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Before Sora returns to the house that is his home, Kairi warns him that it will be different from what he remembers. “You have a little sister now,” she says at the end of the last hour they take to themselves on the sunlit shore, just she and he and Riku, before they make the long trek back to Destiny Islands. Kairi says, “She’s about two? And your dad remarried about a month and a half ago.”
“Remarried?” Sora says, alarmed, and shares a glance with Riku, who shrugs in equal bewilderment. “When did my parents get divorced?” Riku’s did two years before they left, and what followed was a custody battle that still hadn’t been resolved by the time the storm came and absorbed them whole.
Kairi reaches over, hesitant, and places a hand on Sora’s knee. Her touch is feather-light. Light-light. “Sora,” she says, and pauses. The late afternoon sunshine catches the highlights in her hair so she glows a tinted red. “Sora,” she says again, and then she says, “Hina died when Kiku was born.”
So Sora walks on home with that knowledge, and knocks on the front door with that knowledge. It’s not late in evening, though the sky is already blue-black and the breeze blowing off the bay cool against his bare arms. Inside, there’s a beat of silence that lasts half a lifetime, then a scurry of footsteps, a click, and open it swings.
“Oh,” says a woman who he recognizes vaguely as Ms Keahi, his elementary school art teacher. “Hell—oh my —”
“Malie,” comes Dad’s voice from deeper in the house, from the direction of the kitchen, “is it the food?”
“Peni—” Miss Keahi doesn’t move her attention from Sora, her dark eyes impossibly wide under her darker bangs. When he was her student, he thought she was oh-so tall, but now they match each other inch by inch, and the sense of how long it’s been slaps him with the force of a lightning bolt.
Bang!
The sound startles him into the air, and when he settles back into his skin and onto the ground, he catches sight of his father past her shoulder, and of the little girl cradled on his hip. Whatever he dropped isn’t visible. Despite the clatter, she isn’t crying, but stares at the doorway with the same intensity as his. Her eyes are brown, like his, unlike Sora’s. Not like Mom’s.
Swallowing hard, Sora says, “Hi,” and adds, “Can I come in?” because already the silence is too deep and expanding by the second.
Wordlessly, Miss Keahi steps aside, and looks to—looks to her husband , who exhales in one long, shaky breath. “Sora,” he says, hoarse, and looks from Sora to his wife and back again. “Sora, is it really you?”
Two weeks ago, give or take some time, Kairi fell into his arms and said, “This is real,” for the second time in thirteen months. Sora nods, shifts his weight from foot to foot, and then nods again. “Yeah,” he says, and almost asks if Dad wants him to prove it. “Hi.”
Miss Keahi moves away as Dad comes forward, and takes the little girl—Kiku—from his arms just before he reaches Sora. “It really is,” he says as he touches Sora’s cheek. Dad’s hand is just as rough as Sora remembers, callused permanently from years as a shipwright down at DI Harbour. “In the name of all that is—you’re really—Sora—”
With only a moment’s warning, he tugs Sora into an embrace so tight it’s suffocating. Even after two and a half years and a growth spurt, Dad’s still a head taller and twice as broad in the shoulders. Uncomfortably, Sora returns the hug. Even if the only stranger here is a toddler, everything feels wrong and bad and out-of-place.
Or, no. Not everything. What’s wrong and bad and out-of-place is him.
“It’s me,” he says as Dad tells him that everyone insisted he was dead and gone and never coming back, his voice watery against his shoulder. “I’m home.”
From the shadowed kitchen doorway, dark eyed Ms Keahi, who’s now Mrs Kalani, and her dark eyed step-daughter watch them. Dad sobs, nearly silent, into his shoulder, and Sora thinks, So this is home.
One night at the tail end of monsoon season, the Storm hit the township of Destiny Islands without warning, and battered at the shores with an unheard of ferocity. When it finally ended a full three days after it started, the death toll was in the dozens and the number of wounded three times that number. Six were counted as missing; in the following weeks, three returned, wandering back from nearby shores, and months after that, a fourth one—the governor's young daughter—finally found her way home.
When one of the shipwrights and the lighthouse keeper's boys didn't return with her, the townsfolk assumed the worst. It wasn't long before the cemetery earned two new graves, and it isn’t long after the two reappear that the news breaks, and the town rumor mill begins to churn.
“I heard the tide carried them all the way to the mainland,” says the Hibiscus Blvd grocer’s wife to the baker’s daughter several hours after her husband spots Sora Kalani leading his little sister to daycare, and the baker's daughter, who witnessed the Deguchi boy buy bread from her father with her own two eyes, answers, “They would be dead , Lei,” and adds that clearly a sailing ship saved them from monsoon-turbulent waters.
This is all well and good, of course, as chatter between bored friends in a small town with little entertainment. The first idle wonder of many—and far from the last.
In the first few days after their miraculous return, the stories vary from realistic to downright outrageous:
“They must have ended up in the same place as Kairi,” say their classmates, as though Kairi herself, the shy, nearly friendless ex-governor’s daughter who kept to herself and her writing, hadn’t spent the last year disappearing on weekends with poorly thought out excuses to explain her absence. “That would explain why none of them remember.” It’s an explanation that is not an explanation, even if it is the one that makes the most sense, and the adults of the town are quick to deconstruct any teenage theory.
“Kidnapping!” says more than one, to which the common reply is “No one can plan a kidnapping around an unplanned storm .”
A second popular explanation, however vague, is a simple “Trauma!” and a third, which perhaps ties to a second, essentially boils down to “An uninhabited island?”
None of these are logical, not precisely, but the rumors take a sharp right turn into il logical when children and some of the more... imaginative adults add their two cents. They range from “Magic?” (stated, as ever, with a question mark and a shrug) to a (nearly accurate) guess from the Mako Deguchi’s youngest neighbor, a girl of six and a three quarters, who says, “The nightmares made the storm and ate ‘em!”
Well, whether it was creatures from the night or pirates or they somehow floated all those many miles to the mainland in turbulent seas, the fact remains that they are here, alive and breathing and walking the streets, and the town must reconfigure around them. Sheriff Akamai, head of DIPD, meets them separately, together, and without and without Kini Hekekia’s daughter, in a fruitless attempt to gain answers; both boys need to visit the local clinic where Dr. Satou, the physician who needs to be there, and a gaggle of nurses, who do not, update their vaccinations and check them over (discovering evidence of healed broken bones and more scars they can’t explain than just the faded two-pronged mark on the younger one’s cheek); more than one business owner in town approaches the Deguchi boy’s parents (individually) with offers to employ their son with easy work until he’s settled; a week and a half in, Principal Nakajima from Middle Island Secondary School knocks on the Kalani door with enrollment paperwork.
Sora’s home when he comes, struggling still in an effort to learn how to be a brother, a son. The boy on the floor is a mysterious thing, working steadily to braid his sister’s hair into messy submission with an intense focus he lacked three years ago. His step-mother (“Please call me Malie,” she said that first night, staring at him in earnest with her dark, dark eyes) lets the principal in while her husband sits on the couch, watching his children as he pretended to read the morning’s paper. When they enter, he looks up, but Sora doesn’t turn his attention away from his sister’s hair until she does as well, saying, “Who are you?”
“Mr Nakajima?” he says, surprised, at the sight of his old maths teacher standing in his living room doorway. The man’s the same as he always was, tall and crow-faced with a wrinkled neck and stomach that sticks out from eating too many chocolates he keeps hidden in his desk’s top drawer.
With an almost smile, he says, “That’s ‘Principal’ now,” and takes a seat in the armchair when Dad sits straight and invites him to make himself comfortable. Malie settles beside Dad, and Sora, who knows that this is, obviously, about him, plants himself on the couch’s final cushion with Kiku squished next to him before any of the adults can tell him to scram.
After a beat of silence, Dad asks, “Is this about the new semester?”
A jolt shocks down Sora’s spine. “The new semester?” he says.
“It’s almost the end of ahi season, Sora,” Malie says. There’s a cringe tucked in the corner of her mouth, fighting to come out, when she glances at him. The midday sun lighting the room through the windows strikes his face just right, so the odd scar on his cheek sticks out starkly, outlines his thinness, and illuminates his eyes the same post-storm blue as his mother’s.
Three years ago, the Sora that the adults remember was a hyperactive, wiry boy on the edge of a growth spurt with a ready cache of grins, messy hair, and unrealistic dreams. Now his hair’s still unruly, but his body all hard angles and tension, and there’s something Not Quite There about his smiles. Kiku may not notice, but the rest do, so when he blinks, the expression only almost childish, and says, “I’m going to school?” the idea of him sitting in a classroom is as off-putting as his cheerfulness.
“You’re going away?” says Kiku, looking from the step-mom she calls Mama to him. “Why?”
“Sora’s not going anywhere,” Dad says, tone sharp. The words catch in Sora’s throat. For a moment, he can’t breathe. Then Dad says, “I don’t mean—Jiro, can we—” He pauses. Glances sideways past his wife and daughter to his son. “Can we talk in private?”
Before the other man can answer, Sora jostles in his seat. “No way,” he says. “I can be here for a talk that’s about me, Dad.”
There’s another brief silence before Malie, with an unavoidable pang in her voice, tells her daughter they need to go weed the fruit garden, and no, sunflower, don’t argue, if you’re very good, you’ll get a biscuit after dinner. She’s unused to being left out of her husband’s affairs, but Kiku doesn’t need to be here on the off chance the discussion turns heated, and Sora, unfortunately, isn’t wrong.
So Malie, ignoring her daughter’s protests, takes the girl by the hand and leads her away.
“The new school year begins in a month,” Principal Nakajima says once the front door clicks shut, casting the living room in a heavy sort of silence. “Sora, the transition will be easiest for you if you re-enroll then.”
When Dad reaches out to touch his shoulder, Sora has to stop himself skittering away. “Yeah,” he says, and leaves it there. He should smile, claim sure, that’s easy, but he just. Can’t.
“A month isn’t enough time,” Dad says, and lowers his hand when he feels how taunt Sora’s muscles are beneath his fingers. “Not enough to catch up on three years.”
“What?” Sora turns his attention from the principal to his dad with a jerk, then manages that smile. “Hey,” he says, a note too cheerful, “I’ll be fine, Dad.”
At fourteen, he hadn’t known much about Islands law, and after three chaotic years, he forgot most of what he learned in favor of memorizing inter-Kingdom legislation, but he does remember something about students needing to be students until they’re eighteen. With a late birthday like his, this means he’ll be stuck in school until the start of the next ahi season.
“Sora,” his dad says, shifting in his seat, “that’s maths, the sciences, language, history, sailing—Jiro, could he be held—”
“Held back?” Sora says, again, before Principal Nakajima can speak. Interrupting adults is rude, but Sora’s never been the politest. “Dad, I’ll be fine, I promise. Kairi can help, and—”
“Miss Hekekia received extra help after school when she returned,” Principal Nakajima says, “and was tested to re-enter her graduation year. She also didn’t miss nearly as much. This was a possibility I planned to discuss already.”
“Then I’ll study,” Sora says. “I’ll study really, really hard. I promise. I can take the test the day before the year starts or some—”
Again, Dad reaches for him. This time, Sora doesn’t refrain from flinching. The ensuing pause falls syrupy thick, tense and awkward. Eventually, Dad says, “Three weeks for three years of five core subjects? Even two will be a struggle.”
“I can do it, Dad. Really.”
He’s gone a moonshine white, his face a ghostly pale too like his mother’s in the days leading to her death. The panic’s bewildering, but his father can’t fathom where it’s coming from, and the principal, who’s had to warn children about this very thing more than once, can’t make heads or tails of it. What neither realize is that being in a year other than Kairi’s, even if the school is the same, is terrifying.
Sora swallows hard. “I can do it,” he repeats. “Just give me til the last day, please.”
“I can bring around school books,” Principal Nakajima says, conceding, though reluctantly. “The test will be difficult. Your father is right.”
Sora grins again, because he doesn’t know what to do, and says they shouldn’t worry. Unconvinced, his dad also surrenders, and Principal Nakajima leaves the enrollment papers on the coffee table before excusing himself. They both walk him to the door, father and son. There’s not much about them that’s alike; the hair color is the same, and their smiles similar enough, but Sora’s always been much more of his mother’s child than his father’s with a hint of something that comes from neither.
After the man leaves, the two stand on the porch, looking at each other but also not. You don’t need to do everything all at once, Sora, his father wants to say. You’re allowed to take it slow before growing up.
It’s what he wants to say, but doesn’t, because the boy in front of him is a boy but also not, and a part of him—just a small part, really—thinks it might not be so bad that his mother isn’t here to witness such a drastic change.
Sora does not know secondary-level history. He does not know higher secondary-level literature, Islands, mainland, or international. That’s inevitable. It’s a fact.
But he is still not, strictly speaking, behind.
On the day before the start of school, he takes a four hour test in a little over half the time in a lonely classroom with a view of the papaya grove. Principal Nakajima watches him with crowish eyes, barely blinking, until Sora gives him the completed packet. Though it takes another hour, the principal grades it right there while he waits, and when he’s done, says, “This is very impressive, Sora. Give Miss Hekekia my compliments.”
“Thanks,” Sora says, and, “Of course,” because what the residents of Destiny Islands don’t know is this: He’s not smart in the school sense, maybe—not like Riku or Kairi—but he’s good at surviving, and that meant more than swinging a sword.
He learned how to sail a dozen worlds away under a pirate’s tutelage instead of his father’s, singing foreign sea shanties as he zipped between islands and using foreign stars to navigate. He learned how to caulk in every sense of the word; he learned how to careen using palm trees rather than a drydock; he learned to cook what he caught. Out on the open sea, he learned how to fire cannon and board another captain’s ship.
Back in the Islands, only half of that is useful.
Down in the way, way depths of a place called the Baltic Sea, he had to learn about maritime ecosystems and biology because, well, he was a fish, and far above that, on the deck of the gummi ship, he never exactly mastered how to use a computer, but astronomy, engineering, and the maths that came with them were basic necessities for navigation. They weren’t alone up there in the passage between worlds. The ship got hit. It needed repairs. Knowing how to do it himself was just common sense in a crew of three and a cricket.
Human biology and chemistry are needed for magic. He had to learn at least the basics of physics before he could glide. Almost every world spoke multiple different languages, and though Donald used translation spells, they weren’t perfect. Days and days and days spent on board the ship meant days and days and days of sheer boredom—picking up books became inevitable. For the first time ever, he started to like reading.
But none of those were books from his world. Nothing ever taught him his own history.
Dad ruffles his hair and says he’s proud when he sees the test results. Neither Riku nor Kairi are surprised, but he still brings half a dozen guava cupcakes from the bakery he’s found a temporary job in for them to share. She texts their friends on her gummiphone with a joking “ can you believe it??? ” and the replies keep coming through long after dark.
It’s midway through the last week of ahi season when his alarm dings at dawn, and Sora opens his eyes to shafts of pale sun sneaking through his shades and the sea air breeze sweeping under his cracked open window. For a moment, he lies there, exhausted, not wanting to move, until it’s time to force himself to face the day.
Once, when Sora and Kairi were twelve and Riku thirteen, their mothers packed a rucksack each, and the six of them went out to Lehua, the furthest of the islands known for its ohia fields. “It’ll be fun,” Suzu Deguchi told her son while they waited at Ferry Terminal #6 for the Kalanis and the Hekekias. “Maybe that ice cream parlour will still be there.”
It was midsummer, the humidity dense as soup and the still air so hot it could melt their skin from their bones. When Suzu smiled, the expression was watery. She thought her son didn’t notice, as if he hadn’t seen at least three fights a week at home in the last month already.
Still, Riku, who was polite to a fault back then, said nothing.
They spent four nights and five days at the edge of the mangroves, half-hidden by a rocky cove. Sora carved their initials into a palm— SK RD KH —and Riku used that same pocket knife he wasn’t supposed to have to stab through the coconut deep enough for them all to drink. Fireflies dotted the evening dim, and for dinner, Nani made poi and Hina and Suzu steamed rice and marlin. While they cooked, they talked, watching their children run along the surf and shout words only half intelligible on the breeze.
“Don’t worry about him, Su,” said Hina to her friend, who fretted more often than not about how her son would handle the divorce when her soon-to-be-ex-husband was already threatening to sue for custody. “He has Sora, and he has Kairi. If things start getting bad at home, you can always send him to our place for a night or two.”
“Or ours,” said Nani as she added more water to thin her poi. “Just try to focus on sorting things out with Mako for now, all right?”
Frowning, Suzu said, “He just doesn’t seem himself lately.” He, of course, meaning Riku. Outside the window, beyond the Hekekia’s vacation villa’s elaborate flower garden, her son intercepted Sora’s frisbee before Kairi could catch it. His grin, careless and wide, was the first she’d seen in a long time. The first any of them had seen.
No one said this.
Instead, Hina, frowning suddenly as well with her brow furrowing, starts, “Have you—no. Nevermind.” When they pushed, she sighed, and continued, “Have you noticed anything off about Sora?”
From the beach, Sora’s voice floated above his friends, above the winds, calling a foal. He was the same as always, all untamed hair and ungainly limbs. Beside him, Kairi was just as awkward, in the early stages of puberty with uncertain knees and a body beginning to grow into womanhood. Riku, in comparison to his friends’ hyperactivity and short attention spans, appeared the most stable, or would, if only he smiled more.
Nani, who always found her adoptive daughter more familiar than strange despite their lack of blood relation, followed the other women’s gazes to their children. Her daughter tumbled forward over driftwood, but turned the graceless fall into a graceful roll, coming right up onto her feet with her arms raised. Ta-da!
“What do you mean?” she asked. She saw the boys less than the other women saw her daughter; she worked as a secretary in her husband’s office while Suzu taught tenth years for the same hours that her son was in school and Hina ran a dance school out of a makeshift studio behind the house.
Still frowning, Sora’s mother answered, “I don’t know how to explain it. There are moments when he just doesn’t seem. I don’t know. Himself?” Older, maybe, she didn’t say. When he knew things he shouldn’t know, or moved in a way that left her unnerved.
“It’s just puberty,” said Suzu in an identically reassuring tone. “You shouldn’t worry about it too much.”
“I guess not,” Hina said, doubtful, and left it at that.
Four years and a handful of weeks later, Nani tells Suzu, “Hina was right.”
It’s just at the end of ahi season, at the start of the starfruit harvest, and the two women are alone on Suzu’s seafront porch, not-watching-but-watching their children and Sora, who sit on the sand while he and Kairi do their schoolwork and Riku helps her with algebra II. In the sunlight, her hair is almost copper-coloured and, somehow, the shadow Sora casts looks like it should belong to someone other than him. Riku, taller and broader than them both, appears much more than one year their senior with the way the sunlight shades his hollowed cheeks.
Suzu glances away from them as Nani, with faked nonchalance, pours them each a glass of fresh pineapple juice. “They’ve been through a lot,” she says, which is true, but still sounds too much like a thin excuse.
Down by the water, Riku points to Kairi’s text book. Sora leans over, his knee and head knocking hers, but neither move away. When they were younger, Hina declared the two would be married one day.
“It’s a shame,” Nani says, not for the first time, as the two look up at Riku, their expressions hidden in the sun’s glare, “that she couldn’t have been here to see them come back.”
There’s no real answer to that, not one that Suzu hasn’t already given, so she keeps her thoughts to herself and watches the strange not-children down by the water. Riku rocks back on his heels, moving away, as the sun moves behind a cloud and reveals Kairi’s lackadaisical smile that grows at a glacial pace when Sora reaches for a strawberry slice on the fruit spread Suzu made them. The sun drips over them, golden in its afternoon brilliance, and despite Kairi’s expression, none of them hold that easy happiness even Riku carried when they were young.
On the eve of the equinox, on the same day Sora overhears Malie tell his dad, “I think he’s depressed,” Roxas and Namine visit.
“How have you been?” he asks as Sora rows them out to the little island, where Kairi and Riku will join them. If Dad knew he was out on the water, he’d be dead; there’s a storm building out on the open sea, its swollen clouds a roving mass moving across the horizon. “Everything you guys imagined?”
The air’s already charged, with the promised lightning prickling over Sora’s skin. With a grin, he says, “Nah, better,” and glances over his shoulder to locate the cove, as if he couldn’t find it blind. He sits in the canoe’s centre, with Roxas to his front and Namine to his back. She’s twisted when he turns, craning forward for a better view of the island emerging from the fog. With her hair tugged up in a bun, practically white in the pre-storm sunlight, and her ordinary pink dress, she looks more real than Sora remembers.
So does Roxas. They’re more solid, somehow. Their clothes are a little rumpled from the travel and their expressions come easier. It’s a side effect of having their own hearts, of being their own person.
Better , Sora said, but really, these days, without the heaviness on his conscience of Roxas and the others—a weight he didn’t even know was there— he doesn’t feel like much of his own person at all.
This he keeps to himself. Let Malie think he’s depressed if she wants. He’s not. It’s just that he’s one fourth of what he used to be, and doesn’t know who he is alone.
“You grew up here?” Namine says, without turning around. The wind coming off the waves nearly swallow her voice. “It’s so pretty. Roxas, do you think we have enough time for me to draw it?”
“That depends on the storm, right, Sora?”
“You’ve got like an hour.”
Ten minutes later, they reach the cove. First, Sora sees Kairi’s canoe—bright blue, with La Princesse embossed along the side in lopping gold script, the French impossible for anyone here to understand—and next, her and Riku. They sit side by side on a lichen-encrusted boulder a little ways up from the highest point that the tide will reach, her legs pulled to her chest and his dangling. Like Sora, and unlike their guests, they’re both in bathing suits.
Kairi leaps off first when Sora beaches his own unadorned canoe, her feet spraying sand up behind her as Riku jogs for behind, a rucksack slung over his back. “You finally came!” she says, beaming, and drapes herself across Namine, who laughs, and returns the embrace.
“We were starting to think you guys were just stringing us along,” Riku says, but good-naturedly, while Sora ties his canoe to a post the three of them knocked into the sand as children. Kairi moves on to Roxas, freeing Namine for Riku, who graces her with an awkward, one-armed hug. “What took you so long?”
“There’s a lot going on,” Roxas answers, and adds quickly, “Not heartless stuff. Whatever Sora did—” He stops, throwing a look in Sora’s direction, and cringes. People just learning what emotions are can’t hide them very well, except maybe Axel. “Heartless aren’t really a problem anymore, you know? But me and Namine and Axel are trying to find somewhere to go where people will just accept us without asking a lot of questions. Ven offered, but it’s weird.”
Sora understands weird , but keeps that to himself, and says instead, “I’d say you could stay here, but people would definitely ask questions. And they’d make you go to school.”
“School?” Namine repeats. When Sora, Riku, and Kairi start the trek to higher land, their guests follow without question. “We’ve heard about a school. Isn’t it for children?”
Surprisingly sullen, Kairi says, “Yeah,” before brightening again. “You should’ve seen our chem teacher’s face when he realised Sora knows how to figure out the enthalpy of a chemical reaction.”
“Chip taught me,” Sora says, a little defensive. “I was the best person with tools if the reactor got hit.”
“That’s really not surprising,” says Roxas, because he knows about the size of chipmunks, and that sometimes, it seems like everyone else’s thumbs on that ship were just for show. “How long do you have to go?”
As Riku starts up the short, winding path away from the cove, he says, “Just until we’re eighteen, legally. We can go for longer if we want. There was no point for trying since I missed everything, so I’m just working.”
“What do you do?” Namine says, so, almost sheepishly, Riku admits that he works in a bakery, and that he might not hate it as much as he thought.
Roxas falls into step with Sora when they reach the main part of the island, where he walks a little behind the others. Kairi and Riku bracket Namine, the girls chattering about Namine’s forming interest in comparative cross-world artistic movements while he listens, contributing only a little. When Sora slows, resigning himself to the inevitable talk, Roxas asks, “Everything okay?”
That’s a dumb question, but Sora isn’t ready to tell the guy who’s just learning what it’s like to be a person that losing part of yourself is almost as bad as dying. He should know; he has experience with both. “Everything’s great,” he lies. “Waking up at sunrise literally every day for school though? It’s like not even sleeping. And then school’s just boring.”
“I think I remember school,” Roxas says. Familiar uncertainty flickers across his face, so his eyebrows draw towards each other. It’s familiar because his face is almost identical to Sora’s own. “Wasn’t maths the worst thing ever?”
“It still is,” Sora says, and scrunches his nose. “Algebra is really easy, but no one’s going to convince that the teacher isn’t a legit harpy.”
“That bad?”
“She assigns forty-two questions every single night.”
“Oh, gross,” Roxas says with a laugh that catches Kairi’s attention.
"Do you want to go swimming?" she says, then motions to the rucksack on Riku's shoulder. "Riku brought you an extra suit, Roxas, because we figured Sora would forget."
It's not so much that Sora forgot as he only has one these days, and guessed his friends would do this. Still, his cheeks heat. "It wasn't on purpose," he says, even if it was.
"Are you going swimming?" Roxas says, directing the question to Namine, who shakes her head.
"I want to draw," she says. "I've only seen places like this in Kairi's memories. It's so much more beautiful than I imagined."
When the three of them were younger, they all would have protested that their friends didn't need to be so nice about it, that the Islands were boring. But now, after all they've been through and everything they've seen, sometimes the beauty of this place is enough to knock the air from Sora's lungs. He knows the others feel the same way, though they've never talked about it. Between the sky so saturated with colour, the clear, glass-green sea, white sands, and kaleidoscope of houses—well, for the first time, the tourists make sense.
What doesn't make sense is how Sora became Roxas' mirror image, not yearning for a home but restless to run.
"I'll stay with Namine," Roxas says, so when they reach the opposite shore, the one tucked the shadow of the palm grove, they separate. Riku is the only one who seems torn, the result of a holdover from almost forgotten conventions of friendship.
But Sora and Roxas, and Kairi and Namine, aren't really friends. It's hard to label exactly what they are, but no matter how rare their visits to each other are, there's no pressure to spend every minute together.
"My mom's trying to convince me to go to counseling," Riku says the moment they're all past the shallows, bobbing along with the deceptively calm waves. "What kind of bullshit is that? I heard her trying to talk to my dad about it. I don't know what he said but she flipped. Now she won't stop insisting that I need to go because I'm not 'acting like myself.'" He makes speech marks with his fingers when he says the last bit, and scowls in a way that's perfectly reminiscent of his childhood self.
"My parents made me go when I first got back," Kairi says, then raises her voice half an octave, the way she always does to imitate her mother. "'She's the best on the island, sweetheart. You'll love her in no time.' Mrs Yukirou was nice but it was useless. It's not like I needed her."
Sora rolls with a waves, up-down. "I think my stepmom is trying to talk Dad into making me go," he says. "Who knows, maybe they'll make us all do group sessions or something."
"Hey, I'm eighteen," Riku says. "No one can force me to see someone."
With an almost laugh, Kairi says, "When has your mom ever not been the most convincing person in existence?"
From the direction of the beach comes the sound of Namine's laugh, crisp and intangible. It breaks the conversation. Sora breathes in deep and drops down into the water, holding in the air. The sun isn't visible above him, but the light cascades around him in waving shafts. Riku and Kairi's legs kick up bubbles, and all around him, the current moves.
He thinks about the simple joy of never having to fear drowning, and resolutely does not think of the one kiss he shared with Ariel on the sand, when they both had legs and she was voiceless with tears streaking her cheeks. That was Sora's first kiss. He still hasn't kissed Kairi, even if the thought of it nags at him.
When he breaks the surface, Kairi is saying, "Because cupcakes are way better than actual cake."
"You're not wrong," Sora says as Riku protests, indignant, "but what?"
"Kairi wants lemon cupcakes for her birthday," his friend answers, tone implying that this is shameful. "That's not normal."
Out at sea, the storm clouds have crept closer, their darkness blanketing half the sky. A cold contrary to the weather worms its way past Sora's skin, to all the empty places waiting to be filled. "Guys," he starts, but stops when he realises his friends noticed them too.
"We have ten more minutes," Riku says, to his dismay. "Then we should start heading back."
That might be cutting it close, especially given the walk to cove, then the trip to shore, but Sora follows his gaze to Namine and Roxas, who sit oblivious on the beach. She keeps looking from the cliffs to her sketch pad, adding lines or shading with the side of her pencil, while he does most of the talking. They look like normal teenagers plucked right from the school cafeteria. Though Sora's a teenager himself, he suddenly feels so old that even his bones ache, and can tell the others feel the same. The gathering clouds doesn't help. Ever since he returned, storms have just forced him into irrational bouts of panic.
"Do you think they really like each other, or?" Kairi says, speaking quietly and mostly to Sora, but doesn't finish what she meant, either. Or is just because of us .
"They're their own people," Riku says, more directly than Sora is willing, "so if they do, probably not. I thought your running theory was that he had a thing for Lea, Kairi."
"I don't know anymore." She frowns. "Maybe it's neither. He just gives off that vibe with both of them. And so do they. With him."
"Didn't he have an actual thing with that Xion girl?" Sora still doesn't know much about the girl or the situation. When he saw Roxas' memories of those days, it was like viewing a film. Impersonal.
Shrugging, Riku says, "Does it matter?" and glances over his shoulder to the storm. The rain coming down is obviously even from here. "Maybe we should go it."
Sora and Kairi agree, so the three wade back to the sand. "We need to go," Sora says, to their great and obvious disappointment. "Sorry. We just don't want to get stuck out here in the storm. It's not safe, you know?"
"I got the outline of what I wanted done," Namine says, finding an optimistic point. "Can we come back soon? Or you can come to us?"
"Tell us when you find somewhere," Sora says quickly, before his friends can unconditionally agree. Somehow, the thought of seeing Ven and Roxas in the same place, at the same time, is nauseating. "We'll swing by with housewarming gifts. Riku can make you lemon cupcakes."
"Hey!"
Kairi and Sora laugh, so Roxas and Namine too, like some sort of echo. Then the four of them trek back down the beach to the cove where the canoes wait, ready to carry them home.
No one draws the imagination of MI Secondary School’s student-teacher population quite the duo of Kairi Hekekia and Sora Kalani. Within a week, everyone suspected that this would be the case; by the time the wet season reaches its height, that's an accepted fact.
"It's not natural," says ‘Enoka, who teaches the eleventh years algebra, to Kyo, the physical education instructor, while they share a midday meal in the gymnasium office. "Kalani can do equations in his head faster than I can. And Nobu says that Hekekia's analysis of the Persecuted Heroine and Crone archetypes last week was just unreal. Who the fuck disappears like that and returns a genius?"
"They're the two fastest runners in the class," Kyo says around his sandwich. "Best at everything, really. I'm still saying they got picked up by pirates."
"Like a pirate would know how to foil," ‘Enoka says, and scoffs, before returning to her smoothie. She doesn't offer any theory of her own.
The kids are not stellar in every class, of course; both are on varying levels of average in history while Sora is just barely decent in literature and Kairi the same in maths and hadn’t bothered to take a science. It's not skill that puts others on edge, though it does beg a number of questions that no one can satisfyingly answer. Instead, it's their exclusionary closeness, their strangeness, their ability to shift in and out of others' awareness seemingly at will. Still, no one will say any of this aloud. That would only make the discomfort worse.
It's Kane, who instructs the secondary school students on all matters that involve sailing, who comes the closest to voicing it. "It's their eyes," he says, tapping below his own right one. "Shows they've got the sea in them. Gazes always off in the distance. They're flight risks, the lot of them."
Kairi and Sora never do catch on to what their teachers say, and wouldn't care even if they did. There might be some truth in Kane's proclamation, but a month after the wet season equinox, they and Riku remain island-bound. Steadily, reluctantly, talk of them begins to slow.
This does not, however, mean their classmates are willing to be friends.
"You guys can absolutely come too," says Sumiko just three days before the start of the Nightmarch Festival. "If you want." That comes out like some sort of dare: do it, or you won't be cool.
It's an hour before school ends, and the seven eleventh years cluster in rainy day room intended to provide a space for sailing lessons when the weather gets like this. Past the thin walls, a storm batters against the sea and sand, but the small, one-room building is windowless. To Sora, it's airless. He's too preoccupied with that—with the stale air and muggy heat bleeding in through the plywood—that he doesn't register at first that Sumiko is speaking to him and Kairi rather than her friends on the bench next to her. The glitter in her mascara sparkles in the full, artificial light as she stares at them, one perfectly manicured eyebrow raised in expectation. Up at the front of the room, Mr Wahiawa curses, and bangs on the projector. All it shows is an electric blue-white square on the wall.
Kairi reacts first. "Thanks, Sumi," she says, and smiles, but not in a way that's genuine. Exhaustion smudges dark marks beneath her eyes. "I think we're good. Right, Sora?"
“Yeah,” he says quickly. “We’ve already got plans.”
The girl to her right snorts. “Like you two ever have plans,” she says, and rolls her eyes.
Offended, he goes to protest, but Kairi drops a hand on his bouncing knee, steadying and silencing him. He doesn't know why he cares, since he hasn't considered going to Sumiko's house party even once since she started spreading news of it, but their judgement stings. There’s no real reason why it should, but, well. But it does.
Sometimes—and it really is just sometimes, maybe—it’s like his brain abruptly remembers, oh yeah, he’s still seventeen. He imagines Kairi understands, since it isn’t rare for him to catch her looking at Sumiko and the classmates like her with a familiar type of longing, at their outfits even he knows took hours to design, their painted nails, and easy laughs. It doesn’t seem to matter that she’s prettier than any of them. Maybe it’s just that she hasn’t put the effort into her appearance that she used to before they returned, too exhausted in the way that Sora is to pretend. Maybe she could never comfortably go from someone declaring her Princess to embracing this world’s view of being a girl, which is all that label means here. He can get that. As the son of a shipwright, that’s all anyway expects him to be.
The thought of staying here, of apprenticing under his father’s position in a year or so, leaves him itching to run.
He has the daydream snagged on the back of his mind all the way to the end of the week, to the start of the Nightmarch Festival, when he walks the ten minutes required to reach Riku’s. On the way he passes a string of classmates on their way to Sumiko’s, and keeps his head down so no one notices him. Right before he turns the corner, he catches a girl from chemistry class say, “Oh, the three of them are totally fucking.”
When he reaches Riku’s, he lets himself in with the key he still had tucked in the false rock by his mom’s coconut tree, and walks straight into the kitchen. “Hey,” he says, and lifts the pack of okolehao he innocently snagged earlier that day from the school faculty room’s refrigerator. There always were rumours about alcohol on the premises, but he never actually thought it was true. “I come bearing gifts. Is Kairi here yet?”
“Nah, you know her parents,” Riku answers, back still turned as he rinses a mixing bowl. The kitchen smells of lilikoi bars, but it’s already clean. His hair’s tugged up for hygienic reasons. Sora slides the wine bottle on the table as his friend continues, “She actually needs to go to services before she can escape.” After putting the bowl on the drying rack, he turns, leaning back against the sink with his arms folded. “Remember how I said my mom was being evasive about why she wouldn’t home until late? Well, she told me right before she left that she’s going on a date. Like she thought I would have a problem with that.”
“Probably if my dad could have hidden Malie he would’ve,” Sora says. “Parents are weird. I don’t even know if it actually has to do with—you know.”
Riku nods. He does know, so there’s no point in saying it.
Half an hour before the sun sets, and the week long festival officially begins, Kairi arrives, bringing with her a bottle of rice wine. When Riku sees it, tray of sweets balances on his mittened hands, he shakes his head. “Inter-world travel was a bad influence on you,” he says. “You know who’ll get in trouble if anyone finds out? Me.”
“Like you’re so much better,” Kairi says, rolling her eyes. Riku has no argument for that, so he only picks squares off the tray to place on a cooling rack before joining them in the sitting room. “Oh, thanks,” she says, brightening when she sees the three glasses he has balanced in his hands. “I was just telling Sora about how my parents have been hinting for me to find a work placement so I have some direction in my aimless life.”
She sits on Riku’s comfiest oversized armchair with Sora at her feet, back against the low centre table and legs crossed. There’s space next to her for another person if they squish, which Riku promptly occupies. She twists to toss her knees over his, her feet pressed against the opposite arm. Meanwhile, Sora pours them all a glass of her wine and dispenses accordingly.
“What about you, Sora?” Riku asks as he accepts his glass, head cocked to his side. “Is your dad on your case?”
Frowning, Sora answers, “It’s like he just kind of...expects I’ll be his apprentice. And my stepmom’s too busy being on his case still about how I really need to go to counseling because I’m so depressed and stuff. I guess I’m supposed to be exactly the same as when I was fourteen.”
For a long moment, they’re all quiet, mulling that over, and sip their wine in sync. When he was fourteen, he was still a whole, or maybe more than that. Exceeded capacity. Can he be considered whole now, or is whole ness subjective? Kairi probably understands, even if they don’t talk about it. He doesn’t know if Riku does, and hopes he never will.
Beyond the sitting room’s large front windows, the sun slinks closer to the horizon, drawing closer to the night.
“I think,” Kairi starts, slow and careful, but Sora loses thread of what she thinks because then something sizzles and booms, resounding across the dusk-lit beach and overhead, and—
When Sora pulls himself back into the present, back from the world of the dead, he registers first, with his eyes closed, that the arms wrapped around his shoulders are Kairi’s and how steadily her chest is moving in comparison to his own. Then he registers Riku, who picks glass from his palm as he says, “It’s all right, Sora, you’re okay, this is just my place on Middle Island, it’s only fireworks, you’re safe.”
Eventually, he calms down enough to respond, and says, “I’m okay. Seriously. Thanks.” He wants to apologise, but knows what their response will be, so refrains.
After a beat, Kairi retracts her arms, falling back to sit on her shins. Riku heals Sora’s hand with a quick spell, then starts on the glass littering the carpet. “Wait,” Sora says, adjusting himself to face his friend. “I can do it. It’s my mess.”
“It’s not your mess,” Kairi says, a note too loud, prickled from frustration. “It’s—it’s this place. We all thought once we were back here and together again that everything would just be perfect and miraculously better but instead every day at least one person will stare, and ‘adults’ keep treating us like children and we all keep trying to fit into everyone’s idea of normal. It's just exhausting.” She takes a long, deep breath, exhales, and drains the remaining half of her wine in one go.
“Yeah,” Riku says to his handfuls of broken glass. “I think I’m also making it harder on my mom because now she needs to talk to my dad again.”
He stands to toss the glass in the kitchen’s rubbish, so Sora uses a low level water charm to magic the wine from the carpet before it stains. When Riku returns, a plate of the lilikoi squares in hand, Sora says, “Can we leave?”
“Yes,” Riku says without delay, finding an area of dry carpet between them opposite the spill, and laying the plate between them. “We should tell them. Or at least leave notes. But yes, and soon.”
Sora’s heart flip-flops in his chest. “Where do we go?”
Giddy now, Kairi says, “Wherever we want. And we can let everyone know we’re available again. Sora, you’ve been to the most cities. Any suggestions for a homebase?”
“There’s one world with a few good ones,” he says, something like hope beginning to catch hold. “Arendale’s capital is pretty cool and I know the Queen, but it’s cold. There’s also the city where Ariel and Eric live. And Corona’s really nice. That’s the warmest.”
“Well, I know Ariel too,” Kairi says, but Riku cringes, and points out that she probably wouldn’t be too thrilled to see him. “Is Arendale the one with the queen who can do magic? How cold are we talking?”
“I was there in winter. Very cold.”
“What about Hallow Bastion or Traverse Town?” Riku says, but doesn’t protest against Sora’s argument that both those towns are sketchy even on their good days.
They make it through the rest of the wine and half of the okolehao bottles, deliberating every location from San Fransokyo (where at least they speak one of the Islands' two languages) to Athens to Agrabah, but stop abruptly when they hear Suzu’s heels on the stone walkway leading to the house. In an instant, Riku clears away the evidence of wrongdoing by sprinting to the kitchen to hide the empty bottles beneath the rest of the mixed recycling, and Kairi and Sora shove the unopened three under the armchair until Riku has the chance to retrieve them. By the time Suzu pushes open the door, they’re all sitting innocently with glasses of water in hand, snacking on home baked desserts.
Startled, she says, “Oh, hello.” Her cheeks are flushed. Sora swallows his bite and thinks that cold or not, his top choice is still Arendale. “Are you two staying the night? ”
“Yeah,” Riku says for them, and lifts the plate. “Lilikoi bar?”
“That’s sweet, thank you,” she says, and smiles, small and guilty. “I’m stuffed, so how about tomorrow? Don’t stay up too late, kids. Riku has work in the morning.”
“Mom,” Riku says as Sora bristles, but she only laughs, and tells them all goodnight.
Soon after, the fireworks end, and the tension he hadn’t realised weighed on his shoulders dissipates. “When?” he says once they’re settled in Riku’s room, and though his mom can’t hear from down the hall, he still throws a fervent look towards the door.
“Soon,” Kairi says, like a promise. “Soon.”
In the end, they do choose Arendale, if only because a queen is more likely to secure them a flat than anyone else. Anna and Kristoff hug Sora breathless when they see him; Olaf clutches his leg; Elsa only shakes his hand, but coming from her, that’s essentially the same thing.
“There’s always available lodging at the harbourside,” Elsa says on their first night, when they all dine together the “private royal quarters.” Kairi can’t keep her eyes away from the art that lines the walls, which is nothing like the paintings found on the Islands, while Riku’s already fallen into a deep conversation with Kristoff about reindeer behaviouralism. “Technically it’s for visiting sailors, so they’re already paid for with funds from the Royal Treasury. Until you settle into your lives here, that accommodation is yours. And if you continue to travel frequently, then it can stay yours, since that would be using it for its intended function.”
“You’ll need to become citizens first,” Anna cuts in from across the table, arm still stretched out to a painting of a woman on a swing in the garden, which she was telling Kairi about, “but that’s easy, since I can just do that. This is so great. Now I have even more of a reason to go down by the harbour. Anyway, Kai—”
“You also need warmer clothes,” Kristoff says. “I know it’s summer now, but Sora proved that people from your country are weak.”
Shrugging, Riku says, “I won’t deny that. We do have some money for essentials. What’s the currency here?””
“Speciedaler,” Elsa answers, “and our ability to convert currency is limited.”
“Anywhere we can find a job?” Sora asks, because he can accept a flat that’s already designed to be cost free, but doesn’t want them to offer any more.
“You can always make some quick cash down at the docks,” Kristoff says, speaking clearly from experience, “but you still need to be citizens first.”
Until that happens, Elsa decrees, they’re to stay here, in the castle. Last time, Sora hadn’t gone inside, but she gives them permission to wander to their hearts’ content, so with Anna’s guidance, they spend much of the next three days exploring. She lends Kairi one of her autumn dresses, and Kristoff lends Riku and Sora a coat each. Every room’s ceiling vaults high above them, lit by chandeliers and large windows. There are artworks and tapestries in each room, murals and patterns painted directly onto the stone walls, and even the building itself resembles an artist’s sculpture. It’s the opposite of Destiny Islands, and just for that, Sora breathes easier than he has in months.
A week after arriving, they move their meagre belongings into a two room, second floor flat on the waterfront. Donald’s translation spell, which he cast on their way here, has kept them going until now, as well as some basic knowledge from last time, but Sora has a book for beginning learners tucked into his pocket. The rest is just some clothes, which are useless in this world, a couple family photographs, and a deck of Islands cards. Riku brought along a recipe book. Kairi took a notebook and pen.
By the time they settle, it’s nearing sunset. It’s too late to look for work, but they wander down to the sand, walking in their borrowed clothes along the water’s edge.
“We ran to an entirely different world,” Kairi says, keeping her voice low, “and we still ended up back by the sea.”
The smell of the ocean invades their flat the way it invaded their homes. “There are worse places to be,” Sora says, as he breathes in salt and seaweed and the day’s catch brought to shore.
Kairi reaches out to take his hand, then Riku’s, who tugs them down to sit on a pile of slick rocks. “We’re allowed at least one continuity,” he says, which Sora thinks must be true—that even as one-fourth of a person, all he needs for a home is access to the open sea, and them, for now and forever until finally, he dies for good.