[ Fanfic ] Pierrot: Chapter Two (Kingdom Hearts)
Title: Pierrot: Chapter Two
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Pairing: A lot, probably no het, but yaoi/yuri is a go.
Rating: R
Summary: Riku is lost in the desert, in some distant world forgotten even by the nexus. He's searching for something, salvation, absolution, he doesn't know, only knows that, as he runs, as he chases, something follows close behind.
A/N: Got this posted a little sooner than I thought I would. Also, it's annoying to juggle posting things to LJ and FF.net, so I'm not going to belabor the point anymore.
In a distant world, somewhere along the track of time, an alarm sounded. The boy it awoke shook his head, blond hair tumbling into his eyes. Across the room, his roommate was still asleep, hadn't stirred because of the wailing call that had instantly shattered the other's rest. Cloud considered, for a moment, waking him to get the day started properly, but Leon's foul mood from the night before clouded his thoughts, tainted his decision. It was true, the things Leon had said, that they had been waiting and watching with very little news to go on, but it didn't warrant the constant infighting.
He sighed, stretched in the early morning sunlight, yawned as it warmed him, set his sluggish body in motion, and he wished, not for the first time, that he could revert things to the way they had been before, when the world line made sense, and college children weren't being recruited to scan lines of unreadable code, searching for anything that could lead to their lives being tuned to the same frequency as before. But even Cloud knew, late at night when the monsters crept toward him, tormented, screaming beings, diseased and malformed, birds with one wing, that there was no path upon which to return. Whatever had happened, they couldn't escape it. Their current reality was one in which they were trapped, one that neither boy wanted, but that they were making the best of, whether they had chosen to or not.
His desktop computer came to life with just a nudge of the mouse, and then he was staring at the constant lines of code, convinced he'd see nothing new, because there hadn't been anything new in months, not since the last bizarre blip that had been disregarded like the few others they had documented. And yet they watched, every day, every moment they could spare, they stared at the tiny screens, eyes straining against the flow. Mostly there was nothing to see, just the ripples of time, the way the worlds danced together in a beautiful weave that wasn't lost on them, despite their growing impatience and fatigue, but sometimes, sometimes...
“Leon, hey, Leon,” his voice carried enough, had a high enough thread of genuine excitement that Leon groaned, tugged his blanket over his head.
Cloud threw a roll of tape at him, and he flailed under the blanket, muttered a curse.
“Christ, Cloud,” he said, already surly as he sat up to glower at the blonde. “What?”
“I think I found something,” Cloud said, reached for and slid on a pair of wire rimmed glasses, his gaze never leaving the screen.
“What do you mean?” The attitude was still in his voice, and yet he was out of bed, shirtless and crossing the space between them to follow Cloud's gaze, though he spared a glance at Cloud's hands as they swiftly input the necessary keystrokes to narrow down and enlarge whatever he thought he had seen.
“I don't know,” Cloud said. “But there was something. It didn't belong on the time line.”
“There,” Leon said, one hand on the back of Cloud's chair, supporting himself as he leaned forward to point at a fibrous point on the screen. “Lock in.”
“Yeah, I see it,” Cloud said, his typing focused then on the tiny anomaly, and bringing it into sharper focus, transforming it into a still shot of code that even their trained eyes had trouble understanding, breaking down.
“It looks like someone is getting ready for something,” Leon said. “Barely changing things, keeping it small enough that whoever's doing it thinks it'll go unnoticed.”
“Guess that answers the question about whether or not they know about people like us.”
“I told you guys before that, logically, they don't know. They're just being cautious.”
“It made sense to wonder about it,” Cloud said. “They've affected the nexus itself, are jumping from world to world.”
“None of that is confirmed.”
“What about the disappearances? You weren't in this world a year ago.”
Leon shrugged, the argument an old one, and thus less interesting than the code on which his eyes remained. It questioned memories and intent, and regardless of how often Cloud tried, he couldn't make Leon see things from his point of view. Leon, as always, remained silent as he studied the nonsense before him, shook his head some time later.
“I don't know what this means,” he said, sighed. “it doesn't seem important, like it's just a line that was forgotten, and added by whatever naturally controls this at the last minute.”
“I agree,” Cloud said, calm expression unusually conflicted. “Like it's a natural aspect, a line that's always supposed to have been there. Could it be some sort of base code hacking that we don't know about?”
“No,” Leon said, thinking. “It's more likely that there's more to it than that, some higher factor that we just aren't seeing, but I don't think it's hacking,” he reached for the screen, traced the code with one long finger. “It's just, it's way too seamless...”
“So you think it's just, there? A hiccup?”
“No, not that either,” he sighed. “I don't know, but there have been theories I've heard lately.”
“Theories?”
“Magic,” he said. “Resonance. I don't know. Some king of mystic forces that can be tapped into.”
“Someone with that kind of power,” Cloud said, hesitated. “I didn't think power like that existed.”
“Honestly, I'm not sure I do now. I don't want world jumping to be possible, even by accident,” he said, his expression shifting. “You have all the other irregularities saved, right?” Cloud nodded. “Pull them up, see how this compares.”
Seen beside one another, there were obvious differences, namely that, of the handful of examples they had, only a few appeared to be as flawless in design and placement, the others all but screamed of dissonance, moaned that they weren't supposed to be where they were, that something had happened, some stress on the time line, or the world line.
“I don't know,” Cloud said, as neither of them could make sense of it, still, though they'd both thought the visual would give them enough of a boost to complete the overly complicated puzzle. “There's no pattern to it, no way to make it fit...”
“Maybe,” Leon said, worried his bottom lip, still staring at the screen. “Unless that's the point. What if whoever is doing this is only selectively being so careful? A confusion tactic, maybe?”
“Or there could be more than one person out there, jumping around in such a meaningful way that we can pick it up.”
“That too,” he took a step away from Cloud's chair. “Regardless, there's not enough information for us to figure this out.”
Silence, for a moment, as they both pondered the implication.
“Are you going to call him?”
“I don't see much of a choice, do you?”
“No,” Cloud said, his expression neutral again. “He'd want to know, anyway, even if he's busy.”
“Looking for Sora, his mystery 'key' that he won't shut up about.”
“Yeah... you might not even be able to contact him.”
“I'll be fine,” Leon said, snatched his phone from his bed, input a shielded number that even he wasn't sure he knew sometimes, listened to it ring.
“Hey! This is Mickey! Can't come to the phone right now, so leave a message. I'll call you back ASAP!”
Leon scowled, spoke into the phone with an emotionless voice. “Mickey, it's Leon, I need you to call me. Cloud and I have found something.”
xXxXx xXxXx
The town didn't unfurl for Riku as he entered it, gray boots kicking up little dancing puffs of dust as he walked. No one came to greet him, and it was the first thing that took him by surprise, that sent his heart to pumping fear through his limbs, despite that he told himself that it was fine, that the people he couldn't see were as afraid as he was, wary of a newcomer, but it didn't help, didn't stop the memories of shots damn nearing blowing his head off as he entered some cowboy town. The bullets should have hit him, he thought as he walked, as he always did when he called forth the recollection. They should have rendered his flesh and stained his hair scarlet. He should have been killed, but he'd moved, shifted, ducked to the side just before the unseen assailant had squeezed the trigger.
“I'm not afraid,” he whispered to the dry air through cracked lips, and how many times had he said those words, shouted them to the faceless shadows? It didn't matter, the uttered mantra was a lie he'd never admit.
A sound caught his attention, a rustle from one of the buildings to his right. His eyes snapped to it, but saw nothing, even as his heavy feet continued to carry him toward the establishment, a rundown saloon by the look of it, the bat wing doors, the horse ties in front, though Riku had yet to see any such animal.
“Hello?”
There was another sound, and an old man dressed in tattered clothes, bloodstained bandages, was thrown through the swinging doors. Reacting on instinct, Riku caught the man as he fell toward him, green eyes wide. The man looked at him, confused and reeking of booze, and Riku saw the open sores beneath the bandages, dropped him a moment later with a gasp, let him crumple in the dirt.
A woman followed the man out, and as soon as Riku saw her, he knew the anger evident on her features was something she wasn't accustomed to showing. She wasn't beautiful, not by his standards, but maybe by the standards of a place like this. She was, however, soft, childish though Riku couldn't guess her age, innocent somehow in a way that Riku knew was a fallacy.
“We should have done this a long time ago,” she said, her eyes falling on Riku after a moment of glaring at the old man. “Oh...”
Riku raised a hand in a wave, long fingers splayed in a lazy gesture of hello, his hair falling into his eyes from where it had come loose from its ribbon.
“Hey,” he said. “Didn't mean to interrupt anything.”
She glanced to the old man, who was slowly rising to his feet, and then to Riku. “You're not,” she said, her tone flustered as she motioned for him to come inside. “Come on in,” she said, disappeared into the darkness of the saloon, left Riku to follow, though he felt no better about the situation than he had before meeting the curious pair.
Inside was silent chaos. There were no patrons, by the look of them, only anxious faced staff, milling about, desperately trying to find something to do. Some event had taken place there, and not very long ago, given the way the after effects still hung in the air like stagnant water, or poisonous gas.
“We don't get visitors very often,” the girl said, though Riku knew it was a lie, could all but hear her contradicting herself.
“I know it sounds weird,” he said. “But I'm just passing through. I have munny, so I'm not looking to freeload.”
She nodded, though she seemed skeptical, distracted. “I'll start you something to eat, though we don't have much to choose from. We have water, and beer.”
“Water,” he said, sat at the bar with a sigh. There were fans in the room, spinning in lazy circles that passed the chilled air through the room, cooling the sweat which had beaded on his brow, forced his light shirt to cling to the small of his back.
He watched the girl disappear into the back room, had to resist the urge to rest his head against the filthy bar, even if he had just awoken. The heat stole his energy, and his stomach rumbled in protest to not having been fueled in so long.
“You look tired,” the girl said, as she walked back toward the grill, a slab of questionable looking meat on a metal tray. “Been traveling long?”
“I think so,” Riku said, because he didn't know. Some days it felt as if he'd been on the road for months, sometimes years, and different times still he wasn't certain that he hadn't just left the home he couldn't remember, struck out fresh on whatever hell path he tread.
“A lot of people here used to travel,” she said. “But no one has come through in a while.”
“Do people always stay?” His voice had a tinny edge of panic to it, fear that he'd get stuck in the little dust trap until he forget that anything else had ever existed. He already didn't remember his own origin, so how hard would it be for the sun and the wind to drive the rest of his memories from him, leave him a tan skinned worker of the place in which he sat?
“Not always,” she said, and the way she turned to face the grill, the motion a quirk jerk, told Riku that there were things he wasn't being told, some level to the town's story, or at least the girl's, that she wasn't yet willing to speak. “Sometimes people keep going.”
“I'm going to leave tonight,” he said. “I prefer the drive then, the sun is merciless out here.”
“Drive?” She glanced at him, the meat immediately turning light brown and aromatic as she smashed it into a more manageable patty.
“Yeah, uhm, it's complicated.”
“Oh,” she said, tended to his food in silence then, and when she turned to hand it to him she hesitated, until he laid a few pieces of munny on the bar. “Thank you.”
“Same,” he said, didn't ask for bread, had learned his lesson on the rarity of it already, but he did reach for the hunks of salt, broke them over the cooked meat, until it was all he could taste, even as it stung his mouth.
The girl watched him for a moment, until a boy called to her from across the room. Riku's eyes didn't follow her as she moved, because it didn't matter, and he didn't care about any of them, was too afraid to, too terrified of becoming a member of their sad little town. Her words had shaken him, more than he wanted to admit. All he could see were miles and miles of possibilities in the desert, and him lacking the drive to explore them, to continue to push forward.
Shivers danced through him at the thought, at imagining always feeling empty, disconnected, lost. It was torturous enough, always running forward without feeling like he was making progress, without ever knowing there was a destination, but to be stranded, unsure or unable to try to reach that distant shore...
He felt the over salted burger churn in his stomach, and he had to bite back the vomit as it tried to rise.
“I didn't expect to see you here,” the voice was familiar, and yet utterly alien, which was what he thought when he saw the blond's bright blue eyes, eyes like the sky.
“Sora?”
The boy's eyebrow twitched. “It's Roxas,” he said. “You don't know me.”
“I kind of feel like I might.”
“Yeah, I thought you would,” Roxas said, sat beside Riku. “Mind if I ask you a question?”
“I guess not.”
“What does the number 13 mean to you?”
Riku nearly recoiled, reacted in a way that was almost violent, that he couldn't control, his eyes wide as he looked at Roxas.
“Clearly it means something,” he said, musing. “It doesn't mean anything to me, or if it does, I can't remember.”
“Who are you?”
“I don't know if it even matters,” Roxas said. “I'm not who you're looking for.”
“No,” Riku said. “I thought maybe, for a second.”
“You were wrong, I can't help you fly,” Roxas said, sighed. “But I know someone that might be able to. The only problem is that I don't really. All I can remember is red, fire, and a number.”
“You sound insane...”
“And yet you hang onto every word I say. What's that say about you?”
“That I'm desperate.”
“Desperation killed the moogle,” Roxas said, shook his head. “This is the edge of the desert. I think something worse is next.”
“Worse than this?” Riku asked. “I can't imagine it, I don't want to.”
“Same here, but if we follow the man I think we have to, things aren't going to get any easier.”
“We?”
“Yeah,” Roxas looked at Riku, shot him an unbearably infectious smile that was entirely false, though it lit his features no less for being so. “I'm going to take you to number eight. Even if I don't know what the hell that means.”
☆ Chapter Archive ☆
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Pairing: A lot, probably no het, but yaoi/yuri is a go.
Rating: R
Summary: Riku is lost in the desert, in some distant world forgotten even by the nexus. He's searching for something, salvation, absolution, he doesn't know, only knows that, as he runs, as he chases, something follows close behind.
A/N: Got this posted a little sooner than I thought I would. Also, it's annoying to juggle posting things to LJ and FF.net, so I'm not going to belabor the point anymore.
In a distant world, somewhere along the track of time, an alarm sounded. The boy it awoke shook his head, blond hair tumbling into his eyes. Across the room, his roommate was still asleep, hadn't stirred because of the wailing call that had instantly shattered the other's rest. Cloud considered, for a moment, waking him to get the day started properly, but Leon's foul mood from the night before clouded his thoughts, tainted his decision. It was true, the things Leon had said, that they had been waiting and watching with very little news to go on, but it didn't warrant the constant infighting.
He sighed, stretched in the early morning sunlight, yawned as it warmed him, set his sluggish body in motion, and he wished, not for the first time, that he could revert things to the way they had been before, when the world line made sense, and college children weren't being recruited to scan lines of unreadable code, searching for anything that could lead to their lives being tuned to the same frequency as before. But even Cloud knew, late at night when the monsters crept toward him, tormented, screaming beings, diseased and malformed, birds with one wing, that there was no path upon which to return. Whatever had happened, they couldn't escape it. Their current reality was one in which they were trapped, one that neither boy wanted, but that they were making the best of, whether they had chosen to or not.
His desktop computer came to life with just a nudge of the mouse, and then he was staring at the constant lines of code, convinced he'd see nothing new, because there hadn't been anything new in months, not since the last bizarre blip that had been disregarded like the few others they had documented. And yet they watched, every day, every moment they could spare, they stared at the tiny screens, eyes straining against the flow. Mostly there was nothing to see, just the ripples of time, the way the worlds danced together in a beautiful weave that wasn't lost on them, despite their growing impatience and fatigue, but sometimes, sometimes...
“Leon, hey, Leon,” his voice carried enough, had a high enough thread of genuine excitement that Leon groaned, tugged his blanket over his head.
Cloud threw a roll of tape at him, and he flailed under the blanket, muttered a curse.
“Christ, Cloud,” he said, already surly as he sat up to glower at the blonde. “What?”
“I think I found something,” Cloud said, reached for and slid on a pair of wire rimmed glasses, his gaze never leaving the screen.
“What do you mean?” The attitude was still in his voice, and yet he was out of bed, shirtless and crossing the space between them to follow Cloud's gaze, though he spared a glance at Cloud's hands as they swiftly input the necessary keystrokes to narrow down and enlarge whatever he thought he had seen.
“I don't know,” Cloud said. “But there was something. It didn't belong on the time line.”
“There,” Leon said, one hand on the back of Cloud's chair, supporting himself as he leaned forward to point at a fibrous point on the screen. “Lock in.”
“Yeah, I see it,” Cloud said, his typing focused then on the tiny anomaly, and bringing it into sharper focus, transforming it into a still shot of code that even their trained eyes had trouble understanding, breaking down.
“It looks like someone is getting ready for something,” Leon said. “Barely changing things, keeping it small enough that whoever's doing it thinks it'll go unnoticed.”
“Guess that answers the question about whether or not they know about people like us.”
“I told you guys before that, logically, they don't know. They're just being cautious.”
“It made sense to wonder about it,” Cloud said. “They've affected the nexus itself, are jumping from world to world.”
“None of that is confirmed.”
“What about the disappearances? You weren't in this world a year ago.”
Leon shrugged, the argument an old one, and thus less interesting than the code on which his eyes remained. It questioned memories and intent, and regardless of how often Cloud tried, he couldn't make Leon see things from his point of view. Leon, as always, remained silent as he studied the nonsense before him, shook his head some time later.
“I don't know what this means,” he said, sighed. “it doesn't seem important, like it's just a line that was forgotten, and added by whatever naturally controls this at the last minute.”
“I agree,” Cloud said, calm expression unusually conflicted. “Like it's a natural aspect, a line that's always supposed to have been there. Could it be some sort of base code hacking that we don't know about?”
“No,” Leon said, thinking. “It's more likely that there's more to it than that, some higher factor that we just aren't seeing, but I don't think it's hacking,” he reached for the screen, traced the code with one long finger. “It's just, it's way too seamless...”
“So you think it's just, there? A hiccup?”
“No, not that either,” he sighed. “I don't know, but there have been theories I've heard lately.”
“Theories?”
“Magic,” he said. “Resonance. I don't know. Some king of mystic forces that can be tapped into.”
“Someone with that kind of power,” Cloud said, hesitated. “I didn't think power like that existed.”
“Honestly, I'm not sure I do now. I don't want world jumping to be possible, even by accident,” he said, his expression shifting. “You have all the other irregularities saved, right?” Cloud nodded. “Pull them up, see how this compares.”
Seen beside one another, there were obvious differences, namely that, of the handful of examples they had, only a few appeared to be as flawless in design and placement, the others all but screamed of dissonance, moaned that they weren't supposed to be where they were, that something had happened, some stress on the time line, or the world line.
“I don't know,” Cloud said, as neither of them could make sense of it, still, though they'd both thought the visual would give them enough of a boost to complete the overly complicated puzzle. “There's no pattern to it, no way to make it fit...”
“Maybe,” Leon said, worried his bottom lip, still staring at the screen. “Unless that's the point. What if whoever is doing this is only selectively being so careful? A confusion tactic, maybe?”
“Or there could be more than one person out there, jumping around in such a meaningful way that we can pick it up.”
“That too,” he took a step away from Cloud's chair. “Regardless, there's not enough information for us to figure this out.”
Silence, for a moment, as they both pondered the implication.
“Are you going to call him?”
“I don't see much of a choice, do you?”
“No,” Cloud said, his expression neutral again. “He'd want to know, anyway, even if he's busy.”
“Looking for Sora, his mystery 'key' that he won't shut up about.”
“Yeah... you might not even be able to contact him.”
“I'll be fine,” Leon said, snatched his phone from his bed, input a shielded number that even he wasn't sure he knew sometimes, listened to it ring.
“Hey! This is Mickey! Can't come to the phone right now, so leave a message. I'll call you back ASAP!”
Leon scowled, spoke into the phone with an emotionless voice. “Mickey, it's Leon, I need you to call me. Cloud and I have found something.”
xXxXx xXxXx
The town didn't unfurl for Riku as he entered it, gray boots kicking up little dancing puffs of dust as he walked. No one came to greet him, and it was the first thing that took him by surprise, that sent his heart to pumping fear through his limbs, despite that he told himself that it was fine, that the people he couldn't see were as afraid as he was, wary of a newcomer, but it didn't help, didn't stop the memories of shots damn nearing blowing his head off as he entered some cowboy town. The bullets should have hit him, he thought as he walked, as he always did when he called forth the recollection. They should have rendered his flesh and stained his hair scarlet. He should have been killed, but he'd moved, shifted, ducked to the side just before the unseen assailant had squeezed the trigger.
“I'm not afraid,” he whispered to the dry air through cracked lips, and how many times had he said those words, shouted them to the faceless shadows? It didn't matter, the uttered mantra was a lie he'd never admit.
A sound caught his attention, a rustle from one of the buildings to his right. His eyes snapped to it, but saw nothing, even as his heavy feet continued to carry him toward the establishment, a rundown saloon by the look of it, the bat wing doors, the horse ties in front, though Riku had yet to see any such animal.
“Hello?”
There was another sound, and an old man dressed in tattered clothes, bloodstained bandages, was thrown through the swinging doors. Reacting on instinct, Riku caught the man as he fell toward him, green eyes wide. The man looked at him, confused and reeking of booze, and Riku saw the open sores beneath the bandages, dropped him a moment later with a gasp, let him crumple in the dirt.
A woman followed the man out, and as soon as Riku saw her, he knew the anger evident on her features was something she wasn't accustomed to showing. She wasn't beautiful, not by his standards, but maybe by the standards of a place like this. She was, however, soft, childish though Riku couldn't guess her age, innocent somehow in a way that Riku knew was a fallacy.
“We should have done this a long time ago,” she said, her eyes falling on Riku after a moment of glaring at the old man. “Oh...”
Riku raised a hand in a wave, long fingers splayed in a lazy gesture of hello, his hair falling into his eyes from where it had come loose from its ribbon.
“Hey,” he said. “Didn't mean to interrupt anything.”
She glanced to the old man, who was slowly rising to his feet, and then to Riku. “You're not,” she said, her tone flustered as she motioned for him to come inside. “Come on in,” she said, disappeared into the darkness of the saloon, left Riku to follow, though he felt no better about the situation than he had before meeting the curious pair.
Inside was silent chaos. There were no patrons, by the look of them, only anxious faced staff, milling about, desperately trying to find something to do. Some event had taken place there, and not very long ago, given the way the after effects still hung in the air like stagnant water, or poisonous gas.
“We don't get visitors very often,” the girl said, though Riku knew it was a lie, could all but hear her contradicting herself.
“I know it sounds weird,” he said. “But I'm just passing through. I have munny, so I'm not looking to freeload.”
She nodded, though she seemed skeptical, distracted. “I'll start you something to eat, though we don't have much to choose from. We have water, and beer.”
“Water,” he said, sat at the bar with a sigh. There were fans in the room, spinning in lazy circles that passed the chilled air through the room, cooling the sweat which had beaded on his brow, forced his light shirt to cling to the small of his back.
He watched the girl disappear into the back room, had to resist the urge to rest his head against the filthy bar, even if he had just awoken. The heat stole his energy, and his stomach rumbled in protest to not having been fueled in so long.
“You look tired,” the girl said, as she walked back toward the grill, a slab of questionable looking meat on a metal tray. “Been traveling long?”
“I think so,” Riku said, because he didn't know. Some days it felt as if he'd been on the road for months, sometimes years, and different times still he wasn't certain that he hadn't just left the home he couldn't remember, struck out fresh on whatever hell path he tread.
“A lot of people here used to travel,” she said. “But no one has come through in a while.”
“Do people always stay?” His voice had a tinny edge of panic to it, fear that he'd get stuck in the little dust trap until he forget that anything else had ever existed. He already didn't remember his own origin, so how hard would it be for the sun and the wind to drive the rest of his memories from him, leave him a tan skinned worker of the place in which he sat?
“Not always,” she said, and the way she turned to face the grill, the motion a quirk jerk, told Riku that there were things he wasn't being told, some level to the town's story, or at least the girl's, that she wasn't yet willing to speak. “Sometimes people keep going.”
“I'm going to leave tonight,” he said. “I prefer the drive then, the sun is merciless out here.”
“Drive?” She glanced at him, the meat immediately turning light brown and aromatic as she smashed it into a more manageable patty.
“Yeah, uhm, it's complicated.”
“Oh,” she said, tended to his food in silence then, and when she turned to hand it to him she hesitated, until he laid a few pieces of munny on the bar. “Thank you.”
“Same,” he said, didn't ask for bread, had learned his lesson on the rarity of it already, but he did reach for the hunks of salt, broke them over the cooked meat, until it was all he could taste, even as it stung his mouth.
The girl watched him for a moment, until a boy called to her from across the room. Riku's eyes didn't follow her as she moved, because it didn't matter, and he didn't care about any of them, was too afraid to, too terrified of becoming a member of their sad little town. Her words had shaken him, more than he wanted to admit. All he could see were miles and miles of possibilities in the desert, and him lacking the drive to explore them, to continue to push forward.
Shivers danced through him at the thought, at imagining always feeling empty, disconnected, lost. It was torturous enough, always running forward without feeling like he was making progress, without ever knowing there was a destination, but to be stranded, unsure or unable to try to reach that distant shore...
He felt the over salted burger churn in his stomach, and he had to bite back the vomit as it tried to rise.
“I didn't expect to see you here,” the voice was familiar, and yet utterly alien, which was what he thought when he saw the blond's bright blue eyes, eyes like the sky.
“Sora?”
The boy's eyebrow twitched. “It's Roxas,” he said. “You don't know me.”
“I kind of feel like I might.”
“Yeah, I thought you would,” Roxas said, sat beside Riku. “Mind if I ask you a question?”
“I guess not.”
“What does the number 13 mean to you?”
Riku nearly recoiled, reacted in a way that was almost violent, that he couldn't control, his eyes wide as he looked at Roxas.
“Clearly it means something,” he said, musing. “It doesn't mean anything to me, or if it does, I can't remember.”
“Who are you?”
“I don't know if it even matters,” Roxas said. “I'm not who you're looking for.”
“No,” Riku said. “I thought maybe, for a second.”
“You were wrong, I can't help you fly,” Roxas said, sighed. “But I know someone that might be able to. The only problem is that I don't really. All I can remember is red, fire, and a number.”
“You sound insane...”
“And yet you hang onto every word I say. What's that say about you?”
“That I'm desperate.”
“Desperation killed the moogle,” Roxas said, shook his head. “This is the edge of the desert. I think something worse is next.”
“Worse than this?” Riku asked. “I can't imagine it, I don't want to.”
“Same here, but if we follow the man I think we have to, things aren't going to get any easier.”
“We?”
“Yeah,” Roxas looked at Riku, shot him an unbearably infectious smile that was entirely false, though it lit his features no less for being so. “I'm going to take you to number eight. Even if I don't know what the hell that means.”
☆ Chapter Archive ☆