Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Silence
It’s the silence, Riku decides, that is the worst part. It lingers in the air and settles on his skin like so much dust. It seems, almost paradoxically, to muffle the faint noises that try to break it. The soft whoosh of air in tubes and the soft beep of the machine monitoring his vitals seem to sink away under the sheer weight of the quiet.
He’s not familiar with quarantine protocol, but he supposes that opening a window would defeat the purpose of trying to contain the germs.
The silence emphasizes how little time matters. The seconds drip away under the cover of the hush. He is woken at regular intervals, always the same routine of blood pressure and pulse and temperature. He would curse and shout to break it, the routine or the silence he doesn’t know, but in the end it’s too much trouble.
He almost doesn’t notice when it does break.
It’s the birdsong that breaks it, early one morning; the clear, sweet, brilliant notes forming a cascade just to his left. It seems unreal after the dead silence.
“There.” A nurse, he’s heard her voice before, says. “Fresh air, that has to feel good after all this.” She babbles on but he cannot remember what she says. The warble repeats itself outside just as the needle breaks the skin.
Since the darkness and silence had descended, sensation had ramped up its game, he decides. Because, he swears he can feel each individual drop of blood leaving his veins as the nurse finishes the standard draw. So he focuses on the birdsong. He wishes he could remember what kind it is, if only so he could have a picture to match with the sound. But remembering what species of bird frequent their little island was always Kairi’s specialty; just like it was Sora who could hold whole conversations with the little thrush who would perch outside their elementary school classroom.
The nurse finishes with the blood draw and starts to bustle around the room. His voice cracks slightly as he finally asks the question that he’s been hoarding close to his chest since he was raced to the hospital two weeks ago.
“H-how long until we know if it’s permanent?” He hates the trail off, the lingering hope that permeates the question. It sounds like a little kid. He can feel her sympathetic look and swallows hard. Maybe he’ll see the sun set again, the lap of the waves, the swish of a pink skirt, and the way that the breeze makes spikes out of brown hair.
The pause as he waits for her answer drags on for far longer than he thinks it should.
“I’m sorry,” she finally answers. “But as far as we can tell, it is permanent.”
He swallows again and waits for the door to click shut.
Not much changes after the silence breaks. He has birdsongs to keep him company and the window admits breeze that smells of sea salt and sun that dulls the sharp scent of antiseptic. His parents are allowed in and his mom cries and hugs him.
He can’t help but feel as though there is a wall slowly rising between them.
He wakes the next morning to a trill, different this time. Sweet, but softer, like the bird is scared of being heard. It also comes from somewhere to his right. A few moments later the trill repeats from its usual left direction. The end of his bed shifts and the call is repeated quietly.
“Sora?” He feels the jump through the bed springs.
“Riku!” Sora’s voice, Riku decides, is infinitely preferable to birdsong and silence. He also decides that blindness comes as a distinct disadvantage to the best friend of a boy prone to tackle-hugs.
The warmth is… surprising. He’s hugged his friend before, slung arms over his shoulders and piggy backed him home after long days of chasing one or another of the other kids around the island. He doesn’t remember him being this warm though.
His arms had come up automatically to curve around Sora’s shoulders and he can’t seem to let go. Sora doesn’t seem to care.
It’s been weeks since Riku has been touched for more than the fraction of a second that it took to slip a needle in a vein or to double check the fit of a blood pressure cuff. He’d hugged his parents earlier that day, but they’d seemed to pull back every time they wrapped their arms around him. As though he was fragile and would break if they dared to hold on.
Sora clings, his nose presses into the crook of his neck, and his fingers bury themselves in the thin cloth of Riku’s hospital gown. When he does pull back Riku can feel the gentle rise and fall of his breath against his chest. Then there is a fist in his shoulder.
“Don’t ever do that again.” He’s surprised that Sora doesn’t yell it. He remembers when Kairi broke her arm and Sora shouted at her that she wasn’t supposed to hurt herself. She’d complained about broken ear drums for a week.
“It’s not like I said, ‘oh hey, you know what would be fun? Getting so sick that I end up blind.’” Riku doesn’t even try to keep the bitterness out of his voice. He can feel the pain in his throat trying to choke him.
It’s one thing to know something is a fact. It’s quite another to admit that fact out loud to your best friend.
The touch comes as another warm, jerking shock. Sora’s hand traces, slowly, along the edge of the bandages that crisscross over his eyes. His fingertips feel smooth against Riku’s skin, a delicate distraction from the continuous nagging itch of the bandages.
“I know,” Sora pauses as though he’s trying desperately to think of what to say, then he swallows loudly and mutters. “It’s just not fair.”
It’s on the third day after the silence breaks that Riku realizes exactly how much work this is going to take. He is sitting in bed listening to the doctor talk about rehabilitation, about the things that he used to take for granted that will now be a daily struggle. About beginning to live in the darkness.
Though of course the woman doesn’t phrase it that way.
Sora arrives as soon as visiting hours start.
“Riku!”
The sheer amount of joy in his name makes Riku’s heart constrict in an odd double beat. Sora starts talking before the door is closed, babbling about school and Kairi, who will be joining them soon, and how Tidus is an idiot over some new girl and the fact that there’s supposed to be thunder storms tonight. His voice is alive with the stories that he tells.
Riku tries to fight off the smile that is trying desperately to spread across his face. Somehow the darkness seems a little less all-encompassing when he has Sora’s grin to imagine.
The next morning after nurse Sayoko has checked his vitals and made small talk for a few minutes Riku gets up.
It feels like it deserves to be more dramatic than it is; in reality he simply pushes back the blankets, swings his legs to the left of the bed, and stands on the cool linoleum floor. The breeze from the window tickles his exposed skin. He slowly takes a step forward, and then another.
Three. He counts each pace carefully until he can touch the edge of the window frame. Three steps from the bed to the window.
The map of the room that Riku forms feels more like a schematic than an image. The three steps to the window from the bed, the three steps between the edges of the window and each wall; the door: three steps from the bed.
It’s all very flat and gray in his head as he has no details to fill it with. He has no idea the color of the walls, the print of the curtains, what the view from the window shows. He has no idea where he is in the world.
He sighs, squares his shoulders. There’s nothing that he can do about that now.
The shower is the next major task that he embarks on. The bathroom is small, compact and slightly easier to maneuver in. He can almost always keep a hand on a solid surface to ground himself.
He maps a path from the faucet to shampoo to soap. The warm water feels luxurious on his shoulders.
It’s odd feeling his hands go through the familiar motions of washing his hair without even the banal and boring visual input of the tiles in front of his face to focus on. Instead he finds himself thinking about the beach, and Sora in swim trunks chasing Pluto-the-neighbors-dog into the water to retrieve his stolen practice sword.
It’s a memory from another life almost.
By the time he finishes cleaning up the slight sense of vertigo that has been dogging his steps since he stood up this morning has begun to dissipate. He wonders how long it will take him not to notice anymore.
Sora arrives like clockwork at 8am, the start of visiting hours. He announces his presence by bouncing, Riku can hear the squeak of his sneakers on the linoleum, through the door with a half sung, half cheered ‘Riku!’ He keeps up the constant stream of chatter from that point on.
Riku welcomes it.
He begins to think after almost an hour of constant quiet babble that Sora’s voice can brighten up a room more than the whole visible spectrum of light.
As the days passes he begins to think of voices as colors.At first it’s not even conscious, just a sudden flicker of pink for a particularly bubbly nurse, or a streak of dark mahogany for his father.
Its Sora’s color that he first recognizes consciously. Sora is bright and golden and somewhat like the sun.
After that he starts paying attention. Kairi when she visit’s is a bright gleaming blue like their favorite swimming cove. His mother is a deep mossy green. Nurse Sayoko is a clear, crisp, gray. The night nurse whose name he can never remember is a glossy copper.
He wonders for a while if it’s normal, if his brain which is so used to visual stimuli it’s just trying to give the unused centers of his brain something to work with. In the end he decides that he really doesn’t care. It’s nice having something else to differentiate people by in his head.
By the end of the week Riku can move from bed to shower to chair and back with confidence.
One of the nurses notices that he’s constantly up now, pacing around his room avoiding the obstacles of bed and chairs by memory. She talks to the doctors and he is granted permission to wander. It comes with restrictions and conditions but Riku doesn’t care. The room feels far too much like a cage.
He forces himself to start small, even though his first instinct is to take off running as fast and as far in one direction as he can. He carefully charts his path down the hall way outside his room. His fingers learn the texture of the wall, the height of the plaques outside the rooms, and the sequence of raised bumps that indicate his own room.
Sora finds him making his way back to his room on his last day in the hospital.
“Riku!” the cheery greeting is flung down the hallway at him. He turns in what he hopes is the right direction. He guesses it is when a hand inserts itself into his own.
“Bored with being cooped up inside all day?” Sora says as he starts dragging Riku down the hall. “Come on lets go outside. It’s so pretty today, you would not believe the sky…” Riku lets himself be dragged, grinning as Sora babbles on about the weather.
He’s not sure what the sky looks like but it sure feels nice against his skin.