Fic: Chasing Starlight
Title: Chasing Starlight
Author: Rissa
Pairing: RikuxSora
Rating: PG for some swearing
Warning: Spoilers for the entire end of KH2, set after the game
Word Count: 7,762
Summary: Being back home isn't quite the homecoming Sora always imagined, and it seems Riku's of the same mindset when a thunderstorm brings an unexpected visitor to his bedroom window.
A/N: Written with the idea of the RxS Revival in mind, though I have to credit sekachan with a HUGE thanks for her gorgeous artwork, which inspired me out of my funk and prompted this story to be written. I took some artistic liberties that differ from the picture, namely the tone of the story, which I honestly tried to write as a romance but I guess I have too many things on my mind regarding Riku and Sora. Next time, I promise!
Also, thanks to Cate for always being the wonderful reader over my shoulder ♥
- - -
The sharp crack of thunder hits so close that the glass panes in Sora’s window jump and rattle violently from the shockwave, leaving Sora blinking up at his ceiling, suddenly wide awake, his heart hammering against the inside of his chest and his senses sharp and alert. His hypersensitive fingers register the smooth cotton of the quilted blanket across his stomach and the cold skin below his right ankle, foot stretching into the open air beyond the end of his bed, and it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to what little illumination can be discerned in the darkness of his bedroom. Sora’s heartbeat echoes the departing rumble of thunder as it recedes over the rooftops, calming to something less adrenaline charged and ready for flight, leaving only the staccato of the rain striking his window and the persistent tap-tap as wind and rain beat against the wood siding of the house.
Sora takes a deep breath and draws his foot back under the blankets, giving the material a light kick to drape the corner over the edge of the mattress once more. His wild hair pokes his cheek as he sinks deeper against the pillow and he twists his head to the side, pressing the strands between skin and cotton as he focuses on the rippled glass streaked with rainwater over his bed. As he watches the mottled sky, nerves still a little on edge and something inside him held in anticipation while the night lapses into unbroken silence, a flash of white streaks through the clouds, bathing his room with the pale, blue-white light. He catches only a fleeting glimpse of the items in his bedroom as his head turns to the middle of the room -- so many memories in one place: the trunk of toys painted to look like a pirate’s treasure chest, the desk with a too-small chair and edges that banged his knees the one time he’d tried to sit down at it, framed pictures on the walls whose contents he knows by heart, and a wooden boat that dangles from the ceiling on fishing wire tangled around two eyehooks his father had put there when he was eight years old. But there’s nothing else in the room with him, nothing to see in the brief illumination to set his heart further on edge, and Sora allows himself to relax marginally, at least one uncertainty abated, as he waits for the crash to follow on the heels of the electric light.
He doesn’t jump (barely) when the next boom of thunder breaks over the house, pounding away at the air and the very foundation beneath him with a force that reminds Sora, uneasily, of too many other such instances when the floor shuddered and bucked beneath him with malicious intent. He knows, reasonably, that a thunderstorm is not uncommon on the islands nor inherently evil in nature, but the memories of sound and pressure and power greater than himself makes his stomach turn over uncomfortably regardless, and his fingers make a fist against the blanket atop his chest in silent acknowledgment of the fear that still has sway over him as the storm continues over the house.
It isn’t unusual that he’s wide awake in the middle of the night; countless trips to other worlds and sleeping on unfamiliar ground and inside strange structures and most often inside the belly of an interstellar ship has compounded in an impressive amount of bad sleeping habits. The difference between daylight and nighttime in terms of sleeping stopped meaning what it once did a long time ago, when enemies often operated during their own strange hours and when shadowy beasts prefered the cover of darkness to attack and pillage - well, it’s only natural to adopt habits best suited to the current situation. Still, something in Sora is a little disappointed that even now, safe inside his own house and sleeping on a bed he hasn’t seen in two years, and consequently is much smaller than he remembers it, isn’t bringing him the respite he always fantasized about. Maybe things will get better once they buy him a bigger mattress, like his mother promised after Sora complained the first night, or maybe it’ll just take time to reorient his body to the normal sleeping patterns shared by most people, like his father said when he found Sora downstairs in the kitchen in the middle of the third night. Time, Sora thinks, is a whole lot more important these days than it ever was when he was a child, and after being back on Destiny Islands now for a whole week Sora can’t help feeling like he’s waiting for the other shoe to fall.
It isn’t that he’s bothered by the fact that life on the islands has moved on without him, without Riku, and that people continued to live their lives and go to school and get jobs and make new friends in their absence. Everything feels so normal and maybe that’s part of the problem, as though after everything that’s happened, the world being destroyed and then restored, the universe being tossed into utter chaos, swarmed by heartless and nobodies, manipulated by the whims of power hungry individuals and those fighting for their own agendas, surely something should have changed? But besides a few more gray hairs on his father’s head and a new house on the empty lot at the end of the block nothing else has, and Sora can only conclude that maybe it’s him. He’s the one who’s been gone for almost two years, seen other worlds, fought and died a couple times over, defeated creatures straight out of a child’s worst nightmare, been a pawn in evil schemes and known pain and loss and the burden of duty and honor, and scrutinized his own heart with a surprising depth and severity. The world hasn’t changed but he has, and Sora’s come to realize after a week of pondering over unsettling feelings that maybe he’s just a little bit resentful that he’s the only one.
Which is not entirely true. There’s Riku, who’s gone through more shit than Sora and certainly more trials and periods of identity crises and betrayals and manipulation at the hands of sadistic individuals; that he managed to come out of it sane and maybe, hopefully, better for the experience has firmed placed him back atop the gleaming pedestal in Sora’s mind. But considering that it’s been exactly a week since he last saw Riku and likely will be many more before he sees him again, since according to Kairi - his one friend allowed visitation - Riku’s been grounded even longer than Sora has, the feelings of loneliness and displacement have only found room to grow. Riku doesn’t even have the hope of getting out earlier on good behavior, something Sora managed to beg from his father once the punishment had been handed down - though he has a feeling his mother would gladly extend the period indefinitely, or tie a leash on him, if she had her way. Being gone from home for nearly two years without a word might do that to a parent, he supposed, but it made it downright difficult to get in touch with friends again.
Sora only registers the dull smack of something small and hard colliding against his window frame the second time it hits, having brushed off the first as a bit of debris flying loose in the wind, and he sits up slowly to put the window at his left shoulder, eyes scrutinizing the streaked glass and the inky black clouds of the low-lying tropical storm. When the sound comes again, like something small impacting just below his windowsill, he gets up on his knees and presses both hands against the cold glass, looking down this time instead of up. It’s absolutely impossible to see anything beyond the warped distillation of the water on his window and the trees in the front yard are only blurred impressions, cone-shaped smudges that glow with a copper shade around a common edge from the streetlamp three houses down. With a deep breath Sora finds the metal latches at the bottom of his window and flips the catches open, something about the action strangely familiar, and heaves the bottom half of his window up to his shoulders. He ducks his head into the open space, rain immediately dampening his hair and skin and arms, and lets out a surprised, strangled sound of disbelief.
A figure stands on his lawn dressed from head to toe in black, hood drawn up and body facing the direction of his window, and his shock at the sight is so immediate and physical that Sora feels like he’s just been sucker punched in the gut and had his hair pulled for good measure. They can’t be here, not after everything they went through, not after all they did to make sure that every single one of the maniacal bastards was dead, or dissolved, or sent back to wherever it was that bad nobodies came from. The surge of anger and the instinct to protect and fight is almost overwhelming as it follows on the heels of his disbelief, and Sora can only think of how wrong it is, how unfair it is, how low it is that they’d actually follow him here, to his home, and try to put his family and friends and loved ones in danger.
It’ll be their last mistake that they decided to conveniently show up on his doorstep, and Sora is two seconds away from leaping out of his window in his pajamas and summoning the keyblade when another flash of lightning illuminates the sky, and in turn the entire street and front lawn, letting Sora catch a glimpse of the upturned face beneath the hood and the silver hair that frames it.
Riku!?
Sora’s confusion completely fizzles out the homicidal instincts that had overtaken him seconds earlier, and when the brief strobe of lightning fades he’s left with the fuzzy impression of a black jogging suit at the back of his eyes, not an organization coat, and a pale hand that had been waving up at him with some hidden meaning. Sora can only blink in confusion as he cranes his neck out further from the safe confinement of his bedroom, both hands on the windowsill, squinting through the downpour in an attempt to comprehend the distorted motions he can see being made by his friend.
Something whizzes through the air and strikes dangerously close to his head with a loud pop against the side of the house, and Sora lets out a startled yelp as he yanks himself out of the open window, seeking the safety of the wall next to his bed. Seconds later a clap of thunder reverberates from the direction of the earlier lightning, for once not pummeling the air directly over his house, and Sora watches in surprise as Riku charges towards the structure at a full sprint, the echoing rumble neatly masking the thump of rubber soles connecting with the wood siding. Sora uses one hand to push the window open the rest of the way and the other to grab hold of one rain drenched arm as Riku clears the second story window, the older boy’s hands grabbing for purchase on either side of the wet frame and knees connecting with a painful sounding smack against the narrow sill.
“Are you too good for the rose trellis now?” Sora asks with a grunt as he hauls his friend into the room, not willing to admit aloud that the sight of Riku running vertically up the side of his house had actually been pretty cool. It doesn’t excuse him for not using the rose trellis next to Sora's window that he’d been perfectly happy to scale during every other nightly visit for as long as they’d known each other.
“Too heavy, actually,” Riku corrects him, sounding only slightly winded, and drags himself through the rectangular opening that’s probably a bit smaller than he remembers. When he gets a foot and then a leg over the sill he propels himself the rest of the way in, forcing Sora to release him as his knee bounces atop Sora’s bed with a harsh creak of springs before he lands with both feet on the bedroom floor.
Sora shrugs away the admirable show of dexterity in favor of shutting the window after his friend, carefully bringing it down the last few inches so that the wood frame and windowsill are spared from making any noise that might attract the other sleeping members of the household. He secures the latches with a two solid snaps and turns to find Riku stripping down in the middle of his bedroom, wet jacket already discarded at his feet and pants following with a wet slap of material as he shakes the leg free from around his ankle. He’s wearing nothing but a t-shirt and what look to be very loose pajama pants underneath, the shade some indistinguishable deep color with a pattern he can’t make out well in the darkness.
Sora turns to sit crosslegged on his bed atop the blankets and clasps his bare ankles with both hands. “You almost hit me, you know,” he says, scowling.
Riku gives the wet pile on the floor a dismissive poke with his bare toes and shrugs. “I tried to tell you to move out of the way. You didn’t do it, so I did the next best thing.”
“By nearly nailing me in the head with… what were you throwing anyway?” Sora rubs the side of his head, raking fingers through the damp strands, and grimaces upon realizing that the shoulders of his pajamas are soaked from the rain.
Riku turns to face him as he shakes out his hair, and Sora frowns as he feels a few stray drops nail him in the face. “Just some palm nuts I picked up on the way over.”
“In the middle of a thunder storm? What the hell were you doing out in the middle of the night?” Sora asks, undoing the top button on his pajamas to tug the shirt over his head. He balls up the damp fabric and uses the dry bottom half to wipe his face and the ends of his hair.
Riku joins him on the bed, the mattress dipping sharply under the added weight. “Coming over here,” he replies.
“At… whatever insanely early hour of the morning it is right now?” Sora pushes himself off the bed and tosses the shirt in his hands atop the already wet pile in the middle of his floor before stepping over to the bureau across the room. He hears the mattress creak and spring a bit as Riku shifts on the bed while he searches the top drawer for a new shirt to wear, frowning as his hunt turns up far more tops suitable for the thirteen year old frame he doesn’t have anymore. The shirt he’d been wearing before had been one of the few, if only, that had been large on him before and thus a perfect size to be worn now. His mother still hasn't taken him shopping and he's running out of clothes that don't pinch in weird places.
“We haven’t seen each other in awhile,” Riku explains as Sora finally locates a tank top he remembers always being a little loose around the middle.
Sora turns around as he pulls his arms and head through the shirt and finds Riku at the foot of his bed, back against the wall beside the window and one knee bent beneath the arm he has resting on it. “Well… yeah,” Sora admits, pulling at the midsection of his shirt, which is still a little tighter than he’d been hoping. “But aren’t you kind of breaking a few rules by being over here? Kairi said you’d been grounded for life.”
Riku snorts as Sora makes his way back to the bed. “I didn’t risk my life to save the universe just so I could come home and be grounded.”
Sora climbs atop the mattress and grins as he settles back into a crosslegged position. “It was kind of inevitable, don’t you think? Leaving without a word in the middle of the night and all that.”
“It shouldn’t matter,” Riku says, head leaning against the wall and throat bared by the hair falling behind his shoulder. “And I don’t like being cooped up.”
“It’s not forever,” Sora reasons. “They’re just being parents. And it’s kind of nice, sometimes. It means I get to spend more time with my mom. They’re doing it because they love us.”
Riku sighs. “I know. But it keeps reminding me why I wanted to leave in the first place.”
“Going to run off to see other worlds again?” Sora teases with a smile, and Riku turns his head to regard him with a small smile just barely visible in the dim light.
“Maybe. Maybe find a few without heartless for once.”
Sora pouts in mock seriousness. “Not planning a trip without me, I hope?”
“Course not,” Riku says, shifting onto his side and moving up the bed to lie lengthwise on his back, putting himself between the wall and Sora’s leg. “Someone’s gotta fly the gummi ship to get us here.”
“And save your ass when you get into trouble,” Sora adds, mimicking Riku by sliding his legs down the bed and lying down on his back, head sharing the other half of the pillow. The position proves slightly problematic however as both realize that they take up quite a bit more space than they used to, and each spend a moment shifting awkwardly until Sora has his right shoulder nearly hanging off the edge of the bed and Riku turned so his back is against the wall, knees pulled up and touching Sora’s legs, leaving only a narrow gap of mattress between them.
“Don’t you mean the other way around?” Riku asks, the smile evident in his voice even though Sora can’t see it. “And since when did your bed get so tiny?”
“Don’t mock my bed for your insane growth spurt.”
“I’m serious, how can you sleep on this thing?”
Sora sighs, blowing a few wayward bangs further up his forehead. “They’re going to buy me a new mattress this week. Things have been kind of busy.”
“Like what?” Riku asks. He lets out a brief, amused snort when Sora swivels his head to the side to regard his friend. “Indulge me. I haven’t seen you in a week.”
Sora settles back against the pillow, folding his arms across his chest. “Lots of lectures, lots of crying, it’s been almost half and half. I think my mom’s taking it the hardest, like I went and stole two years of my life she never got to see. She knows I need new clothes and a new bed but every time I bring it up she looks like she wants to burst out crying again. I figure if I wear the same few pieces of clothing enough times she’ll get the idea.”
“I’m sorry,” Riku says sincerely. “Probably not how you expected, huh?”
“It’s home,” Sora says, as if that were explanation enough. “I think I would have felt even worse if I’d never come back at all. What about you?”
Sora turns his head with the question, hearing the force of the rain hitting the window pick up slightly in volume in the silence. Riku has one arm up on the pillow and his head propped against it, elevating him slightly and hiding his expression behind the curtain of silver hair falling across his cheek and neck. Sora’s actually surprised it hasn’t all been hacked away yet - Riku’s mother never struck him as the type to tolerate long hair on a boy, and Riku had already been pushing the line when they were younger.
“It could be worse, I guess,” Riku finally says, his voice low. “Probably mostly the same as your family, except I’ve got a brother and sister to deal with. Everyone came home and spent a few days yelling at me and wanting to hear the story again when they didn’t believe it after the first five times. You know my brother’s in college now?”
“Yeah?” Sora asks, more surprised than he probably should be. Riku’s brother had been a third year when everything started, which makes sense that he would have graduated and gone to college in their absence. Riku’s sister was a year above them, which meant she was probably a second or a third year by now. “Everything’s really changed.”
Riku shrugs, his left shoulder lifting in silent agreement. “In some ways, I guess. It’s still boring as hell here.”
Sora grins and hugs himself a little before releasing his arms and reaching towards the ceiling, fingertips stretching out to the faded glow-in-the-dark stars that had dimmed hours earlier. “Think we’ll ever get to go visit other worlds again?”
“Yes,” Riku answers immediately and with such sudden conviction that Sora drops his hands and turns to look at his friend again.
“Riku?”
“I’m not staying here forever,” Riku says quietly. “Maybe finish school to make everyone happy, but… I can’t stay.”
“Riku…”
Sora frowns, though most of him understands where his friend is coming from, aware that the motivations which initially inspired their journey haven’t faded in the slightest -- only been briefly overshadowed by bigger and more pressing matters. Sora understands because he feels the same way, feels the call of the stars and the worlds they represent and the people and friends he’s left behind, and the desire to see them all again weighs just as strongly in his heart as his need was to find Riku and his home. But where Sora’s motivations are fueled by the bonds he’s created and wants to keep strong, he knows that Riku’s reasons have always centered around the desire to break free, to loosen the bonds that he feels keeps him trapped on the islands. It’s always pained him a little inside to know this, that his friend views his family as shackles rather than the roots he’ll always be able to return to, but that hasn’t stopped Sora from hoping that one day his friend will change his perceptions for the better. Running away for good isn’t the answer, but time away just might be what Riku needs to appreciate the things he has at home better than he does now, and this is something Sora is sure of.
Riku reaches over with the hand that had been resting on his waist and knocks Sora, once, on the middle of his forehead with a knuckle. “Don’t brood so hard, your face will stick that way.”
Sora scowls and rubs the center of his forehead out of reflex. “I’m not brooding, just thinking.”
A distant crackle and boom of thunder fills the brief silence, and Sora realizes that the wind has ceased slamming sheets of rain against his bedroom window, the torrent diminished to a steady downpour that sounds more like comfortable white noise than an approaching hurricane. Either way there's no chance that Riku is going home, and Sora can hazard a good guess that his friend hadn’t planned on returning from the beginning anyway. It’ll be hell explaining things in the morning unless Riku can pull another fancy trick and get himself out of the house before anyone notices, but Sora has a feeling they’ll find a way to deal with it when the time comes. They’ve gotten out of trickier situations together before.
“I was pretty selfish last time,” Riku states quietly, as if this were his conclusion after a long moment of inner thought.
“What do you mean?” Sora asks, blinking into the darkness while looking at his friend.
“Getting you roped into my ideas about leaving the island, finding other worlds to explore. You only went along with it because I was so adamant about it and didn’t want to get left behind, and then you dragged Kairi along too, all because I was making up lame excuses to run away from home and didn’t want to go by myself.”
Sora shifts on the bed, rolling onto his side so he can face Riku, their knees and shins bumping together but neither withdrawing for lack of space on the narrow bed. Sora crosses his arms and gives Riku’s shadowed face the attention he knows the other boy needs unconditionally right now. “I’ll admit it was like that at first,” Sora begins carefully. “But your dream still became my dream after awhile. Just because you came up with it first doesn’t mean that I didn’t believe in it too.”
“And what if I’d suddenly decided to stay on the islands instead?” Riku asks, his tone challenging but quiet.
“Then I would have stayed on the islands,” Sora answers easily. “What would be the point of sailing off to an unknown world without my best friend?” Sora grins and finally catches a glimpse of an answering smile on Riku’s face.
“You’re such an idiot, Sora.”
“Well I did learn from the best,” Sora retorts, sniggering, which earns him retribution in the form of a finger poking rather painfully against his ribs. “Ow!”
“Shh. Don’t need to wake up your parents, do we?”
“Well you shouldn’t be stabbing people in the dark,” Sora snaps back, lowering his crossed arms so they lay a little more protectively around his middle.
“Gotta be prepared for anything,” Riku advises, and Sora rolls his eyes openly at the pretense of superiority in his friend’s voice.
“Prepared my butt, that was cheating. Just wait till we get out of this solitary confinement, I’ll kick your ass good on the beach.”
Riku lets out a soft chuckle. “Powerful words, Sora. Are you sure you can back them up?”
Sora’s competitive instincts are rising fast enough that he knows he’s only a few seconds away from grabbing the pillow out from under their heads and pummeling Riku thoroughly, so he takes a deep breath and tightens his crossed arms to prevent the impulse from being acted upon. “Just wait and see,” he says instead.
To his relief Riku drops the matter, from rival to best friend in the blink of an eye. “It’ll probably be a year before I even see the beach again,” he says with a sigh.
“How long did they ground you for?” Sora asks, suddenly worried that Kairi’s declaration of ‘forever’ hadn’t been jesting at all like he’d originally assumed.
“I don’t know,” Riku says glumly, and he shifts a little to tuck his head deeper into the crook of his arm on the pillow. “There’s no set time limit on it right now, just however long my dad feels likes. I’ll probably be going straight between home and school for awhile.”
Sora scrunches up his face at the news, a part of him railing against the heavy-handed punishment even while another wants to understand the reasoning behind their parents taking this so seriously. “Man, that sucks. But at least we’ll still see each other at school, right?”
Riku snorts. “Right, school. I think I’d rather stay home.”
“What’s wrong with school?” Sora demands. He might share the common opinion among teenagers that school is the last place on earth he'd like to be, but even he’s willing to admit that the higher education is probably for the best, even if it is a pain in the ass to get through.
“Sora, do you really think after everything we’ve been through we can just go to school and pretend like nothing’s happened? What are they going to teach us that we don’t already know?”
“Algebra?” Sora suggests. He smiles when Riku lets out a soft snort, the tension between them dissolving. “I think I’d take school over the heartless any day.”
“I suppose a crotchety old teacher is better than Maleficent,” Riku concedes with a good humored sigh, his warm breath traveling the short distance between them to land on Sora’s face.
“Yeah, I bet I could do better than having someone like Donald trying to teach me magic.”
“You two sure fought a lot at first. How’d that work out?”
Sora shrugs slightly. “I paid attention to the basics, watched how it was done, and experimented a lot. Eventually I stopped burning or freezing parts of my body and then figured out how to aim. Even Merlin was impressed!”
Riku laughs quietly. “Somehow I don’t think they’d let that pass in chemistry.”
“We have to take chemistry?” Sora asks with a groan, rolling over onto his stomach to push his face into the pillow next to Riku’s elbow. The pitch darkness under his nose and the sound of the falling again on the roof and against his window reminds Sora that it’s still the middle of the night and that tomorrow will still be another day when he’s still grounded and Riku will be sent home to face whatever punishment will come for sneaking out of the house in the dead of night, and in the middle of a violent thunderstorm no less. At the moment, despite what attempts at acceptance he’s been struggling to swallow over the past week, all of it suddenly seems incredibly unfair for two returning heroes. Being teenagers doesn’t change the fact that they’ve been to other worlds, fought thousands of enemies, been put into service by the King who rules all of said worlds, and in Sora’s case, gained the respect and friendship of countless individuals who he’d been fortunate enough to meet on his journeys. There’s more out there than just the four walls of his house and the halls of school he’ll inevitably become confined inside again, and at the moment Riku’s constant determination to get away doesn’t sound quite so unappealing to Sora.
“Let’s run away,” Riku says with quiet, sudden conviction, breaking Sora out of his thoughts and sending him up on his elbows to look at his friend in disbelief, who seems to have suddenly developed the ability to read minds as well as scale vertical walls.
“Riku… we can’t,” Sora protests, wishing his weak voice sounded more convincing. “Our parents would kill us.”
“Then we won’t come back this time.”
“Riku…” Sora shakes his head, struggling to find that voice of reason because a part of him had actually jumped and shouted a ‘YES!’ inside his head at Riku’s suggestion.
Riku sighs and rolls onto his back, his shoulder pressing up against Sora’s forearm and his other arm tucked behind his head, propping him another few inches off the pillow. “Why wait if it’s just going to happen anyway?”
Sora bites his bottom lip, threading the fingers beneath his chest together atop the blanket. “Leaving in the middle of the night again just feels wrong. Plus, you know Kairi would be pissed at being left behind.”
“So take her with us,” Riku suggests, waving a hand in the air over his chest. “She’s from Hollow Bastion, right? Maybe she wants to see it again.”
Sora draws his left arm out from underneath himself and settles his elbow on the pillow, propping his cheek against his fist so he can look down at Riku’s shadowed face. “I asked her about that, actually, when she asked me how Radiant Garden was doing. I don’t think she knew how much of it had been destroyed by the heartless. She was… surprised, I guess. And sad. When I suggested the idea she said she didn’t need to see it. Maybe she’s scared or something, bad memories, you think?”
Riku grunts noncommittally. “Maybe it’s not her home anymore.”
Sora ponders that for a moment, making a soft sound of agreement. “I wonder how everybody’s doing there? The Restoration Community was working really hard to rebuild the place. And Tron too, I hope someone remembered to go talk to him every now and then. He wouldn’t admit it but I bet he gets lonely easily.”
“Tron?” Riku asks curiously.
“Um, uh, this… guy, I guess? He lived inside of a computer.”
“He what?” Riku asks incredulously, turning his head to regard Sora. “You mean like a virtual reality?”
“A what? I mean he was inside the computer, like a part of it. There was this whole world inside that computer in Ansem’s old study, we went to visit a bunch of times and defeated this thing called the MCP that was trying to take over the whole town. It was crazy.”
“People can’t control things from inside computers, Sora,” Riku says blandly and with that tone that he thinks Sora is lying through his teeth.
“I’m not making it up,” Sora argues hotly, using his free hand to punch Riku’s nearest shoulder for good measure. “He called us all users and said he was a… a… security… um… a thing you know, like a lock I guess? He kept asking us for a password. And we could talk to him outside of the computer too once we got rid of the MCP and things went back to normal. How do you know so much about computers anyway, Riku?”
“DiZ… Ansem, had one set up in the mansion. I taught myself a little.”
“Oh yeah,” Sora recalls, memory tossing up the images of the twin sets of screens and a keyboard, one smashed to pieces and one humming with glowing numbers and images. It hadn’t looked at all like the one in Ansem’s study, but the blue light had been the same in both places.
“And I wasn’t lying,” Sora repeats when Riku’s silence reveals his lingering opinion regarding Sora’s tale of a world inside a computer. Sora attempts to throw another punch but gets his wrist captured a breadth away from its destination by Riku’s hand, which keeps Sora’s arm firmly clasped between his fingers as he lowers them to the mattress between them. Sora frowns and draws his wrist free when Riku’s fingers relax their hold, but keeps his hand next to Riku’s, the warmth of his friend’s skin seeping into his own.
Riku doesn’t say anything else and Sora finds himself studying his friend’s face in the dim light, the sharp nose lit in profile and the eyes which he can see are closed behind the fall of silvery bangs over his forehead. Sora has to admit that Riku’s become unexpectedly handsome in the intervening years since they left Destiny Islands, possessing smooth skin and long hair and proportionate features, and eyes that Sora’s always associated with memories of the sea that now hold a mysterious depth and resilience. A trait that probably only Sora knows is there because of the burdens of pain and betrayal his friend has gone through. Riku’s changed so much in such a short amount of time that it scares Sora to think about how much his friend might change again if he let him out of his sight for any extended period of time. He only just got his friend back before they found the door to the islands and since then this is the first time he’s seen Riku in a week, who’s already talking about running off to see other worlds again, and Sora breath catches at how sharply this makes his heart wrench in his chest.
“Riku,” Sora says softly, aware that his friend is only feigning sleep, and feels the fingers next to his hand twitch slightly in response. He hauls in a deep breath before speaking. “Let’s do it.”
Riku’s eyes open and slide over to regard Sora. “Do what?”
“Go, like you said. Let’s go, whenever you want.”
Riku rolls a little toward Sora, his head lifting off the pillow and his expression surprisingly neutral. “Just like that? After how much you just argued against it?”
Sora licks his lips and digs his fingers into the quilted blanket beneath them, his pinkie finger curling around and trapping Riku’s in the process. “You remember what we said, when we were in the darkness?”
Riku nods, some of his hair spilling across his shoulder and onto his chest, eyes watching Sora intently across the narrow expanse between them on the bed.
“I thought we were going to stay there forever and I didn’t mind. I thought, ‘this is okay, everyone’s safe again, we don’t need to move from here’ and I was honestly okay about it. You were there and I hadn’t seen you in ages and it… felt right, you know? Even though it was all dark and the world was dying I wasn’t scared of it anymore, and it wasn’t just because I’d accepted the darkness inside of me like you did, even though that was a part of it, it was because you were there too and I know that you and me, together, we can do anything. We even defeated Xemnas and all his thousands of nobodies and we got out of it alive and I figured that if that was our reward at the end, finally meeting again and being able to just talk in peace and catch up, forever… then that was okay, you know?”
Riku says nothing, the silence unbroken but for the pattering sound of the rainfall which has finally settled into a steady drizzle, all traces of the earlier thunder and lightning long since moved on to other islands or the open water. Sora can’t make out Riku’s face very well, let alone tell if he’s blinking or doing anything beyond breathing, but he does feel the fingers by his hand move imperceptibly against the mattress, and before he can ponder the impulse Sora moves his hand and wraps it around his friend’s, lacing their fingers together. The warmth and strength of the grip is exactly what he needs to continue speaking.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot too since we got back. I’m really glad that door opened for us, I got to see Donald and Goofy and the King again and give Kairi back her charm like I promised, and this is home, it’ll always be home, but… I’ve got friends on other worlds now. The universe is a lot bigger than our islands now, you know?” Sora chuckles quietly at the irony, sliding his hand out from under his cheek and letting his head rest on the soft underside of his forearm instead. “I miss them. I want to know how they’re doing and help them if they’re still having trouble. I can’t stay here forever either, and I hate being grounded just as much as you do, but I don’t want make everyone worry like that again. It would be selfish just to leave without a word… but, if you really meant it, if you’re going to leave… you know I’d go with you.”
“Sora…” Riku says quietly, the low tone masking whatever emotion he’s feeling at the moment. “You know I wouldn’t… I can’t ask you just to leave. I know your family loves you.”
“Would you leave without me?” Sora demands, his fingers crushing Riku’s hand in a tight squeeze that makes the bones pop under the sudden pressure.
“No,” Riku answers immediately, wincing slightly, and then pauses guiltily when Sora’s grip relaxes slightly. He sighs, undecided. “Maybe…”
“Riku!”
“Well you’d be more mad if I wasn’t honest,” Riku argues back.
Sora scowls but then relaxes his expression into a frown. “Thanks,” he replies grudgingly. “So, you’d really leave me?”
Riku rolls onto his back and lets out a deep breath. “I didn’t say… I just meant… okay, if I asked you a million times to go with me and on the millionth and first time you still said no, then yeah I’d go on my own.”
Sora is stunned by the unexpected display of honesty from his friend, and it reminds him of a conversation they had not so long ago on a beach when similar words of sincerity had been spoken between them. Maybe this is a different Riku from his childhood friend, one who doesn’t hide behind a blindfold to cover his eyes from revealing the truth about his emotions. Maybe the darkness changed more than just his powers and his body, maybe it forced Riku to look at himself the same way it did for Sora, to look inside his heart and the darkness that resides there and understand that accepting it, not fearing it, means not having to worry about being overtaken by it. Sora has learned that an enemy is best combated with both eyes wide open, and for the first time he realizes that Riku has also come to understand this too.
Sora scoots a little closer to the body stretched out alongside his and lets his chin bump against Riku’s shoulder. “So when do you want to leave?”
Riku laughs quietly, the bitter edge easily masked but still there underneath. “Let it go, Sora.”
Sora smiles and squeezes the hand still trapped in his fist. “I mean it. Let’s pick a date and plan a trip.”
Riku turns his head to look down at Sora, some of their hair tangling as Riku’s nose stops an inch from his forehead. “A trip?” he asks in confusion.
Sora nods, purposefully digging the point of his chin into Riku’s shoulder, and he grins when Riku tries to shrug him off inflicting any more pain. Sora drops his head onto the pillow, feeling some of Riku’s hair become trapped beneath his face, and he can smell his friend’s shampoo and the scent of the rain and earth he brought in from standing outside in the storm earlier. It’s a little disappointing that Riku doesn’t smell like the familiar papou tree whose branches he dominated so exclusively when they were younger, but as they’ve been trapped indoors all week it isn’t that surprising. Riku’s body is warm and real and the close proximity reminds Sora of countless prior sleepovers, when even arranging blankets and sleeping bags on the floor somehow wound up with Riku in his bed anyway, or vice versa when he slept over at Riku’s house, and it hasn't occured to Sora once to kick him out even with the painful lack of space.
“We’ll take a trip,” Sora explains, speaking quietly and conspiratorially into the ear a short distance from his mouth. “Not right away because we need to wait until we’re not grounded anymore and have to ask for permission, but I bet once they’re over it they’ll let us go if we explain it properly. We’ve got friends worried about us and I’m sure the King will want us to check in now and then, right? We won’t be leaving for good but at least we’ll be able to get away for awhile, check out how things are going, and then someday… I dunno. We’ll deal with after school when it happens.”
Riku absorbs all this in silence, his quiet breathing the only sound Sora can perceive from his spot next to him on the pillow, and Sora finds his thumb unconsciously rubbing the back of Riku’s hand in silent support. “Think you can handle waiting a little?” Sora asks teasingly.
Riku barks out a short, disbelieving laugh, and gives Sora’s hand an answering squeeze with his own. “Since when are you the one planning my life?”
“You know I’m right,” Sora says, settling himself a little closer on the bed so that Riku’s right arm is trapped between his side and Sora’s chest. The close warmth of Riku is relaxing and Sora blinks a few times before closing his eyes, the weight of his eyelids making it easy to keep them shut as he listens to Riku's soft breathing.
“You don’t seriously expect me to wait around until I’m not grounded anymore do you? I still say we should leave now.”
“Riku,” Sora says with a muffled growl, eliciting another soft laugh from his friend.
“Okay, it’s not a bad idea. It might actually work.”
“It will work,” Sora corrects, squirming slightly on the bed. “We’re the keyblade masters after all. We’ve got to make sure the universe stays safe.”
“I suppose there are probably a few heartless still floating around that need to be taken care of.”
“Hundreds,” Sora agrees absently, nodding against Riku’s shoulder.
“Thousands?”
Sora smiles and opens his eyes to watch his friend as he plays along. “Maybe millions?”
“Well what are we waiting for?” Riku asks with good-humored enthusiasm, withdrawing his free arm from behind his head to wave up at the window and the stars still obscured by the rain clouds overhead.
“Sleep first,” Sora replies dismissively, finally giving in to the urge to yawn that’s been creeping up on him slowly for the past several minutes. The brief period of silence that follows gives Sora the chance to yawn once more, and he throws an ankle over Riku's leg as he shifts comfortably against the body next to him.
“You think I should break out in the morning?” Riku asks seriously after a moment, replacing his arm between his head and the pillow.
“It’s your skin,” Sora mutters, unconcerned.
“But they’ll find me in your bed,” Riku points out, voice lowered to match Sora’s sleepy slur.
“I can lock the door,” Sora retorts before succumbing to another yawn. “Ah… ma keyblade master. Like to see them try and get in then.”
Riku chuckles. “So where are we going first after we bust out of here?”
“Hmm,” Sora ponders, struggling to focus on the serious question even though his body is telling him that the time to be awake has long since passed. “Neverland, I miss flying. You were so bent out of shape before you totally missed it, but you gotta try it too.”
“Flying huh?” Riku queries softly. “That sounds like fun.”
“And then to see Tron,” Sora continues, a hint of a sleepy smile in his voice, “so you can see he really does live inside the computer. And I can introduce you to everyone, Leon and Yuffie and Aerith and Cid and Cloud…”
Sora yawns again, lips smacking drowsily. “Be good, Riku. I wanna see everyone…”
Riku laughs softly and Sora feels the side of his friend’s face lean in to press against the top of his head, burying Riku’s mouth and nose into the wild nest of Sora’s hair. “I promise,” Riku says quietly, his voice barely above a whisper but still audible in the warm stillness of the bedroom. “Goodnight, Sora.”
“Night, Riku.”
- - -
A/N: I dunno, Riku always struck me as the baby in the family, a kid struggling to find his own path away from the prior achievements of his brothers and sisters and the expectations of his parents and a mother than probably babied him too much for his boyish sensibilities :D
Author: Rissa
Pairing: RikuxSora
Rating: PG for some swearing
Warning: Spoilers for the entire end of KH2, set after the game
Word Count: 7,762
Summary: Being back home isn't quite the homecoming Sora always imagined, and it seems Riku's of the same mindset when a thunderstorm brings an unexpected visitor to his bedroom window.
A/N: Written with the idea of the RxS Revival in mind, though I have to credit sekachan with a HUGE thanks for her gorgeous artwork, which inspired me out of my funk and prompted this story to be written. I took some artistic liberties that differ from the picture, namely the tone of the story, which I honestly tried to write as a romance but I guess I have too many things on my mind regarding Riku and Sora. Next time, I promise!
Also, thanks to Cate for always being the wonderful reader over my shoulder ♥
- - -
The sharp crack of thunder hits so close that the glass panes in Sora’s window jump and rattle violently from the shockwave, leaving Sora blinking up at his ceiling, suddenly wide awake, his heart hammering against the inside of his chest and his senses sharp and alert. His hypersensitive fingers register the smooth cotton of the quilted blanket across his stomach and the cold skin below his right ankle, foot stretching into the open air beyond the end of his bed, and it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to what little illumination can be discerned in the darkness of his bedroom. Sora’s heartbeat echoes the departing rumble of thunder as it recedes over the rooftops, calming to something less adrenaline charged and ready for flight, leaving only the staccato of the rain striking his window and the persistent tap-tap as wind and rain beat against the wood siding of the house.
Sora takes a deep breath and draws his foot back under the blankets, giving the material a light kick to drape the corner over the edge of the mattress once more. His wild hair pokes his cheek as he sinks deeper against the pillow and he twists his head to the side, pressing the strands between skin and cotton as he focuses on the rippled glass streaked with rainwater over his bed. As he watches the mottled sky, nerves still a little on edge and something inside him held in anticipation while the night lapses into unbroken silence, a flash of white streaks through the clouds, bathing his room with the pale, blue-white light. He catches only a fleeting glimpse of the items in his bedroom as his head turns to the middle of the room -- so many memories in one place: the trunk of toys painted to look like a pirate’s treasure chest, the desk with a too-small chair and edges that banged his knees the one time he’d tried to sit down at it, framed pictures on the walls whose contents he knows by heart, and a wooden boat that dangles from the ceiling on fishing wire tangled around two eyehooks his father had put there when he was eight years old. But there’s nothing else in the room with him, nothing to see in the brief illumination to set his heart further on edge, and Sora allows himself to relax marginally, at least one uncertainty abated, as he waits for the crash to follow on the heels of the electric light.
He doesn’t jump (barely) when the next boom of thunder breaks over the house, pounding away at the air and the very foundation beneath him with a force that reminds Sora, uneasily, of too many other such instances when the floor shuddered and bucked beneath him with malicious intent. He knows, reasonably, that a thunderstorm is not uncommon on the islands nor inherently evil in nature, but the memories of sound and pressure and power greater than himself makes his stomach turn over uncomfortably regardless, and his fingers make a fist against the blanket atop his chest in silent acknowledgment of the fear that still has sway over him as the storm continues over the house.
It isn’t unusual that he’s wide awake in the middle of the night; countless trips to other worlds and sleeping on unfamiliar ground and inside strange structures and most often inside the belly of an interstellar ship has compounded in an impressive amount of bad sleeping habits. The difference between daylight and nighttime in terms of sleeping stopped meaning what it once did a long time ago, when enemies often operated during their own strange hours and when shadowy beasts prefered the cover of darkness to attack and pillage - well, it’s only natural to adopt habits best suited to the current situation. Still, something in Sora is a little disappointed that even now, safe inside his own house and sleeping on a bed he hasn’t seen in two years, and consequently is much smaller than he remembers it, isn’t bringing him the respite he always fantasized about. Maybe things will get better once they buy him a bigger mattress, like his mother promised after Sora complained the first night, or maybe it’ll just take time to reorient his body to the normal sleeping patterns shared by most people, like his father said when he found Sora downstairs in the kitchen in the middle of the third night. Time, Sora thinks, is a whole lot more important these days than it ever was when he was a child, and after being back on Destiny Islands now for a whole week Sora can’t help feeling like he’s waiting for the other shoe to fall.
It isn’t that he’s bothered by the fact that life on the islands has moved on without him, without Riku, and that people continued to live their lives and go to school and get jobs and make new friends in their absence. Everything feels so normal and maybe that’s part of the problem, as though after everything that’s happened, the world being destroyed and then restored, the universe being tossed into utter chaos, swarmed by heartless and nobodies, manipulated by the whims of power hungry individuals and those fighting for their own agendas, surely something should have changed? But besides a few more gray hairs on his father’s head and a new house on the empty lot at the end of the block nothing else has, and Sora can only conclude that maybe it’s him. He’s the one who’s been gone for almost two years, seen other worlds, fought and died a couple times over, defeated creatures straight out of a child’s worst nightmare, been a pawn in evil schemes and known pain and loss and the burden of duty and honor, and scrutinized his own heart with a surprising depth and severity. The world hasn’t changed but he has, and Sora’s come to realize after a week of pondering over unsettling feelings that maybe he’s just a little bit resentful that he’s the only one.
Which is not entirely true. There’s Riku, who’s gone through more shit than Sora and certainly more trials and periods of identity crises and betrayals and manipulation at the hands of sadistic individuals; that he managed to come out of it sane and maybe, hopefully, better for the experience has firmed placed him back atop the gleaming pedestal in Sora’s mind. But considering that it’s been exactly a week since he last saw Riku and likely will be many more before he sees him again, since according to Kairi - his one friend allowed visitation - Riku’s been grounded even longer than Sora has, the feelings of loneliness and displacement have only found room to grow. Riku doesn’t even have the hope of getting out earlier on good behavior, something Sora managed to beg from his father once the punishment had been handed down - though he has a feeling his mother would gladly extend the period indefinitely, or tie a leash on him, if she had her way. Being gone from home for nearly two years without a word might do that to a parent, he supposed, but it made it downright difficult to get in touch with friends again.
Sora only registers the dull smack of something small and hard colliding against his window frame the second time it hits, having brushed off the first as a bit of debris flying loose in the wind, and he sits up slowly to put the window at his left shoulder, eyes scrutinizing the streaked glass and the inky black clouds of the low-lying tropical storm. When the sound comes again, like something small impacting just below his windowsill, he gets up on his knees and presses both hands against the cold glass, looking down this time instead of up. It’s absolutely impossible to see anything beyond the warped distillation of the water on his window and the trees in the front yard are only blurred impressions, cone-shaped smudges that glow with a copper shade around a common edge from the streetlamp three houses down. With a deep breath Sora finds the metal latches at the bottom of his window and flips the catches open, something about the action strangely familiar, and heaves the bottom half of his window up to his shoulders. He ducks his head into the open space, rain immediately dampening his hair and skin and arms, and lets out a surprised, strangled sound of disbelief.
A figure stands on his lawn dressed from head to toe in black, hood drawn up and body facing the direction of his window, and his shock at the sight is so immediate and physical that Sora feels like he’s just been sucker punched in the gut and had his hair pulled for good measure. They can’t be here, not after everything they went through, not after all they did to make sure that every single one of the maniacal bastards was dead, or dissolved, or sent back to wherever it was that bad nobodies came from. The surge of anger and the instinct to protect and fight is almost overwhelming as it follows on the heels of his disbelief, and Sora can only think of how wrong it is, how unfair it is, how low it is that they’d actually follow him here, to his home, and try to put his family and friends and loved ones in danger.
It’ll be their last mistake that they decided to conveniently show up on his doorstep, and Sora is two seconds away from leaping out of his window in his pajamas and summoning the keyblade when another flash of lightning illuminates the sky, and in turn the entire street and front lawn, letting Sora catch a glimpse of the upturned face beneath the hood and the silver hair that frames it.
Riku!?
Sora’s confusion completely fizzles out the homicidal instincts that had overtaken him seconds earlier, and when the brief strobe of lightning fades he’s left with the fuzzy impression of a black jogging suit at the back of his eyes, not an organization coat, and a pale hand that had been waving up at him with some hidden meaning. Sora can only blink in confusion as he cranes his neck out further from the safe confinement of his bedroom, both hands on the windowsill, squinting through the downpour in an attempt to comprehend the distorted motions he can see being made by his friend.
Something whizzes through the air and strikes dangerously close to his head with a loud pop against the side of the house, and Sora lets out a startled yelp as he yanks himself out of the open window, seeking the safety of the wall next to his bed. Seconds later a clap of thunder reverberates from the direction of the earlier lightning, for once not pummeling the air directly over his house, and Sora watches in surprise as Riku charges towards the structure at a full sprint, the echoing rumble neatly masking the thump of rubber soles connecting with the wood siding. Sora uses one hand to push the window open the rest of the way and the other to grab hold of one rain drenched arm as Riku clears the second story window, the older boy’s hands grabbing for purchase on either side of the wet frame and knees connecting with a painful sounding smack against the narrow sill.
“Are you too good for the rose trellis now?” Sora asks with a grunt as he hauls his friend into the room, not willing to admit aloud that the sight of Riku running vertically up the side of his house had actually been pretty cool. It doesn’t excuse him for not using the rose trellis next to Sora's window that he’d been perfectly happy to scale during every other nightly visit for as long as they’d known each other.
“Too heavy, actually,” Riku corrects him, sounding only slightly winded, and drags himself through the rectangular opening that’s probably a bit smaller than he remembers. When he gets a foot and then a leg over the sill he propels himself the rest of the way in, forcing Sora to release him as his knee bounces atop Sora’s bed with a harsh creak of springs before he lands with both feet on the bedroom floor.
Sora shrugs away the admirable show of dexterity in favor of shutting the window after his friend, carefully bringing it down the last few inches so that the wood frame and windowsill are spared from making any noise that might attract the other sleeping members of the household. He secures the latches with a two solid snaps and turns to find Riku stripping down in the middle of his bedroom, wet jacket already discarded at his feet and pants following with a wet slap of material as he shakes the leg free from around his ankle. He’s wearing nothing but a t-shirt and what look to be very loose pajama pants underneath, the shade some indistinguishable deep color with a pattern he can’t make out well in the darkness.
Sora turns to sit crosslegged on his bed atop the blankets and clasps his bare ankles with both hands. “You almost hit me, you know,” he says, scowling.
Riku gives the wet pile on the floor a dismissive poke with his bare toes and shrugs. “I tried to tell you to move out of the way. You didn’t do it, so I did the next best thing.”
“By nearly nailing me in the head with… what were you throwing anyway?” Sora rubs the side of his head, raking fingers through the damp strands, and grimaces upon realizing that the shoulders of his pajamas are soaked from the rain.
Riku turns to face him as he shakes out his hair, and Sora frowns as he feels a few stray drops nail him in the face. “Just some palm nuts I picked up on the way over.”
“In the middle of a thunder storm? What the hell were you doing out in the middle of the night?” Sora asks, undoing the top button on his pajamas to tug the shirt over his head. He balls up the damp fabric and uses the dry bottom half to wipe his face and the ends of his hair.
Riku joins him on the bed, the mattress dipping sharply under the added weight. “Coming over here,” he replies.
“At… whatever insanely early hour of the morning it is right now?” Sora pushes himself off the bed and tosses the shirt in his hands atop the already wet pile in the middle of his floor before stepping over to the bureau across the room. He hears the mattress creak and spring a bit as Riku shifts on the bed while he searches the top drawer for a new shirt to wear, frowning as his hunt turns up far more tops suitable for the thirteen year old frame he doesn’t have anymore. The shirt he’d been wearing before had been one of the few, if only, that had been large on him before and thus a perfect size to be worn now. His mother still hasn't taken him shopping and he's running out of clothes that don't pinch in weird places.
“We haven’t seen each other in awhile,” Riku explains as Sora finally locates a tank top he remembers always being a little loose around the middle.
Sora turns around as he pulls his arms and head through the shirt and finds Riku at the foot of his bed, back against the wall beside the window and one knee bent beneath the arm he has resting on it. “Well… yeah,” Sora admits, pulling at the midsection of his shirt, which is still a little tighter than he’d been hoping. “But aren’t you kind of breaking a few rules by being over here? Kairi said you’d been grounded for life.”
Riku snorts as Sora makes his way back to the bed. “I didn’t risk my life to save the universe just so I could come home and be grounded.”
Sora climbs atop the mattress and grins as he settles back into a crosslegged position. “It was kind of inevitable, don’t you think? Leaving without a word in the middle of the night and all that.”
“It shouldn’t matter,” Riku says, head leaning against the wall and throat bared by the hair falling behind his shoulder. “And I don’t like being cooped up.”
“It’s not forever,” Sora reasons. “They’re just being parents. And it’s kind of nice, sometimes. It means I get to spend more time with my mom. They’re doing it because they love us.”
Riku sighs. “I know. But it keeps reminding me why I wanted to leave in the first place.”
“Going to run off to see other worlds again?” Sora teases with a smile, and Riku turns his head to regard him with a small smile just barely visible in the dim light.
“Maybe. Maybe find a few without heartless for once.”
Sora pouts in mock seriousness. “Not planning a trip without me, I hope?”
“Course not,” Riku says, shifting onto his side and moving up the bed to lie lengthwise on his back, putting himself between the wall and Sora’s leg. “Someone’s gotta fly the gummi ship to get us here.”
“And save your ass when you get into trouble,” Sora adds, mimicking Riku by sliding his legs down the bed and lying down on his back, head sharing the other half of the pillow. The position proves slightly problematic however as both realize that they take up quite a bit more space than they used to, and each spend a moment shifting awkwardly until Sora has his right shoulder nearly hanging off the edge of the bed and Riku turned so his back is against the wall, knees pulled up and touching Sora’s legs, leaving only a narrow gap of mattress between them.
“Don’t you mean the other way around?” Riku asks, the smile evident in his voice even though Sora can’t see it. “And since when did your bed get so tiny?”
“Don’t mock my bed for your insane growth spurt.”
“I’m serious, how can you sleep on this thing?”
Sora sighs, blowing a few wayward bangs further up his forehead. “They’re going to buy me a new mattress this week. Things have been kind of busy.”
“Like what?” Riku asks. He lets out a brief, amused snort when Sora swivels his head to the side to regard his friend. “Indulge me. I haven’t seen you in a week.”
Sora settles back against the pillow, folding his arms across his chest. “Lots of lectures, lots of crying, it’s been almost half and half. I think my mom’s taking it the hardest, like I went and stole two years of my life she never got to see. She knows I need new clothes and a new bed but every time I bring it up she looks like she wants to burst out crying again. I figure if I wear the same few pieces of clothing enough times she’ll get the idea.”
“I’m sorry,” Riku says sincerely. “Probably not how you expected, huh?”
“It’s home,” Sora says, as if that were explanation enough. “I think I would have felt even worse if I’d never come back at all. What about you?”
Sora turns his head with the question, hearing the force of the rain hitting the window pick up slightly in volume in the silence. Riku has one arm up on the pillow and his head propped against it, elevating him slightly and hiding his expression behind the curtain of silver hair falling across his cheek and neck. Sora’s actually surprised it hasn’t all been hacked away yet - Riku’s mother never struck him as the type to tolerate long hair on a boy, and Riku had already been pushing the line when they were younger.
“It could be worse, I guess,” Riku finally says, his voice low. “Probably mostly the same as your family, except I’ve got a brother and sister to deal with. Everyone came home and spent a few days yelling at me and wanting to hear the story again when they didn’t believe it after the first five times. You know my brother’s in college now?”
“Yeah?” Sora asks, more surprised than he probably should be. Riku’s brother had been a third year when everything started, which makes sense that he would have graduated and gone to college in their absence. Riku’s sister was a year above them, which meant she was probably a second or a third year by now. “Everything’s really changed.”
Riku shrugs, his left shoulder lifting in silent agreement. “In some ways, I guess. It’s still boring as hell here.”
Sora grins and hugs himself a little before releasing his arms and reaching towards the ceiling, fingertips stretching out to the faded glow-in-the-dark stars that had dimmed hours earlier. “Think we’ll ever get to go visit other worlds again?”
“Yes,” Riku answers immediately and with such sudden conviction that Sora drops his hands and turns to look at his friend again.
“Riku?”
“I’m not staying here forever,” Riku says quietly. “Maybe finish school to make everyone happy, but… I can’t stay.”
“Riku…”
Sora frowns, though most of him understands where his friend is coming from, aware that the motivations which initially inspired their journey haven’t faded in the slightest -- only been briefly overshadowed by bigger and more pressing matters. Sora understands because he feels the same way, feels the call of the stars and the worlds they represent and the people and friends he’s left behind, and the desire to see them all again weighs just as strongly in his heart as his need was to find Riku and his home. But where Sora’s motivations are fueled by the bonds he’s created and wants to keep strong, he knows that Riku’s reasons have always centered around the desire to break free, to loosen the bonds that he feels keeps him trapped on the islands. It’s always pained him a little inside to know this, that his friend views his family as shackles rather than the roots he’ll always be able to return to, but that hasn’t stopped Sora from hoping that one day his friend will change his perceptions for the better. Running away for good isn’t the answer, but time away just might be what Riku needs to appreciate the things he has at home better than he does now, and this is something Sora is sure of.
Riku reaches over with the hand that had been resting on his waist and knocks Sora, once, on the middle of his forehead with a knuckle. “Don’t brood so hard, your face will stick that way.”
Sora scowls and rubs the center of his forehead out of reflex. “I’m not brooding, just thinking.”
A distant crackle and boom of thunder fills the brief silence, and Sora realizes that the wind has ceased slamming sheets of rain against his bedroom window, the torrent diminished to a steady downpour that sounds more like comfortable white noise than an approaching hurricane. Either way there's no chance that Riku is going home, and Sora can hazard a good guess that his friend hadn’t planned on returning from the beginning anyway. It’ll be hell explaining things in the morning unless Riku can pull another fancy trick and get himself out of the house before anyone notices, but Sora has a feeling they’ll find a way to deal with it when the time comes. They’ve gotten out of trickier situations together before.
“I was pretty selfish last time,” Riku states quietly, as if this were his conclusion after a long moment of inner thought.
“What do you mean?” Sora asks, blinking into the darkness while looking at his friend.
“Getting you roped into my ideas about leaving the island, finding other worlds to explore. You only went along with it because I was so adamant about it and didn’t want to get left behind, and then you dragged Kairi along too, all because I was making up lame excuses to run away from home and didn’t want to go by myself.”
Sora shifts on the bed, rolling onto his side so he can face Riku, their knees and shins bumping together but neither withdrawing for lack of space on the narrow bed. Sora crosses his arms and gives Riku’s shadowed face the attention he knows the other boy needs unconditionally right now. “I’ll admit it was like that at first,” Sora begins carefully. “But your dream still became my dream after awhile. Just because you came up with it first doesn’t mean that I didn’t believe in it too.”
“And what if I’d suddenly decided to stay on the islands instead?” Riku asks, his tone challenging but quiet.
“Then I would have stayed on the islands,” Sora answers easily. “What would be the point of sailing off to an unknown world without my best friend?” Sora grins and finally catches a glimpse of an answering smile on Riku’s face.
“You’re such an idiot, Sora.”
“Well I did learn from the best,” Sora retorts, sniggering, which earns him retribution in the form of a finger poking rather painfully against his ribs. “Ow!”
“Shh. Don’t need to wake up your parents, do we?”
“Well you shouldn’t be stabbing people in the dark,” Sora snaps back, lowering his crossed arms so they lay a little more protectively around his middle.
“Gotta be prepared for anything,” Riku advises, and Sora rolls his eyes openly at the pretense of superiority in his friend’s voice.
“Prepared my butt, that was cheating. Just wait till we get out of this solitary confinement, I’ll kick your ass good on the beach.”
Riku lets out a soft chuckle. “Powerful words, Sora. Are you sure you can back them up?”
Sora’s competitive instincts are rising fast enough that he knows he’s only a few seconds away from grabbing the pillow out from under their heads and pummeling Riku thoroughly, so he takes a deep breath and tightens his crossed arms to prevent the impulse from being acted upon. “Just wait and see,” he says instead.
To his relief Riku drops the matter, from rival to best friend in the blink of an eye. “It’ll probably be a year before I even see the beach again,” he says with a sigh.
“How long did they ground you for?” Sora asks, suddenly worried that Kairi’s declaration of ‘forever’ hadn’t been jesting at all like he’d originally assumed.
“I don’t know,” Riku says glumly, and he shifts a little to tuck his head deeper into the crook of his arm on the pillow. “There’s no set time limit on it right now, just however long my dad feels likes. I’ll probably be going straight between home and school for awhile.”
Sora scrunches up his face at the news, a part of him railing against the heavy-handed punishment even while another wants to understand the reasoning behind their parents taking this so seriously. “Man, that sucks. But at least we’ll still see each other at school, right?”
Riku snorts. “Right, school. I think I’d rather stay home.”
“What’s wrong with school?” Sora demands. He might share the common opinion among teenagers that school is the last place on earth he'd like to be, but even he’s willing to admit that the higher education is probably for the best, even if it is a pain in the ass to get through.
“Sora, do you really think after everything we’ve been through we can just go to school and pretend like nothing’s happened? What are they going to teach us that we don’t already know?”
“Algebra?” Sora suggests. He smiles when Riku lets out a soft snort, the tension between them dissolving. “I think I’d take school over the heartless any day.”
“I suppose a crotchety old teacher is better than Maleficent,” Riku concedes with a good humored sigh, his warm breath traveling the short distance between them to land on Sora’s face.
“Yeah, I bet I could do better than having someone like Donald trying to teach me magic.”
“You two sure fought a lot at first. How’d that work out?”
Sora shrugs slightly. “I paid attention to the basics, watched how it was done, and experimented a lot. Eventually I stopped burning or freezing parts of my body and then figured out how to aim. Even Merlin was impressed!”
Riku laughs quietly. “Somehow I don’t think they’d let that pass in chemistry.”
“We have to take chemistry?” Sora asks with a groan, rolling over onto his stomach to push his face into the pillow next to Riku’s elbow. The pitch darkness under his nose and the sound of the falling again on the roof and against his window reminds Sora that it’s still the middle of the night and that tomorrow will still be another day when he’s still grounded and Riku will be sent home to face whatever punishment will come for sneaking out of the house in the dead of night, and in the middle of a violent thunderstorm no less. At the moment, despite what attempts at acceptance he’s been struggling to swallow over the past week, all of it suddenly seems incredibly unfair for two returning heroes. Being teenagers doesn’t change the fact that they’ve been to other worlds, fought thousands of enemies, been put into service by the King who rules all of said worlds, and in Sora’s case, gained the respect and friendship of countless individuals who he’d been fortunate enough to meet on his journeys. There’s more out there than just the four walls of his house and the halls of school he’ll inevitably become confined inside again, and at the moment Riku’s constant determination to get away doesn’t sound quite so unappealing to Sora.
“Let’s run away,” Riku says with quiet, sudden conviction, breaking Sora out of his thoughts and sending him up on his elbows to look at his friend in disbelief, who seems to have suddenly developed the ability to read minds as well as scale vertical walls.
“Riku… we can’t,” Sora protests, wishing his weak voice sounded more convincing. “Our parents would kill us.”
“Then we won’t come back this time.”
“Riku…” Sora shakes his head, struggling to find that voice of reason because a part of him had actually jumped and shouted a ‘YES!’ inside his head at Riku’s suggestion.
Riku sighs and rolls onto his back, his shoulder pressing up against Sora’s forearm and his other arm tucked behind his head, propping him another few inches off the pillow. “Why wait if it’s just going to happen anyway?”
Sora bites his bottom lip, threading the fingers beneath his chest together atop the blanket. “Leaving in the middle of the night again just feels wrong. Plus, you know Kairi would be pissed at being left behind.”
“So take her with us,” Riku suggests, waving a hand in the air over his chest. “She’s from Hollow Bastion, right? Maybe she wants to see it again.”
Sora draws his left arm out from underneath himself and settles his elbow on the pillow, propping his cheek against his fist so he can look down at Riku’s shadowed face. “I asked her about that, actually, when she asked me how Radiant Garden was doing. I don’t think she knew how much of it had been destroyed by the heartless. She was… surprised, I guess. And sad. When I suggested the idea she said she didn’t need to see it. Maybe she’s scared or something, bad memories, you think?”
Riku grunts noncommittally. “Maybe it’s not her home anymore.”
Sora ponders that for a moment, making a soft sound of agreement. “I wonder how everybody’s doing there? The Restoration Community was working really hard to rebuild the place. And Tron too, I hope someone remembered to go talk to him every now and then. He wouldn’t admit it but I bet he gets lonely easily.”
“Tron?” Riku asks curiously.
“Um, uh, this… guy, I guess? He lived inside of a computer.”
“He what?” Riku asks incredulously, turning his head to regard Sora. “You mean like a virtual reality?”
“A what? I mean he was inside the computer, like a part of it. There was this whole world inside that computer in Ansem’s old study, we went to visit a bunch of times and defeated this thing called the MCP that was trying to take over the whole town. It was crazy.”
“People can’t control things from inside computers, Sora,” Riku says blandly and with that tone that he thinks Sora is lying through his teeth.
“I’m not making it up,” Sora argues hotly, using his free hand to punch Riku’s nearest shoulder for good measure. “He called us all users and said he was a… a… security… um… a thing you know, like a lock I guess? He kept asking us for a password. And we could talk to him outside of the computer too once we got rid of the MCP and things went back to normal. How do you know so much about computers anyway, Riku?”
“DiZ… Ansem, had one set up in the mansion. I taught myself a little.”
“Oh yeah,” Sora recalls, memory tossing up the images of the twin sets of screens and a keyboard, one smashed to pieces and one humming with glowing numbers and images. It hadn’t looked at all like the one in Ansem’s study, but the blue light had been the same in both places.
“And I wasn’t lying,” Sora repeats when Riku’s silence reveals his lingering opinion regarding Sora’s tale of a world inside a computer. Sora attempts to throw another punch but gets his wrist captured a breadth away from its destination by Riku’s hand, which keeps Sora’s arm firmly clasped between his fingers as he lowers them to the mattress between them. Sora frowns and draws his wrist free when Riku’s fingers relax their hold, but keeps his hand next to Riku’s, the warmth of his friend’s skin seeping into his own.
Riku doesn’t say anything else and Sora finds himself studying his friend’s face in the dim light, the sharp nose lit in profile and the eyes which he can see are closed behind the fall of silvery bangs over his forehead. Sora has to admit that Riku’s become unexpectedly handsome in the intervening years since they left Destiny Islands, possessing smooth skin and long hair and proportionate features, and eyes that Sora’s always associated with memories of the sea that now hold a mysterious depth and resilience. A trait that probably only Sora knows is there because of the burdens of pain and betrayal his friend has gone through. Riku’s changed so much in such a short amount of time that it scares Sora to think about how much his friend might change again if he let him out of his sight for any extended period of time. He only just got his friend back before they found the door to the islands and since then this is the first time he’s seen Riku in a week, who’s already talking about running off to see other worlds again, and Sora breath catches at how sharply this makes his heart wrench in his chest.
“Riku,” Sora says softly, aware that his friend is only feigning sleep, and feels the fingers next to his hand twitch slightly in response. He hauls in a deep breath before speaking. “Let’s do it.”
Riku’s eyes open and slide over to regard Sora. “Do what?”
“Go, like you said. Let’s go, whenever you want.”
Riku rolls a little toward Sora, his head lifting off the pillow and his expression surprisingly neutral. “Just like that? After how much you just argued against it?”
Sora licks his lips and digs his fingers into the quilted blanket beneath them, his pinkie finger curling around and trapping Riku’s in the process. “You remember what we said, when we were in the darkness?”
Riku nods, some of his hair spilling across his shoulder and onto his chest, eyes watching Sora intently across the narrow expanse between them on the bed.
“I thought we were going to stay there forever and I didn’t mind. I thought, ‘this is okay, everyone’s safe again, we don’t need to move from here’ and I was honestly okay about it. You were there and I hadn’t seen you in ages and it… felt right, you know? Even though it was all dark and the world was dying I wasn’t scared of it anymore, and it wasn’t just because I’d accepted the darkness inside of me like you did, even though that was a part of it, it was because you were there too and I know that you and me, together, we can do anything. We even defeated Xemnas and all his thousands of nobodies and we got out of it alive and I figured that if that was our reward at the end, finally meeting again and being able to just talk in peace and catch up, forever… then that was okay, you know?”
Riku says nothing, the silence unbroken but for the pattering sound of the rainfall which has finally settled into a steady drizzle, all traces of the earlier thunder and lightning long since moved on to other islands or the open water. Sora can’t make out Riku’s face very well, let alone tell if he’s blinking or doing anything beyond breathing, but he does feel the fingers by his hand move imperceptibly against the mattress, and before he can ponder the impulse Sora moves his hand and wraps it around his friend’s, lacing their fingers together. The warmth and strength of the grip is exactly what he needs to continue speaking.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot too since we got back. I’m really glad that door opened for us, I got to see Donald and Goofy and the King again and give Kairi back her charm like I promised, and this is home, it’ll always be home, but… I’ve got friends on other worlds now. The universe is a lot bigger than our islands now, you know?” Sora chuckles quietly at the irony, sliding his hand out from under his cheek and letting his head rest on the soft underside of his forearm instead. “I miss them. I want to know how they’re doing and help them if they’re still having trouble. I can’t stay here forever either, and I hate being grounded just as much as you do, but I don’t want make everyone worry like that again. It would be selfish just to leave without a word… but, if you really meant it, if you’re going to leave… you know I’d go with you.”
“Sora…” Riku says quietly, the low tone masking whatever emotion he’s feeling at the moment. “You know I wouldn’t… I can’t ask you just to leave. I know your family loves you.”
“Would you leave without me?” Sora demands, his fingers crushing Riku’s hand in a tight squeeze that makes the bones pop under the sudden pressure.
“No,” Riku answers immediately, wincing slightly, and then pauses guiltily when Sora’s grip relaxes slightly. He sighs, undecided. “Maybe…”
“Riku!”
“Well you’d be more mad if I wasn’t honest,” Riku argues back.
Sora scowls but then relaxes his expression into a frown. “Thanks,” he replies grudgingly. “So, you’d really leave me?”
Riku rolls onto his back and lets out a deep breath. “I didn’t say… I just meant… okay, if I asked you a million times to go with me and on the millionth and first time you still said no, then yeah I’d go on my own.”
Sora is stunned by the unexpected display of honesty from his friend, and it reminds him of a conversation they had not so long ago on a beach when similar words of sincerity had been spoken between them. Maybe this is a different Riku from his childhood friend, one who doesn’t hide behind a blindfold to cover his eyes from revealing the truth about his emotions. Maybe the darkness changed more than just his powers and his body, maybe it forced Riku to look at himself the same way it did for Sora, to look inside his heart and the darkness that resides there and understand that accepting it, not fearing it, means not having to worry about being overtaken by it. Sora has learned that an enemy is best combated with both eyes wide open, and for the first time he realizes that Riku has also come to understand this too.
Sora scoots a little closer to the body stretched out alongside his and lets his chin bump against Riku’s shoulder. “So when do you want to leave?”
Riku laughs quietly, the bitter edge easily masked but still there underneath. “Let it go, Sora.”
Sora smiles and squeezes the hand still trapped in his fist. “I mean it. Let’s pick a date and plan a trip.”
Riku turns his head to look down at Sora, some of their hair tangling as Riku’s nose stops an inch from his forehead. “A trip?” he asks in confusion.
Sora nods, purposefully digging the point of his chin into Riku’s shoulder, and he grins when Riku tries to shrug him off inflicting any more pain. Sora drops his head onto the pillow, feeling some of Riku’s hair become trapped beneath his face, and he can smell his friend’s shampoo and the scent of the rain and earth he brought in from standing outside in the storm earlier. It’s a little disappointing that Riku doesn’t smell like the familiar papou tree whose branches he dominated so exclusively when they were younger, but as they’ve been trapped indoors all week it isn’t that surprising. Riku’s body is warm and real and the close proximity reminds Sora of countless prior sleepovers, when even arranging blankets and sleeping bags on the floor somehow wound up with Riku in his bed anyway, or vice versa when he slept over at Riku’s house, and it hasn't occured to Sora once to kick him out even with the painful lack of space.
“We’ll take a trip,” Sora explains, speaking quietly and conspiratorially into the ear a short distance from his mouth. “Not right away because we need to wait until we’re not grounded anymore and have to ask for permission, but I bet once they’re over it they’ll let us go if we explain it properly. We’ve got friends worried about us and I’m sure the King will want us to check in now and then, right? We won’t be leaving for good but at least we’ll be able to get away for awhile, check out how things are going, and then someday… I dunno. We’ll deal with after school when it happens.”
Riku absorbs all this in silence, his quiet breathing the only sound Sora can perceive from his spot next to him on the pillow, and Sora finds his thumb unconsciously rubbing the back of Riku’s hand in silent support. “Think you can handle waiting a little?” Sora asks teasingly.
Riku barks out a short, disbelieving laugh, and gives Sora’s hand an answering squeeze with his own. “Since when are you the one planning my life?”
“You know I’m right,” Sora says, settling himself a little closer on the bed so that Riku’s right arm is trapped between his side and Sora’s chest. The close warmth of Riku is relaxing and Sora blinks a few times before closing his eyes, the weight of his eyelids making it easy to keep them shut as he listens to Riku's soft breathing.
“You don’t seriously expect me to wait around until I’m not grounded anymore do you? I still say we should leave now.”
“Riku,” Sora says with a muffled growl, eliciting another soft laugh from his friend.
“Okay, it’s not a bad idea. It might actually work.”
“It will work,” Sora corrects, squirming slightly on the bed. “We’re the keyblade masters after all. We’ve got to make sure the universe stays safe.”
“I suppose there are probably a few heartless still floating around that need to be taken care of.”
“Hundreds,” Sora agrees absently, nodding against Riku’s shoulder.
“Thousands?”
Sora smiles and opens his eyes to watch his friend as he plays along. “Maybe millions?”
“Well what are we waiting for?” Riku asks with good-humored enthusiasm, withdrawing his free arm from behind his head to wave up at the window and the stars still obscured by the rain clouds overhead.
“Sleep first,” Sora replies dismissively, finally giving in to the urge to yawn that’s been creeping up on him slowly for the past several minutes. The brief period of silence that follows gives Sora the chance to yawn once more, and he throws an ankle over Riku's leg as he shifts comfortably against the body next to him.
“You think I should break out in the morning?” Riku asks seriously after a moment, replacing his arm between his head and the pillow.
“It’s your skin,” Sora mutters, unconcerned.
“But they’ll find me in your bed,” Riku points out, voice lowered to match Sora’s sleepy slur.
“I can lock the door,” Sora retorts before succumbing to another yawn. “Ah… ma keyblade master. Like to see them try and get in then.”
Riku chuckles. “So where are we going first after we bust out of here?”
“Hmm,” Sora ponders, struggling to focus on the serious question even though his body is telling him that the time to be awake has long since passed. “Neverland, I miss flying. You were so bent out of shape before you totally missed it, but you gotta try it too.”
“Flying huh?” Riku queries softly. “That sounds like fun.”
“And then to see Tron,” Sora continues, a hint of a sleepy smile in his voice, “so you can see he really does live inside the computer. And I can introduce you to everyone, Leon and Yuffie and Aerith and Cid and Cloud…”
Sora yawns again, lips smacking drowsily. “Be good, Riku. I wanna see everyone…”
Riku laughs softly and Sora feels the side of his friend’s face lean in to press against the top of his head, burying Riku’s mouth and nose into the wild nest of Sora’s hair. “I promise,” Riku says quietly, his voice barely above a whisper but still audible in the warm stillness of the bedroom. “Goodnight, Sora.”
“Night, Riku.”
- - -
A/N: I dunno, Riku always struck me as the baby in the family, a kid struggling to find his own path away from the prior achievements of his brothers and sisters and the expectations of his parents and a mother than probably babied him too much for his boyish sensibilities :D