(no subject)
Title: Co-dependence
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Pairings: Riku/Sora/Kairi
Genre: I... dunno. Sort of angst, sort of sap.
Word Count: 6,831
Notes: This goddamn fic has been sitting on my harddrive mostly finished for about a year now. There are no words for how enormously relieved I feel to post it, at least not in English. Aaaah. Set post KHII.
Summary: Now they're home everything should be normal, but the three of them need each other more than ever.
“Sora? So~ra. Psst, Sora.”
Sora doesn’t reply, still conked out on his desk in a picture of abject misery or maybe just slightly melodramatic boredom, and Kairi sighs, contemplating ways she could get his attention without the teacher noticing. Tugging on his hair or throwing a wad of paper at him would probably be a little obvious, and she can’t call his name any louder than she already did.
Well, really.
“Sora!” she hisses, and kicks him in the ankle.
“AAAH!” Sora yelps, bolting upright in his chair with panic. “I’m awake, I’m awake, I’m-- uh oh.”
“I’m sure you are,” the teacher says, very icily, and Sora wilts beneath her glare. Kairi can’t help giggling a little behind her hand at his dismayed expression, even though she feels a bit bad about getting him into trouble. He shouldn’t have been sleeping in class anyway, though, so she doesn’t feel too bad.
“However,” the teacher continues, “I would appreciate it if in future you try not to let any bad habits learned in the past year disrupt my class.”
“Yes miss,” Sora answers meekly, dipping his head, and she turns back to the class, apparently deciding to let him off the hook this time.
“3 x plus the square root of y--”
“What was that for?” Sora whines, as quietly as he can, and turns to scowl at Kairi. She opens her mouth to answer, then glances cautiously towards the front of the classroom. The teacher still has her back to them, but every so often she turns around to sweep a look over the class, and Kairi doesn’t want to risk them getting in trouble. (Again, in Sora’s case.)
“I’ll tell you after class,” she whispers to him, eyes fixed on the front of the classroom. “At least try to look like you’re writing something, Sora, I think she’s getting mad.”
Sora winces, bending his head back down over his desk in a futile attempt to look studious when the teacher’s unimpressed gaze lands in his direction. “Hey, um, Kairi…”
“X is 4, y is 9,” she says, taking pity on him. After all, he hadn’t done any algebra while he’d been busy saving worlds, so she can’t really blame him for forgetting it all.
Not that he’d been that good at algebra even before then, but hey.
~
“So why’d you kick me in the ankle?” Sora wants to know, as soon as the bell rings for end of period and they’ve escaped to their lunch break. The two of them are hanging around by the wall at the entrance to the school, Kairi sitting on top of it swinging her feet as she eats a sandwich and Sora leaning against it with his arms linked behind his head, pouting back at Kairi.
They’d always hung out together, them and Riku and their other friends too, but where before they used to split up sometimes during lunch and morning tea breaks at school to spend time with other classmates, now they’re completely inseparable in and out of school time. Sometimes people comment on it, find it odd, make jokes about living in each other’s pockets; nobody else gets it. Kairi knows, though, that the three of them do it because they’re subconsciously afraid, terrified of being torn apart again. Of losing each other.
She chews her sandwich for a while and swallows before she answers, staring thoughtfully up at the perfect blue sky that always, always makes her think of Sora and then Riku by association. These days, Riku is always connected to Sora, even in her thoughts.
“You’ve been acting weird ever since school went back,” she says eventually. “I mean, your attention span has never been great and I know it must be bizarre getting used to mundane things like school again after everything, but it just feels like… more than that. I don’t know, like you’re seriously depressed about something. I’m worried, that’s all.”
Sora doesn’t reply at first, doesn’t look back at her, vision unfocussed and gazing off blankly into space.
“Don’t you find it wrong too?” he blurts finally.
Kairi wrinkles her nose, because Sora has a bad habit of just saying whatever’s in his head without realising that other people aren’t actually mind readers, not even Kairi or Riku, and what seems logical to him is often a completely random non sequitur to everyone else. It loses him a lot of marks on essays.
“Maybe,” she says dryly. “And if I knew what it was, maybe I’d be able to tell you.”
“This, this…” Sora unlinks his arms to gesture in a helpless and frustrated manner when his words just aren’t cutting it. “Riku!”
That wasn’t what Kairi had been expecting. “Riku is wrong?” she guesses, utterly baffled by this point. “Riku is an it? What are you going on about, Sora?”
“No! Kairi! You know that’s not what I meant!”
“Then tell me!” she exclaims, flinging her own hands up in exasperation. “What about Riku?”
“He’s not here!” Sora says, spinning to glare at her and stomp his foot like a child having a temper-tantrum. “He’s not here and he’s always supposed to be here now but suddenly he’s not!”
And Kairi knows exactly what Sora’s talking about, because it makes her uncomfortable too. She and Riku had a year longer than Sora of being apart to learn to deal with it, though, a year when Sora was sleeping, and then she’d had those extra weeks of waiting while the two of them had been stuck in the world of darkness. Sora doesn’t want to let either of them go, let them out of his sight for even a second in case they disappear. He’d gotten used to spending every moment of every day with them both by his side, the three of them going so far as to take turns staying at their different houses together, but then school had started.
Riku is in his first year of high school; Sora and Kairi are still in third year middle school. Beyond not having classes together, they’re not even on the same campus, and they can’t eat lunch together anymore. It’s a huge chunk out of the day where Kairi and Sora can’t see Riku, and it makes her unhappy and Riku edgy (at least we’re mostly together, Sora, she thinks; Riku can’t be with either of us), but Sora can’t seem to adjust to it at all.
“Sora…”
“It’s not just me, right?” he demands, and his voice cracks a little. “It’s weird, isn’t it?”
This kind of co-dependence the three of us have isn’t healthy, she should say. It’s not normal, we can’t live like this, we can’t always be together.
They want to, though, and no one has the right to tell them they can’t after everything they’ve done and been through, whether or not anyone else really knows about it. They’ve earned this. Since when have they ever cared about what people tell them they can and can’t do, anyway?
“Yeah,” she says slowly, jumping down from the wall as the bell rings. “Yeah, it’s weird.”
Kairi finds herself dwelling on this for the rest of the day through the classes she and Sora don’t share, and wonders if any of them can ever be normal again.
~
In the end, Kairi is temporarily diverted from these thoughts by the usual reunion with Riku after school, which in her mind, and certainly in Sora’s, takes precedence over all else. Sora bowls Riku over in what she’s never quite sure is supposed to be a flying hug or a death tackle (boys; they seem to think open affection is less embarrassing if it’s violent, for some reason) while she greets him rather more sedately, grabbing his arm and smiling up at him.
“Hey, Riku,” she says, and he grins back before hooking his other arm around Sora’s neck and ruffling that permanently messy hair.
“Ri-ku!” Sora complains, trying briefly to wriggle his way out of Riku’s stranglehold before giving up and meeting Riku’s smirk with a big grin of his own.
Someone, Kairi thinks fondly, should really tell them that even with all their roughhousing there is nothing remotely manly about the way they act around each other, no matter how much they try to pretend it is.
Someone should also whack Sora with a clue-by-four, because she’s pretty sure that he’s the only one who hasn’t started waking up to the implications of the three of them trying to stick to each other like this as they get older.
Sora has always been very firmly fixed in the here-and-now, though, and this is pretty much their normal routine. Eight hours can feel like a lifetime, sometimes, and it’s a lifetime every day, the three of them forever impatient for class to end so they can be together again. As cool as Riku tries to play it, to Sora and Kairi he misses by a mile with the way his expression brightens when he sees them and the way he always hugs Sora just a little too tight, like he’s trying to make sure Sora is really there or maybe hold onto him so he can’t go anywhere.
Kairi’s thoughts return, yet again, to the conversation she and Sora had had during their lunch break, and now she knows what to look for she notices things that previously she’d passed off as completely natural. The three of them are frequently touching, walking too close or leaning against each other or curling up together, as if to reassure themselves that the other two aren’t going anywhere.
Things should be normal again now they’re all home, but they’re not, because Kairi has finally figured out that the reason Sora is so miserable in school is that when he can’t see Riku he’s afraid maybe Riku’s gone, maybe he’s left them behind or been abducted or something, and while Kairi’s not quite as flipped out by it as Sora is, it affects her too. It’s stupid; she knows it is. It’s only a few hours, after all, which is nothing compared to all those other times they’ve been apart. It’s only a few hours, and it’s only normal not to be together every hour of every day, but this has turned into a phobia. She’s afraid that she’ll turn around and they’ll be gone, that she’ll reach out to touch them and her fingers will catch at the air. It’s a phobia the three of them share, another thing that belongs to them alone and binds them like the secrets of the past two years and everything they’ve sacrificed for each other.
With this train of thought lingering in her mind for the rest of the day, Kairi can’t help but wonder how Riku copes during school. Sora is hopelessly preoccupied through every single one of the classes they both take and she’s willing to bet that he’s even worse in the classes they don’t. Kairi herself finds it hard to concentrate a lot of the time, staring out the window and chewing thoughtfully on her pen as she speculates about what Riku is doing now, what Sora’s thinking, if the three of them will go to that movie they’d been talking about on the weekend, even though she used to be a very good student.
She doesn’t see Riku in class, though, so she doesn’t know how well he focuses. He’s always been much more driven than most people, has always had an abnormally sharp attention span and been naturally a little ahead in academia the same way he is in more physical pursuits. By contrast, while Sora has his own talents, he’s never really been one for the books and he’s got the attention span of a goldfish. Kairi falls somewhere in between them, above average but fairly normal.
In her more selfish moments, Kairi wishes that Riku weren’t quite so smart or competitive. If he’d fallen behind as badly as Sora had there’d be no way they’d let him move on to high school-- which is a much bigger deal than not forcing Sora to do the year of middle school he missed-- and then they’d all be in the same grade. Sora would be happier, and so would she.
Kairi is still thinking about it much later that evening when her parents have gone to bed-- it’s her house, tonight-- and the three of them are on the couch watching a movie. Riku doesn’t like romance (or so he claims) and Sora doesn’t like scary films (even though he pretends he does) so they usually end up watching action or comedy or drama, except when she and Sora gang up on Riku and guilt him into watching what he terms “chick flicks” (much to Sora’s disgruntlement: just ‘cause they’re not about stuff blowing up doesn’t make them girly!) with them, which Kairi firmly believes he secretly enjoys. They’d been watching a drama tonight, though, and a fairly boring one at that; Sora is asleep, head in Riku’s lap and legs stretched across Kairi’s thighs.
Kairi sighs tiredly and slumps against Riku, her head on his shoulder as the credits scroll across the screen to a song she likes. In her opinion, it’s the best part of the movie.
“Well that was a waste of two hours of my life,” Riku says idly, and Kairi stifles a small laugh, knowing that Riku would rather waste two years of his life watching bad movies like this than spend another year the way he spent the last one.
“Yeah, it blew,” she agrees sleepily, and watches Riku’s fingers as they slide absent-mindedly through Sora’s hair. “Hey, Riku?”
“Mm?”
She’d been about to ask how much he misses her and Sora when he’s at school, but she catches herself just in time. It’s a dumb question; she doesn’t need to hear it or see it for herself to know, and asking something like that would probably just ruin the pleasant drowsy atmosphere.
“Never mind, it’s nothing.”
Riku’s eyes lift briefly from Sora’s sleeping face to frown lightly at her. “No, seriously, what?”
Kairi closes her eyes, turning her face so it’s buried in the sleeve of the track jumper he’s wearing. “Sora always misses you during class,” she mumbles, similar to what she’d originally been going to say but inversed. “He’s hopeless without you.”
There’s silence. When she peeks up at Riku through her bangs, Kairi sees the half-smile on his lips and soft look in his eyes as he looks down at Sora, twining his fingers through Sora’s spikes, and something in her heart twists, prickles at her eyes, overwhelms her with how much these two dumb, brilliant boys love each other and how much they both mean to her.
“That’s because Sora’s a wuss,” Riku says archly. He’s not fooling anyone, but he gets embarrassed by feelings, especially other people’s feelings for him-- Sora’s feelings for him, more than anything-- and finds it easier to throw around insults than be honest. Sora used to get really upset by all those put-downs, but after everything they’ve been through he can see through Riku’s macho bluffs just as easily as Kairi can.
Or maybe Riku’s just getting worse at hiding it.
Probably both.
“Why don’t you tell him?” Kairi asks gently, lacing her fingers through Sora’s so their joined hands rest on his chest. “I mean, you know he’s not going to figure it out by himself. It’s not like he’s dumb, but he’s pretty oblivious, you know? For him he just loves someone and doesn’t think about it any further than that.”
“… I know.”
“So? Why don’t you?”
Riku scowls, still staring resolutely down at Sora and not meeting Kairi’s eyes. “If he’s happy, it’s fine the way it is. I’m not going to… I can’t…”
“I don’t deserve to,” Kairi finishes. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
“Kairi--”
“Trust me, he’d be happier if you just told him,” Kairi says exasperatedly, interrupting Riku’s protest. “And so would you. And so would I. We’d all be happier. Besides, he’s not fine. He’s paranoid. Paranoid is totally not fine.”
“But--”
“Anyway,” she adds, “even Sora’s going to get it eventually. Well, maybe. And it’s only going to create a bigger mess if we don’t sort things out now.”
“Hypocrite,” Riku mutters. “Why haven’t you said anything to him?”
“Why are all boys such idiots?” she asks, not really expecting an answer, and lifts her head from his shoulder, taking advantage of the element of surprise (followed by the element of confusion and/or shock) to brush his hair from his face with her free hand so she can press her lips to his cheek in a chaste kiss.
“Kairi, what are you…?”
“I’m not doing anything until you blockheads sort yourselves out,” she says reasonably, spoiling it a little with a yawn as she settles back against his side, closing her eyes again. “And stop thinking you don’t deserve things, moron. That’s got nothing to do with it-- it’s the other person’s choice whether they love you or not. And Sora and I do, so you’d better learn to deal with it, Riku.”
He doesn’t respond to that, maybe because he doesn’t have a response to give, and she lets her breathing even out. This is an uncomfortable position to sleep in-- for all of them, and she’d take a bet that Riku’s back will be feeling it tomorrow-- but Kairi is content to stay where she is, and it’s not like Sora is going to move any time soon.
She pretends to fall asleep long before she actually does, but Riku is still awake and staring at Sora with a troubled look when she finally slips into unconsciousness.
~
Kairi has decided that the problem here is not that the three of them want to spend all their time together. So they love each other, big deal; if other people don’t approve they can go jump in the ocean for all she cares. No, the problem is rather the flip side of the same coin: they can’t stand to be apart, especially not Sora, and they just can’t function the way things are. Sorting this out properly, she thinks, is going to take a bit of symbolism and less uncertainty in the bonds they have, which might be strong but are still not quite defined. What they need is something a little more concrete.
The thing is, for this to work, Sora and Riku have to sort themselves out first. Kairi knows that Riku cares about her, but she also knows that he will never love her the way he loves Sora. She doesn’t mind; there’s still a considerable place for her in Riku’s heart, and to be honest it would scare her to be in Sora’s position. She doesn’t think she’d be strong enough to withstand such an obsessive, all-consuming passion as Riku’s for Sora. It’d probably drag her down and destroy both of them, but Sora… Sora’s special. He pulls Riku up with him and supports them both without even realising it, just by being himself.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that Kairi trying to sort things out with Riku first would be a waste of time and would probably just make Sora insecure and miserable and stupid about it all even if it did work. Trying to sort things out with Sora first would be an even worse idea, because Riku’s insecurities outstrip Sora’s quite impressively and she bets he’d do his whole “well if they’re happy together that’s good and I’ll stay out of the way” thing, which he never would have done before everything changed.
Before everything changed
Back then, she and Riku had both been completely focussed on Sora-- the childhood friendship had started to slip because they were jealous of each other (true jealousy, not the sustainable kind of envy Sora and Riku have always had), and they were both doing things to aggravate the other. Riku had a tendency to shoot himself in the foot sometimes, though, because his pride stopped him doing anything useful and he’d end up flirting with Kairi just to get back at Sora for… god knows. Liking Kairi? It had never made much sense to her, but then, as smart as Riku is, he isn’t always rational.
Kairi doesn’t know how to feel about that pride of Riku’s. At the time it had been a mixed blessing; no way he’d take Sora from her acting like that, but it was fairly obnoxious to put up with. On the other hand, now… now she knows that a lot of what happened was set off by that infamous pigheadedness of his, and though she doesn’t blame him, he blames himself. A little humility is a good thing and Riku is a better person for what he’s been through, but he’s also a person with severe self-esteem problems and an unhealthy level of disregard for himself. He’d throw away his life or happiness in an instant for Sora, but that’s not what Sora wants.
Or what Kairi wants, either. Which isn’t exactly the point, but sort of is at the same time.
Anyway, Riku had been arrogant and he could be very obnoxious at times, but that year Kairi had spent alone had reminded her exactly why they had become friends in the first place. She missed him, a lot. She missed them, she missed Sora even when she couldn’t remember him, but she missed Riku too, just as much, and she had realised exactly how much when she’d finally seen him standing in front of her and had known without a doubt that it was him.
Sora had said it best: Riku is Riku, no matter what he looks like.
But really, none of that matters unless and until Riku and Sora stop being stupid about this. After she’d spoken to Riku she’d kind of hoped that he’d get over his complexes enough to say something to Sora, but he’s always been too stubborn for his own good.
Kairi wants Sora and Riku to get their act together before she tries to sort out her own relationship with the two of them, but she never said anything about not interfering. After all, if she left it up to the two of them, it could take years.
Time for Plan B, she thinks.
~
Another day, another lunchtime.
“Sora.”
“Ieearh?” (Yeah?)
“… Don’t talk with your mouth full, that’s seriously gross.”
Chew, chew, chew, swallow.
“Sorry!”
“Anyway. Sora.”
“Yeah?”
“You know Riku and I love you lots, right?”
“Yeah, I love you guys lots too,” Sora says easily, because unlike some people (that means you, Riku, she adds mentally) he isn’t too chicken to admit it. Although even Kairi is a little taken aback at how quickly he can say that kind of thing; he doesn’t seem thrown at all, just a bit puzzled.
“Um, that’s good,” she says, after a pause. “But, like, love love. Riku would die for you kind of love.”
Sora looks really confused now. “Uh, yeah, I know,” he says. “Though I kind of wish he wouldn’t, with the dying thing. I only just got him back, I don’t want to lose him again because he does something dumb to protect me or, y’know. Whatever.”
“You and me both,” Kairi sighs. This conversation is not going the way she’d planned. “But, Sora. The way you love me. Is that the same way you love Riku?”
And now he’s giving her a weird look. “Of course not. You’re Kairi. Riku’s Riku.”
This is kind of like banging her head into a brick wall. Repeatedly.
“Um, that’s… not exactly what I meant,” she says carefully. “I meant… Well…”
“Yeah?”
Stuff it, there’s no tactful way to say this.
“I meant do you love Riku in the ‘wow you’re my best friend and I’d do anything for you’ way or the ‘I love you forever and I want your babies, never leave me’ way?” Kairi asks, blunt as a butter knife. “Not that that’s actually physically possible. But you know what I mean.”
She waits patiently for Sora to finish choking on his sandwich, and even thumps him on the back, very helpfully.
“I. Um,” Sora says, turning an interesting shade of red. “K-Kairi!”
She guesses, from the blush staining his cheeks, that he is using his imagination. She’s sort of relieved to know that he really is a teenage boy, and does actually have some form of sex drive.
“I’m serious! Do you like Riku in the platonic way or the romantic way?”
Okay, so maybe there had been a more tactful way to say it, after all. Whatever, the other way had probably illustrated her point better.
Sora scuffs his foot in the dirt, refusing to meet her eyes the same way Riku had. “Neither. Both. He’s… Riku, you know? I just. He’s Riku.”
“Sora, if you love Riku and you know he loves you back,” Kairi says, beginning to feel a headache coming on, “then why, for god’s sake why haven’t you done anything about it?”
“It’s fine as it is, though, isn’t it? I mean, if Riku’s fine with it the way it is, it’s okay, isn’t it?”
Kairi pities herself very much, at this moment, and takes back everything she’d thought a moment ago about proof that Sora really is a teenage boy. This is proof he’s really not.
“He’s not going to do anything!” she exclaims in exasperation, and makes sure to emphasise what she says next very clearly. “Look, Sora. Riku. Is. A MORON. More of a moron than you!”
“Hey!”
“He’s all, blah blah, Sora deserves better, blah blah blah, it doesn’t matter, blah blah etcetera! So unless you do something, you’ll both be unhappy and frustrated, and I’ll be unhappy and frustrated, and we’ll all be unhappy and frustrated and celibate until the day we die so Sora, if you don’t do something soon I swear I will kill you!”
“Yes, Kairi,” he says meekly. “But… why me? Why can’t you?”
“AUGH WHY ARE BOYS SO DUMB.”
“But--”
“Do you want to die?”
Sora very wisely stops questioning Kairi’s judgement after that.
~
They’re at Sora’s house, this time, hanging out in his room. It’s hard to give the boys privacy for long without being really obvious about it, so Kairi prays that Sora will take the hint and not dawdle too much when she goes “downstairs, to get some ice cream from the freezer”.
Alternatively, if he doesn’t take the hint, she’s perfectly happy for him to take the initiative. Either way is fine, just so long as he takes advantage of the privacy.
Or, um. The relative privacy. It’s not like she’d lied about going downstairs or anything, but seriously, that really doesn’t take very long, and she didn’t want to hang around downstairs being bored forever if Sora and Riku were just sitting around wondering what was taking her so long. She didn’t want to walk in during the middle of whatever if Sora had been doing something either, though, which is why she’s now hovering around outside the door watching through the gap.
And, she reassures herself, she’s just making sure neither them do anything stupid. It’s got nothing to do with her own curiosity. Besides, she’s sure neither of them would mind.
Well, okay, so maybe Riku would. But it’s for his own good! Sort of!
When she peeks in, the silence between them is thick and awkward enough that she doesn’t just give up hope immediately. This is a silence with purpose, a pregnant silence, the kind of silence where Sora is obviously gearing himself up to say something in a probably rushed and jumbled and maybe very ill-advised and not-so-well-thought-out kind of way, which is what happens whenever he gets really nervous. Riku just as obviously recognises this, and is waiting a little impatiently for Sora to get around to blurting out whatever that something is.
If you chicken out, Sora, Kairi thinks darkly, I swear I will throw you out the window.
She knows it probably wouldn’t hurt him, what with being a keyblade master and all, but it’s the principle of the thing.
“Hey, uh. Riku.”
Riku is eyeing Sora in a way that lands somewhere between ‘apprehensive’ and ‘curious’. “Yeah?”
“You know how, like, you’re my best friend and stuff?”
From the look on Riku’s face, he’s biting back some sarcastic comment that would maybe hit a little too close to home, something like ‘no, I thought you chased me halfway across the universe because you hated me’.
“I guess.”
“Well, I mean. You know you’re important to me, right? Like, super important.”
Riku’s tone is distinctly wary by this point. “Sora, what…”
“I just wanna be with you and Kairi. You know that, don’t you?” Sora presses him, bracing his hands on the bed as he leans forward and his words tumble and fall over themselves as he rushes to get them out. “All of us, together. ‘Cause I care about you, both of you, and--”
“Sora,” Riku says sharply, slapping a hand over Sora’s mouth to cut him off before he can say any more. “Shit, Sora, don’t say that kind of thing, you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”
Sora’s glaring now, tugging Riku’s hand away with a fierce scowl. “I’m not dumb, Riku! You and Kairi seem to think all this stuff goes over my head, but it’s not like I don’t get it!”
Kairi winces guiltily.
“That’s not the point,” Riku argues, even though it had been at least part of the point and Kairi can tell he’s a bit shaken. “The point is that it’d be the worst idea we’ve ever come up with, and given some of the idiotic crap we’ve pulled between us, that’s seriously saying something.”
“What’s so bad about it?” Sora demands. Kairi bets he’s this close to biting Riku’s hand, still held in place where Sora had pulled it from his mouth. “How can you know when you haven’t even tried?”
“I don’t need to jump off a cliff to know it’s a stupid thing to do,” Riku snaps, and yanks his wrist back, jumping to his feet. “I’m already bad enough for you as it is, Sora. You don’t need me fucking anything else up, so let it go.”
“I told you I forgave you already, Riku!”
“And you shouldn’t have! Even if you have, I haven’t!”
“Riku--”
“Right, I’ve had enough of this!” Kairi announces, flinging the door open to scowl at them. Sora yelps and falls backward off the bed, and Riku stares at her, bemused and disgruntled and, when it occurs to him a moment later, mildly peeved.
“You were there the whole time, weren’t you?” Riku says suspiciously.
“K-Kairi, what are you-- how come you--” Sora babbles incoherently, using the bed to help him push himself to his feet with an expression that is both embarrassed and a little guilty-looking, and Kairi would have giggled at their faces-- and Sora’s hair-- at any other time, but she’s too puffed up with helpless outrage at their overwhelming stupidity to be distracted for now.
“Stop being a martyr!” she says instead, stomping her foot at Riku. “Being a moron isn’t going to make Sora stop loving you, idiot, it’s only going to make him miserable! And me! But especially him!”
“But…”
“No buts! If you love him so much and want to make him happy, you’re not going to do it by punishing yourself!”
“Yeah!” Sora exclaims stubbornly at this point, having apparently recovered enough from the shock of Kairi bursting in to remember his righteous indignation. “Seriously, Riku, how would you feel if Kairi and I went around sacrificing ourselves for you all the time?”
That’s a kind of crap analogy and Riku is so not going to buy it, Kairi thinks, but she kind of gets where Sora’s coming from.
“You do!”
“We do stuff for you because we care about you, Riku! We don’t go out of our way to suffer!”
“Yeah, but neither of you ever--”
Kairi can see where this sentence is heading. It’s heading to something along the lines of ‘blah blah darkness, blah blah betrayal blah blah don’t deserve forgiveness blah’, which this conversation and in fact all their conversations have already had enough of.
“Stop right there, mister!” she interrupts firmly. “This is a strictly self-loathing-free zone!”
“But--”
“Just shut up, Riku,” she orders, and rounds on Sora, who is starting to look a little nervous. “And as for you--” she continues, hands on her hips, and Sora wilts beneath her glare.
“Yes, Kairi?” he says meekly. It feels rather like kicking a puppy.
“You… you should learn to thump Riku one when he’s being a dumbass,” she finishes lamely.
“Excuse me?”
“Shut up, Riku!”
Miraculously, this time he actually does, cowed at least temporarily into silence.
“Right,” Kairi says, only slightly mollified, then: “Why are you still just standing there?”
This is a rhetorical question, and she doesn’t wait for even an attempt at an answer before planting her hands on Sora’s back and giving him a firm shove. For someone who’s gone around saving the universe twice now, his balance really isn’t that great; he stumbles into Riku with a surprised yelp, and Riku catches him automatically, protective instincts now thoroughly ingrained.
Riku stares at her over the top of Sora’s head, taken off-balance, and she stares urgently back at him, trying to convey with psychic eye laser beams that if he does not do something right now Sora is going to think Riku just likes him in an obsessive friend way and is going to be insecure and miserable and it will be all your fault, Riku!
Thankfully, Riku is smart enough both to get the hint and to realise that he’s trapped between a rock and a hard place. If he kisses Sora now maybe he’ll be a crap boyfriend and will hurt him by being a screw up, but not taking the initiative will mean Sora will definitely get hurt, effective immediately, and maybe more hurt than he would be otherwise. It’s better to take a chance on what they both want and risk the possibility that it will turn out to be a bad idea than have them both be miserable for nothing, so Riku flashes her a challenging look and curls the hand not resting around Sora’s waist in the younger boy’s hair, swooping down to kiss Sora in the same take-no-hostages manner he does everything before Sora can figure out what’s going on.
“Nggh!” Sora gurgles, but evidently gets with the program (remarkably quickly, for him), because a second later he’s melting against Riku and it’s like everything has just tilted to the side and gone a little bit crazy. Kairi’s moving before she realises it, because this is it, green light, all systems are go, and she’s pressed up against Sora’s back so the gentle swell of her breasts are crushed a little against his shoulder blades and her hands are curved around Riku’s hips.
Her eyes meet Riku’s over Sora’s shoulder when he opens them, dark with lust and recklessness, more open and honest than she’s ever seen him. He breaks the kiss with Sora, leaving the shorter boy with his face resting against Riku’s neck, and Kairi can hear the short, damp, panting gasps Sora gives as he tries to remember how to breathe. The feel of his chest rising and falling against hers and the heat in Riku’s gaze cause warmth pool in her stomach, blossoming and spreading outward so she feels more than a little reckless herself.
Riku is evidently on her wavelength, for once, and she’s grateful for that, tilting her face up as he angles his down over the slope of Sora’s shoulder so their mouths collide in a messy tangle of teeth that segues into the smooth glide of lips and tongues sliding against each other, Sora between them leaning back against Kairi and arching up into Riku, always stuck in the middle but as a bridge, not a barrier, the thing that holds them all together.
This kiss is kind of like a metaphor for their entire relationship, Kairi thinks hazily, slipping her fingers in between Sora’s where they clutch desperately at Riku’s top.
A few seconds later, Sora’s apparently feeling mischievous; Riku gives a sudden and startled moan, reflexively jerking Kairi closer and squashing Sora even closer between them as a result, and when she blinks her eyes open in surprise, she sees it’s because Sora has started licking and biting at Riku’s neck. Riku presses hard into the kiss briefly and then he’s breaking it, turning his face away from her, away from both of them, swearing incoherently as his self-control is shredded to tatters.
Kairi doesn’t have time to start feeling at all left out, though, because while Riku is trying to pull himself back together Sora is tilting his head back over her shoulder with a wide, cheeky grin, eyes meeting hers upside-down. It’s just as well he’s short, or this wouldn’t even be physically possible.
“Hey,” he says happily, and reaches up with his free hand to drag her down into a kiss of their own, neck stretched and bared.
When Sora kisses Kairi, it’s kind of shy and endearingly awkward but sweet, and Riku has his nose pressed just behind Sora’s ear, buried in his hair, which Kairi knows from experience is soft and smells nice, faint and natural unlike the fruity shampoo that Kairi uses.
“Kairi,” he mumbles into her mouth, breaking the kiss when it gets too painful twisting his neck back like that, and turns to face Riku again, hair prickling against Kairi’s nose. “Don’t leave,” he says, urgent and desperate, and Kairi can’t see his eyes but she knows they’re pleading. “Riku.”
“Sora,” Riku answers shakily, not able to formulate any words beyond that, but his fingers tighten in Sora’s jacket and he’s not going to leave, can’t leave, not anymore.
Kairi moves to disentangle herself, because they can’t stand here like this forever and there has to be a more comfortable and convenient way of doing this, but Sora catches her wrist before she can move away.
“Don’t leave,” he repeats, this time talking to her, looking back over his shoulder. Without waiting for her to reply Sora takes a sudden step back, dragging Riku with him and sending Kairi stumbling backwards so they trip over each other’s feet and her knees hit the bed and buckle, completely throwing out the balance of the boys, sending the three of them tumbling down onto Sora’s bed in a slightly painful tangle of limbs.
They lie there in silence for a moment, the only sound their mingled out-of-breath pants.
“This is never going to work,” Riku tells them eventually, ever the realist, the pessimist who never expects or even hopes for the best in case the fall hurts too much. His voice is muffled by Sora’s collarbone, and Kairi’s not sure whether he’s talking about the what they’re doing right now, the logistics generally or their entire relationship. Probably all three.
Things usually come in threes, Kairi has discovered.
Still, for all his tendency to expect the worst out of any given situation, Kairi can hear the desperate need to hope, the grudging willingness to leap for the stars because as much as it would hurt to fail it hurts even more not to try in the first place.
“We’ll figure it out,” Sora says confidently, cocooned by Riku and Kairi in a sticky, perfect mess of arms and legs on his bed, which should have been way too small for the three of them but somehow seemed just right. He beams so brightly that it almost hurts to look at him, the way it dazzles your eyes to stare right into the sun. He’s always been like this, filled with blind faith that everything is going to turn out alright in the end, leaping without ever looking first.
And Kairi, always the happy medium, the girl who spends all her time with one boy who is a hopeless idealist and another who’s a hopeless pessimist, the girl who has reasonable expectations but still has them, smiles, because she knows Sora’s right. This is going to work. This has to work, because they love each other too closely and too fiercely for it not too; because they’ve got Sora, and he always makes the impossible seem easy.
“We’ll figure it out,” she agrees, fingers brushing against Riku’s over the rise and fall of Sora’s ribcage, and in that one shining, perfect moment, she knows everything is going to be okay.