If he was honest, Riku's silence wasn't the worst company in the world. He didn't stare or ponder or swing back in a way that was far too relaxed considering the wriggling darkness mere feet away from the thin metal walls of their vehicle. He just sat, and sometimes his eyes were open and sometimes they were closed, and either way it was comfortable enough having his presence.
At dawn, when the morning sunlight peeked over the distant hills and finally washed the road in gold, Roxas pressed the brakes and brought the truck to a halt. He went through the floodlights one at a time, flipping them on for a count of ten and then back off, assuring there was no nook or cranny around the vehicle's exterior for a stray Shadow to cling to. Then killed the engine and disengaged the pressure lock on his door, releasing with a hiss, and said simply, "Let's get some fresh air."
Sora and Kairi emerged from the back, stretching sleep-tired limbs and blinking in the sun, and by then Roxas was inspecting the tires and running his fingers along some tiny scratches in one of the side panels, three marks almost perfectly spaced enough for him to splay his palm against. They must have lost a track light just there, or one of the Shadows ventured close enough to try and get inside. Kairi nodded as she passed him, like she'd noticed it too, like a silent agreement to replace that bulb as soon as possible.
The morning was pleasant, the sort that called for sliced fruit and eggs and Roxas started preparing it himself, silently slicing up a mixture of velango and cakeberries and moormelon, eggs sizzling away in the boxstove, until Riku appeared at the back door, open wide to let in the cool morning breeze, and said that Kairi needed him on the roof. Something about wiring. He shrugged, handed Riku the knife and climbed up the back ladder to find her there with her kerchief and denim and the red toolbox that was more hers than his, now. She was sitting on her knees, open panel beside her forgotten, and staring down at the ground.
He'd parked in the gravel shoulder, and alongside the truck was the broad sweep of the road, dusty gray pavement wide enough for two of the biggest trucks to pass each other abreast, endless and completely empty in either direction. In the space right there, however, in the cool and gold light of the morning Sora was barefoot on the pavement, discarded shirt and the sheath of that eastern sword off to the side, and he was moving so fast that Roxas had to blink and refocus to keep up with him. Like a hummingbird, limbs so fast and sword flickering, glinting steel in the sunrise and it was amazing enough in itself that he didn't slice himself in two with how fast he was moving, how the blade spun around him, how he'd shift one foot back and stop, suddenly and so still it was like the clockwork of time had just stopped turning, inexplicably, one hand forward and the sword turned back against his side. And then, just as suddenly, he was moving again.
Roxas circled the open panel and knelt down next to Kairi, watching this with a slack expression, mouth open and eyes drooping, almost entranced. He shifted more comfortably, prepared to sink into her heart and wrap the netting tighter if she fell back too far. "Kairi?"
"He's..." Her voice was faraway, dreamlike, vague and there was something hurt and longing in the sound, like back in the meeting room, when she first saw this boy. Roxas wasn't sure what was triggering her memory; it was just something to chalk up, one more thing that wasn't going according to plan. "He's a knight," she finished, finally, certainty in her words, one hand curling against her knee. "He's a knight of the Holy Guard. I used to watch them from the tower when they practiced in the mornings, with..." Kairi trailed off, mouth opening further and closing, tongue wetting her lips. "They were like stars. Little flickers of silver, they moved so fast and all you could see was the light reflecting off their swords. It was... so incredible..."
She listed a bit to the right and Roxas reached out to catch her arm, pull her back, and used the contact to slide a little of his consciousness in to draw the veils closed, smoothing down the metaphysical fabric they represented until he was sure the memory had dimmed back into the fog, Kairi blinking rapidly in reality. She turned to look at him for a moment, that preternatural calm back in place, then looked down at Sora again.
"That's just really interesting, I guess. I mean, I didn't know people from the West knew those swordforms, too." Kairi shrugged, sat back until she could pull her legs out in front of her and cross them, watching a bit longer before her attention returned to the toolbox.
It was interesting, he supposed--interesting enough that a knight of Luma's Holy Guard was out here in the middle of the desert and had even less business being there than Kairi did. At least with Kairi there was an explanation.
For Sora, though, there was nothing; just questions and wonderings and the way none of his emotions ever slipped and skidded around, even when he wasn't paying attention. The way he was out there on the pavement performing a dangerous dance with a sword, and no one in the world would believe for a second that he was ill.
Roxas slept through the morning, deeper and longer than he had in days, frustration ebbing and giving way to exhaustion. It was fantastic, it was refreshing, and when he woke he stayed firmly under the covers in the lower bunk, stretching his limbs and sighing into the remnant of a nice dream, face turned toward the pillow. Riku's back greeted him, turned towards the laundry section on the bank of appliances, setting the washer up for a small load.
He wondered for a while, staring at the fall of silver hair on Riku's shoulders, what exactly was going on with them, anyway. Sora was sick but not sick, Riku doted on him like any Replican did on his master but carried around his giant shroud of guilt like a security blanket, other emotions swirling around behind it but as loud as the guilt was only bits and pieces could be seen, unless they came out front and center in obvious moments, like they had back at that meeting. Riku's fear telling him all about Sora's fate in simple, sad lettering.
The pocket door was open, and if he twisted his neck he could see Kairi driving, hands carefully on either side of the wheel, eyes on the road, but laughing brightly at something Sora had said from the passenger seat. Roxas couldn't see him, but could picture him there with his feet up on the console, arms crossed behind his head. Could picture that unquiet smile. He heard their talk continue, Sora relating a story slightly muffled by the rumble of the truck, and he only caught the words 'Leon' and 'hopper' and something about a watertower, and then Riku was turning around to face him.
"Morning," he mumbled, and then paused. "Afternoon, actually. You practically slept the day away."
Roxas shrugged, rolled onto his back and stretched his arms out over his head, as far as he could. "Did I miss lunch?"
"There's a sandwich in the icebox." Riku shrugged, reached down to collect a pile of folded clothes and carry them back over to the cubby where his and Sora's things were stashed.
Another peal of laughter from the front and Roxas sat up, straightening the blankets beneath him before sitting again to collect his shoes. "Sounds like they're getting along."
"Sora gets along with everyone." Riku said it as a simple measure of fact, knelt on the floor and rummaging for space. He was silent for a few minutes, until Roxas's shoes were tied and he was looking for a shirt, and Riku finished packing away the clothes and pushed the cubby shut. He sat with his hands braced on his knees, and looked up at Roxas over his shoulder. "Where did she come from, anyway?"
Roxas considered how to answer, and tried to not consider for too long on the chance that Riku would become suspicious by protracted thought. He could be vaguely honest or equally as deceitful as he was with Kairi, and wondered if a combination of the two was close enough. It wasn't exactly a lie, just not the entire truth. "I found her on the side of the road."
"Very funny."
"I'm not joking." Roxas stood up, kneeling by the drawers under the bunk to find something clean. The burlap bag he kept by the foot of the bunk for laundry was empty, and he ventured a guess that Riku had the grace to do everyone's laundry while he was at it. Always nice, how domestically efficient Replicans were. "She was just lying there, so I stopped and picked her up."
Riku continued to hold his position and stare for another minute while Roxas pulled a green shirt out, stood and closed the drawer with one foot while he pulled it on. He buttoned from top to bottom while Riku's gaze and expression dropped simultaneously, mouth settling into a flat, pursed line just before he turned away. Shoes rattled violently inside the cubbyhole and the shroud of distemper that fell over the Replican was more than enough to speak for him.
Roxas chose the wisest route and didn't say anything further. This whole issue of trust was going to cause a problem, so long as he couldn't safely tell anyone the truth.
He made the concession that night, and thought it was pretty big of him, to let Riku drive. It was only mildly harrowing, not having the wheel to clutch while the sun set, right hand instead wrapped around a sweating bottle of tea, glass creaking to inform him that he really was holding it too hard. He schooled himself to breathe, closed his eyes and realized that he really could do that since he wasn't driving, and willed his body to relax.
It would be a while, he figured, before he'd ever be able to go into the living area, close the pocket door and sleep like none of this was going on.
For the first hour or so, they sat in the same silence as before; Roxas finished his drink, Riku held the wheel steady and stared out at the spread of headlights on the road, the wriggle of darkness at the edges. The silence wasn't quite as comfortable as before, more disquiet, occasional bursts of mistrustful anger popping through the red swath of guilt over Riku's heart. He wasn't comfortable with this, with Roxas and this arrangement and the incomplete idea of what might be happening, who they were and why they were out here traveling alone in a V-class truck, barely protected enough against the dark and the desert to survive all the way to the East.
If he really thought about it, put himself in Riku's shoes for a moment--not that he had any idea what it was like to be a clone and so limited in scope--he didn't really blame him. Roxas would be suspicious and uneasy, too.
When the tea was gone, Roxas stared for a while, and when staring only served to set his nerves on edge, he closed his eyes and tried to think instead. Pleasant thoughts, childhood thoughts, the temple and his friends and Aerith and the little metal star against his heart. Cold winters wrapped up in a blanket, snuggled together so the younger kids could sleep by the fire.
The beeping noise brought him back to reality, inhaling in a rush and straightening where he'd slumped in his chair, grabbing the armrests for balance. "What?"
Riku was examining a monitor above and to his right, reaching up to fiddle with the dial and tap at the static on the screen. "It's the proximity alarm, but nothing's coming up on the videx."
Roxas swallowed, hard because his throat had gone dry, his tongue along with it and he stood up, moved behind Riku's seat to examine the videx screen. It was the rear camera, tilted down to show the truck's back door but all that could be seen were the tracklights there, the darkness on the edges and the road passing beneath.
"You have a scope?" Riku asked over the beep, increasing now in volume and frequency.
Roxas pushed open a panel in the ceiling above his head, dragging the scope controls down to eye level. He flipped the device on with his thumb and peered through the eyeholes, waiting while it powered up and swung a view around the roof once before settling. A flick of the toggle to raise it higher, then the knob that turned it to the side, around until it was watching the rear of the truck, track lights glowing in the night.
It was vague, back there in the dark beyond where the lights disappeared and the darkness closed in, but he could make out a shape in the dim reflection of light from the truck. Just an outline, but that was more than enough.
A sleek black hopper riding on stealth, lights out, bare yards of distance behind them and gaining fast.
Roxas flipped the scope off and all but shoved the controls back up into the ceiling panel, Riku staring up over his shoulder in concern. Roxas ignored him, turning the knob to keep the panel shut. "Turn on the rear floodlights."
"What are you doing?" Riku's voice was raising with concern alongside the angry beeping of the proximity alarm. "What's back there?"
"Just turn them on." Roxas slid the pocket door open and tromped into the back, flicking the interior lights on high. Sora and Kairi, in the upper and lower bunks respectively, glowered at him from their pillows. "You two, grab torchlights," he said in the same firm tone he'd used with Riku, stalking directly past them to the back door. "Have them ready just in case. Stay in the bunks."
Sora opened his mouth, eyebrows drawing together, on the verge of saying something and Roxas turned his back, put both hands on the wheel pressurizing the back door, and called to Riku, "Did you turn on the rear floodlights?"
"Yes, what--" Riku turned just enough to look back through the pocket door at Roxas, poised to spin the wheel and disengage the lock, and at that precise moment all three of his passengers screeched at him some variation of:
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"
Roxas paused, hands still on the wheel and scowled down at it for a moment before spinning around and addressing the truck at large, one hand flung out to indicate all three of them and spat, "Would all of you shut the fuck up and trust me for five seconds? STAY WHERE YOU ARE," he added, because Sora looked like he was about to jump down from the top bunk.
With silence at his back, aside from some hissing from the drivers seat that was probably Riku cursing his name to the Replican god, Roxas grabbed the wheel again, and turned it.
The door hissed, air rushing through it and past it and shuddered on its hinges as Roxas pushed it open, almost flung away from him in the tailwind the truck created. He grabbed the bar just outside to steady himself, raised one hand at the force of air blowing his bangs into his face, and ducked down until he found the space where it was least invasive, then opened his eyes.
The night was dark and bare around him, beyond the edges of the brilliant white floodlight, Shadows swarming, wriggling and writhing and racing now to keep up with the truck, limpid yellow eyes blinking up at their prey right there in the open, unprotected, and some ventured to spread reaching talons into the pool of light surrounding him. A tremor ran up his spine, looking down for a moment at the pavement speeding away beneath his feet before closing his eyes firmly and resolving not to look that direction again. Fantasies in his head of losing his grip and falling, faded blacktop eating away his skin as his body tumbled and skidded along it, followed closely by the Shadows finishing him off, his poor wayward heart left to be slowly digested into nonexistence in one of their bloated bellies.
When he opened his eyes again, he looked out, past the rush of air and road and away from the darkness, to the light providing a sweep of what lay behind them, and like knowing what he had planned, the hopper tailing them had edged into the light, revealing itself. It was an Organization model, that was for sure, oblong and black with four widespread wheels, designed for speed and stealth and not at all for being this far out in the desert. They must have brought a truck, somewhere further behind, to carry their supplies.
He wondered, just for a moment, who had finally caught up with him, but as the shiny black nose of the hopper drew closer to the truck's rear bumper, a small, resonating jump of his heart in his chest told him who was behind the tinted sheen of the windshield, even before he squinted to make out the sharp silhouette there.
Roxas smiled.
"Hey, baby," he drawled, lazy, leaning to the side against the door as though this was just a casual encounter, as though they weren't clipping along through the desert in the dead of night with Shadows swarming all around them, as though Roxas wasn't running and Axel wasn't chasing and all was well and normal. He might have been standing in the doorway to Axel's room back at the University, one arm on the frame, lazy smile spreading across his face and suggestion dripping everywhere.
It could have been that, and he played it just that way, just for Axel.
He could almost see the answering smirk through the windshield and lifted his free hand, raised it to his lips to plant a kiss there, slow and teasing, then held his palm flat and blew the kiss out into the night. Through the hopper's windshield, he thought he saw a hand raise up from the steering wheel to catch it.
"Sorry," he murmured softly, smiled beatifically, and raised his hand again. Two fingers pointing, and he drew a wall of blinding light across the road.
Roxas shut his own eyes at the intensity, and the sound of wheels screeching, and offered a prayer to whoever would listen that the hopper didn't overturn, or crash, or go off the road into the tribes' territory. He didn't think it would--Axel knew him, Axel knew the plan and he would have known what Roxas was going to do. He wouldn't have shown himself otherwise.
This time, when he opened his eyes, the light was gone, and the road behind the truck was empty aside from the mass of darkness.
He pulled back quickly and jerked the door shut, struggling against the wind holding it open until Sora appeared at his side to help haul it closed. He spun the wheel until the door hissed and pressured itself fully shut, not so much as a crack for a Shadow to slink through. "Take the torchlights, check everywhere, cupboards, drawers, panels, everything. Don't turn the lights out back here until morning, not even to dim. Okay?" He watched Sora, stared hard until he nodded, then stalked back to the front and pushed the pocket door closed tight.
Riku's hands were white-knuckled, gripping the wheel. "You didn't tell us you were being followed."
"You didn't ask," Roxas shot back, one hand grabbing his shoulder. "Let me drive."
Riku gave him a hard stare, for a long moment, then stood, one hand on the wheel as he shifted to the side to take the passenger seat until Roxas could slip in and grab it, hold it steady while he settled in.
"Is this why you didn't want us coming with you?" Riku asked at length, elbows settled on the armrests and still staring, eyes going narrower and narrower as he did.
"Not my fault it took you until now to realize that I was fucking serious." Roxas spat the words out at the consoles in front of him, reaching forward to flip the rear floodlight off, then slowly, one by one, he started turning the lights off. One set of tracks at a time, toggles flipping off in loud clicks of metal on metal.
He closed his eyes, and focused.
"What the hell are you doing?" Riku hissed, voice strained and panicked and two beats from jumping from his seat.
Roxas kept him in place with a sidelong look, brief but meaningful. "I told you to trust me. I'm not going to put myself in danger; you can believe that if nothing else." He closed his eyes again. "Don't break my concentration, or we'll all die."
He flattened his fingers on the wheel and dug down deep, drawing off the pool of the photology Art deep in his gut to create the field around the truck. It would take a lot to keep it up, but he could make it for a few hours, maybe. He licked his lips, spoke through the process for Riku's benefit. "There's a spectrum of light called infrared. It's invisible to the human eye but as far as the Shadows are concerned, it's still light." He flipped off the last of the exterior lights, opening his eyes and bending the spectrum in front of his face so he could see the road, the Shadows little green blurs on either side of it, still moving and scampering out of the way as though the headlights were still on.
"You can see it?"
"Yes."
Riku was silent for several minutes, aside from a bare gasp as Roxas reached up to flip off the cabin lights, nothing left but the few dim LEDs on the consoles. He could hear the creak of leather, Riku grabbing the armrests of his seat and the steady rise of breath, trying not to panic in the darkness. Finally, a swallow, and a long breath. "Can you see them?"
"Yes. They're staying away."
"How long do we have to do this?"
"I threw one of them off our tail, but there'll be more. So... as long as possible."
Roxas tried to settle in his seat, not willing to admit that his own palms were sweating against the wheel. Just a couple of hours. A couple of hours of green non-light and knowing, like his skin crawling, that everything around him was pitch black.
Riku's breathing steadied after a while, cautiously optimistic that Roxas's light trick was working. Sora and Kairi were still safe in the light, back in the living area behind him; he could hear them thumping around, still checking every nook and corner for stray Shadows. At length, there was another breath, and then Riku asked what Roxas was afraid he was going to. "Who are they? Why are they following you?"
"I took something of theirs." Roxas decided that was the safest answer, and left it at that. Riku made a dubious noise, and when Roxas flicked his attention over he was just as green as everything else. "You want the truth?"
"Of course."
"You're going to laugh." Roxas sat back in his seat, holding still in hopes his nerves would stop jumping, watching the green highway and the green bob of antennae all around them. "But I'll tell you, if you really want."
Riku licked his lips, a smack in the dark. "Tell me."
Roxas felt the corners of his mouth turning up, and if Riku could see it he probably wouldn't understand how self-effacing the expression really was. "I'm trying to save the world," he said, mouth still curling. Unable to help himself, especially at Riku's silence after the declaration, he snickered and laughed out loud.
[ NEXT ]