Chapter Text
“Hey, Riku,” Sora asked, “do you remember when we first decided to see the worlds?"
Riku glanced at him from the corner of his eye. The dusky orange of the setting sun painted him in vibrant color.
Riku looked out across the sparkling water. “Yeah,” he answered, “’Course I do.”
“Why didn’t we?”
The surf rolled up to lap at their feet. “What do you mean?”
“We worked so hard on that raft, y’know? We were gonna sail it out past the horizon and go on a real adventure.”
Riku's chest tightened. “We were just kids.” He glanced over again. Sora’s gaze stayed fixed ahead, on the distant horizon. “Something on your mind?”
“Hmm.” Sora leaned back on his hands, tipping his chin up to the sky. “Maybe I’m just figuring some stuff out.”
Riku watched the gulls circle out over the waves. “Alright, wise guy,” he said. “You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”
Sora’s fingers brushed his knuckles, and Riku’s heart stuttered. He looked down at the sand between them, where Sora had rested a hand over his own. Riku looked up at him, stunned.
Sora’s eyes were clear and shining. “Maybe I want to,” he said quietly.
“Sora,” Riku started, the words coming out of his mouth before he could stop them, “let’s take the raft and go—just the two of us.”
Sora leaned into their hands, drawing close, and there was something steep and plummeting in Riku’s stomach. The sweep of chestnut brown hair over Sora’s forehead tickled his face, his bottomless blue eyes and galaxy of freckles filling Riku’s vision. Sora’s lips parted, sucking in a quiet breath, and Riku felt like he was standing at the edge of some great precipice, looking down.
Sora’s mouth moved, but the words were drowned out as a thunderclap exploded through the space between them, shaking through Riku’s chest with enough force to rattle his teeth.
Their hands slipped on the slick wood beneath them, and Riku found himself skidding towards the edge of the raft as rain the size of bullets pummeled down on them. He could hear Sora shouting through the din, but the sound was just another stroke in the fury of the ocean.
Before him, in the all-too-near distance, a swell like the back of a waking titan was distorting the horizon line.
Riku scrambled for purchase on the surface of the raft, colliding with Sora’s legs as he skittered backwards. His hands found the mast and he hauled himself to his feet, Sora floundering to regain his balance beside him. The sail was snapping against the furious charcoal-black of the clouds like a handkerchief caught in a hurricane, and Riku snatched the rope and looped it around his open palm, pulling it taught. He scoured the jagged horizon for the familiar shape of their island, but the world in every direction was a maelstrom of frothing whitecaps and plumes of pitch-dark cloud.
A gust of wind battered against the raft, and Riku staggered, the rope dragging through his white-knuckled grip and tearing open the calluses underneath.
Before he had time to think through their options, Sora’s icy hands were on his face.
He was soaked through to the skin, his hair black and flattened against his scalp. He blinked the torrent of water from his eyes, his mouth still moving, his voice still drowned in the roar of the storm and the sea, and then he suddenly froze, the color draining from his face. His gaze was fixed over Riku’s shoulder, at the ocean beyond.
Riku twisted in time to see the titan on the horizon blotting out the sky. Sora’s fingernails dug into his arm as the raft started to tilt under their feet.
For a moment, the din of the storm seemed to go quiet, as if it, too, had been swallowed by the gravity of the tide.
It struck the raft.
Riku was erased for a fraction of a second. The impact forced everything human out of him, the weight of the ocean squeezing him like the fist of a giant. The irresistible power of the tide tore at his limbs, sending him careening into bottomless, distant dark.
When he stopped spinning, Riku remembered that he was alive.
He opened his eyes. The saltwater burned, his vision blurred and hazy. There was only darkness in all directions.
He forced out a huff of air and watched as the bubbles clambered towards his feet, and he tried to right himself in the water to follow their desperate migration to the surface. A smear of thin light appeared over him, and he struck out for it.
Something snagged on his leg, and he thrashed against it in a panic. He peered back down into the murky depths, his blood running cold.
Inky tendrils were climbing his legs, and he struggled desperately to tear them away, but they had already wrapped around his waist and were still reaching, slithering up towards his neck. The air bubbles drifted further out of sight, the smear of light receding into nothingness as the tendrils dragged him down.
He reached out a hand for the surface, another puff of air escaping him as one of them circled his throat. He squeezed his eyes shut.
A firm grip caught his wrist. When he opened his eyes again, Sora was pulling himself close, wresting the fingers of one hand beneath the tendril at his throat.
He found Riku’s mouth with his, and a breath passed into him—not enough, but something—and then Sora’s fingers threaded into his own, the soft heat of his tongue sweeping the curve of Riku’s lip, and the tendrils tangled around him loosed into curls and dissipated into the current.
The wave that had broken over them was drawn back out by the tide, and Riku was lying on sun-warmed sand with their hands laced at his side, Sora’s worried face hovering above him.
His hand at Riku’s throat was a gentle but constant pressure. His mouth was still close enough to taste, and Riku felt the brush of his lips as he said, warm and relieved:
“I thought I’d lost you, Riku.”
He trailed his fingertips down Riku’s face and pinched his nose shut, and then he pressed his open mouth to Riku’s and breathed into him again.
Something roiling and hot writhed inside him, screaming to come up. When Sora pulled away, his silhouette was too broad, and Riku recognized the glint of golden eyes and silver hair as Ansem’s shadow fell over him. The hand at his nose squeezed hard enough to make his eyes water, and the fingers locked into his his slipped free and clamped firmly over his mouth.
Riku grappled at Ansem’s wrists, but his body felt like it was made of lead. The world started to swim around him.
Ansem’s voice, lower, harder, colder, murmured through his haze.
“Oh, Riku…I thought I’d lost you.”
The thing squirming inside him seized up against Ansem’s hand, and he jerked sideways and vomited seawater and inky black tendrils onto the sand.
Riku jolted awake. His heart was hammering against his ribs, the neck of his t-shirt soaked through with sweat. He stared at the ceiling, his grip on reality gradually rebooting.
After a moment, he draped an arm over his eyes and pulled in a long, slow breath.
You’re awake and alive, he promised himself.
Sora is awake and alive. You’re in Radiant Garden. You’re with friends. You’ll see him soon.
Ansem is gone.
You’re okay.
You’re okay.
You’re okay.
When they were kids, falling for Sora was just another thread in the fabric of Riku’s life.
Paopu trees flowered vibrant reds in wintertime, the tide carried their footprints away as it dawdled out in the afternoon, and Riku loved Sora: simple as that. It was a constant, quiet thrum inside him, like a second heartbeat. The world was in black and white until Sora gave it color. Everything around him came alive—including Riku.
Even as they grew, they were inseparable. They loafed on the beaches, tussled in the sand until they were out of breath, made impossible plans to do impossible things. The future was one bright, endless adventure, never a question in their minds that they would face it together. The thrum grew, too, until Riku could feel its current buzzing under his skin whenever Sora was with him, whenever Riku so much as thought of him. Why wouldn’t he want to be with him all the time? Why wouldn’t he do anything—anything in the world, in all the worlds—to protect him?
Impressing him was Riku’s only mission in life. Every scoff or grin was a tiny success, every flashy display or elaborate challenge a plea for Sora’s attention, and Riku thrived on it. When Sora’s eyes were on him, he could do anything.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise when Sora’s eyes went elsewhere. People gravitated to him the way plants grew toward the sun. They made other friends, and then another real friend, and Riku made room for her without even realizing it had happened. Kairi nestled so seamlessly into his heart, he didn’t even notice how important she was to him until he noticed how important she was to Sora.
The thrum in Riku’s chest started to feel like a bad joke. He started to wonder why looking at Kairi sometimes made his heart feel like a weight too heavy to carry. He started to wonder why he didn’t feel about her the way he felt about Sora—why he didn’t feel about anyone the way he felt about Sora.
He thought: Isn’t she important to me? Don’t I love her, too?
Then he thought: What if I love him too much?
Was it normal, to look at his best friend like he was the only person in the world? What if Sora didn’t feel the same? What if he loved Kairi more? She was the easiest thing in the world to love. She was just like Sora, like a sunbeam all year round.
Riku was brash, and reckless, and competitive—he wasn’t like either of them. The only thing they all had in common was loyalty, and Riku couldn’t even get that right. And given the choice, why would Sora ever choose him?
Of course, it took him another three years to realize what it meant to want Sora to make that choice, and choose him.
By then, everything was so messed up, his feelings kind of took a back seat.
Riku’s disorientation lingered over breakfast, where he was barely listening to Leon's morning briefing. He was mostly watching Yuffie peel the crusts off her toast and trying not to think at all.
He tuned back in when Leon gestured vaguely in his direction. “Riku, are you up for a patrol?”
Riku wiped a sleeve absently over his mouth. “Sure,” he said.
Leon nodded, flipping through the log book on the table in front of him. “Sora should be landing sometime tonight. We can put together a training plan for your exam once we’re all together.” He scribbled something into the margins of the book. “In the meantime, I got word of some heartless activity by the old lab—we should make sure the security system is handling it. There might be clean-up.”
“Word from Cloud?” Yuffie implored, her mouth turning up at the corner.
Leon rolled his eyes. “Who else?” he muttered.
She scooted her chair an inch or two in Leon’s direction. “How’s it going with him?”
Leon stiffened. He crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s not.”
Yuffie nudged him warmly with her shoulder. “Don’t be like that, Squall. He’s your type, and I know for a fact he plays for your team.”
Riku froze, his coffee mug halfway to his lips.
“First of all,” Leon said flatly, “he is not my type.” He brushed off Yuffie’s hand. “You should worry less about my love life and more about your own. Or better yet, worry about helping Tifa clear the debris from the library.” With that, he rose from the table and headed for the door.
“Touchy,” Yuffie muttered.
Riku stared at the threshold where Leon had disappeared, his mouth dry.
“Uh,” he said.
“I know, I know, it’s none of my business,” Yuffie sighed, resting a weary elbow on the table and swirling the splash of juice left in her glass. “He’s been celibate so long I’m starting to worry he’ll turn to stone.”
“Leon,” Riku clarified, “is he, uh…into guys?”
Yuffie cast him a sideways look. “I thought you knew.”
Riku blinked at her. “Why would I know that? We’ve barely had one conversation since I got here. He’s not really the chatty type.”
She suddenly looked very interested in the bottom of her glass.
Riku felt a tight, panicky flutter in the pit of his stomach. He set down his mug. “I should catch up with him,” he said quickly. “Check out the heartless problem.”
He left his breakfast half-finished and made a beeline for the door.
“Hey, wait,” Yuffie called.
Riku paused at the threshold. He glanced over his shoulder at her.
“You should have a second,” she said. “Conversation, I mean. You know, get to know the guy a little.”
“Yeah,” Riku answered hastily. “Sure.”
Before she could say anything else, he was out the door.
Riku caught up with him in the bailey. Leon was leaning over the low stone wall with his blade propped at his side, his arms folded underneath him. Beyond, where the cliffside dropped away, the crumbling stone and looming spires of the vale jutted like dark bones into the rich pink of the sunrise.
The sight of it made Riku’s gut twist into knots. Walking the streets since his arrival, surrounded by the people who made their lives here, Riku had swallowed down a churning guilt. A piece of him knew that he had been used, that the damage he did while he was under Maleficent’s thumb wasn’t only his to bear. But another piece of him, the one that beckoned him to stare down the barrel and try to understand, knew that life was rarely that simple.
Sometimes, in the moments before he dropped off to sleep, he could see Radiant Garden as Kairi described it, her hands stretched towards the sky as she pried up her childhood one memory at a time: a patchwork of vivid beauty, all shimmering water and stained glass and field after field of bright, orderly flowers.
If he wanted to leave this world—any world—better than he found it, then he still had a lot to make up for.
This seemed as good a place to start as any.
Leon didn’t acknowledge his approach, but Riku leaned into the cool stone beside him anyway.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
Leon kept his eyes on the horizon. “Used to be.” He pushed away from the wall without sparing Riku so much as a passing glance. “Let’s go.”
Riku turned, but Leon was already halfway down the low stone steps, sheathing his blade over his shoulder.
At a loss for anything to say, he followed.
The damage from the collapse was worse in this area than any other, the streets around the castle abandoned. They walked in silence through the rubble, their footfalls echoing against the cavernous stone. The light refracting through the veins of quartz and sediment made the sheer cliffside seem to shift and flicker as they passed.
He still couldn’t reconcile the dry, aloof stranger with the suave and clever version Sora so enthusiastically painted. He also wasn’t sure if Leon had a problem with him. Riku wouldn’t blame him, if he did.
Talk to him, whispered a quiet, urgent voice in the back of Riku’s mind. He’s like you.
He stared at the back of Leon’s head, tugging at a loose thread on the inner seam of his pocket. “So, you…do this…often?”
Leon didn’t bother turning. “Yup.”
“Just the four of you?”
“Merlin helps out when he can. And Aerith prefers restoring histories to restoring streets.”
Riku twisted the thread around his finger and started to pull it free. “What about Cloud?”
Leon stopped abruptly, and Riku came to a stumbling halt to avoid walking face-first into his shoulder blades.
He turned, and for the first time that day—possibly for the first time, period—he looked Riku dead in the eye.
“If you’ve got something to say,” he said flatly, “go ahead and say it.”
Riku’s palms started to sweat. He held up both hands in front of him. “No, I—um.” He picked the strand of dark thread off his fingers and flicked it away, his face going hot. “Look, I’m not trying to pick a fight. Sora talks about him. I didn’t know he lived around here.”
Leon’s expression slipped from irritation into exhaustion. His shoulders relaxed.
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. Yeah, he does.”
Riku blinked, and a snort of laughter snuck up on him. “You don’t make it easy, do you?” he said.
Leon stared at him.
“Conversation,” Riku clarified.
Leon crossed his arms over his chest. The gesture was a little looser, a little more relaxed than it was before. “You’re not much of a talker, yourself,” he said.
Riku shrugged. “We can’t all be Yuffie.”
That earned him a sliver of a smile. “Come on,” Leon said, gesturing him forward.
This time, he waited for Riku to fall in step beside him.
As they rounded the corner towards the postern, there was a resonant, metallic skitter in the crevice of a looming stone wall. They exchanged a sideways glance, and Riku summoned the Way to the Dawn in a flash of light.
It was still for another few moments. A groan echoed from deep within the stone.
A surge of shadows skittered out of the dark like spiders, and Riku didn’t waste a second. He struck out in front of him in quick, pointed jabs as heartless swarmed the plaza around them, four of them bursting into dark mist under his blade. At his side, Leon was carving through the hoard in wide swaths.
A wave of silvery dusks slithered over the crest of the postern bridge, and Riku drew back his arm and hurled the Way to the Dawn in a tight arc. It struck three of them before slicing through the nearest heartless and snapping back into his hand, the space in front of him showered in bright sparks and dark mist.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the telltale glint of knife-like spines rising up from the earth between them.
The assassin breached the surface of the street like a whale coming up for air. It slashed at them with one long, serrated arm, and Riku rolled out of the way and skidded to a stop with his back to the sheer cliffside. Leon twisted in time to steel his blade against it, knocking it back, and it spun out into the open.
Riku trained the Way to the Dawn at the handful heartless that remained. “Breaking a sweat yet?” he called.
Leon speared the assassin cleanly through the center, and it fizzled out into nothingness. He flipped Riku the bird.
Riku grinned. “Magnera!”
A pulse of energy coursed through him, and a shimmering sphere manifested in the center of the plaza, pulling in the scattering heartless.
Something shifted in his chest.
Riku’s mind blanked. He glanced down at his keyblade, frowning, but he couldn’t pin down the shape of the feeling. He aimed at the mass of heartless gathering overhead. “Fira!”
This time, he could tell immediately that something was wrong. A swell of power rose in him, but it didn’t peak or taper—it just kept growing, accumulating inside him until he started to shake from the pressure. There was a lurch in him, a rush of adrenaline raising the hair on the back of his neck.
A swirling spout of fire erupted from the end of his keyblade, and it kicked back in his hand and sputtered as the flame coiled from orange to deep purple to seething, tarry black. When it finally dispelled, there was nothing left of the swarm but a streak of ash on the cobblestones.
Across the street from Riku’s childhood home, there was a steep, grassy hill. He and Sora used to sprint down it like they were racing gravity itself, their feet flying to keep up with the momentum, until their legs went out from under them and they went tumbling onto the forgiving banks of the river below. There was something thrilling in the powerlessness of it, of competing with an irresistible force just to see if they could withstand it without being overtaken.
Riku hadn’t felt that pull since his true face had been restored, since his friends had clasped their hands around his and reminded him of the riverbank at the bottom.
He felt it now.
“…iku. Riku. Riku.”
He flinched when Leon’s hand rested on his shoulder.
“Hey, you okay?”
Riku blinked at him. “Sorry, what?”
Leon looked him over for a moment, his brow knit in the middle, and Riku suddenly felt ill.
There was a tremor under his foot, and he glanced down. A ring of light was expanding below him, and stumbled back as it spouted upward like a fountain and echoed out in a five-foot radius. The pillar of light flickered like a faulty hologram before vanishing, and the ring on the stone street rippled and stuttered out over and over again.
Leon stared at the flickering pattern on the street between them. “Huh,” he said.
“Better late than never,” Riku said dryly.
Leon righted himself and sheathed the gunblade. “Something must be malfunctioning. It shouldn't have a problem with enemies this weak.” He swiped a hand over his chin. “There’s a command console in the castle study. We’ll have to check it out.”
He started towards the postern, and Riku put a few feet of distance between them before he followed along, keeping his eyes trained on the ground. He watched the cobblestones pass under him, transitioning into cracked mosaic tile and then burnished brass.
Riku was intimately familiar with the gravity of darkness. It was a steady, constant tug at his heart, a reminder that doing good was a lifelong effort. The path he chose walked the razor’s edge, but he was sure it was the right one.
Why is this happening now? he thought. Am I slipping?
He didn’t feel like he was slipping. He felt good—mostly—for the first time in years. He felt at home on his island again, felt deserving to stand at his friends’ side. He’d been waiting his entire life to become a keyblade master, and now he was just weeks away from his chance to prove that he was worthy of the title. He wasn’t without regret—that, he was sure, would never leave him entirely—but he had found the strength to repair what he could of his mistakes, and he trusted it.
So…why?
Leon extended a hand to halt him at the castle entrance. The metal door was jarred open, a collapsed stone pillar lying across the crumpled remains.
They stepped carefully around it. Riku trailed his hand along the sleek walls as they wandered deeper into the castle halls, tracing the seam of the wallpaper with his fingertips. It was a strangely homey design for a structure built on a cluttered system of ventilation pipes. Leon disappeared into a doorway ahead, and Riku turned the corner after him.
He froze.
Ansem’s face loomed over him, an unfamiliar coat across his shoulders. He was rendered in cutting profile, his hair slicked cleanly back.
The distant murmur of Riku’s nightmare echoed through him. I thought I’d lost you.
Then Leon called to him from the doorway beside the painting, and Riku snapped back into himself.
“Sorry,” he said, and he crossed the room in a few quick strides, keeping the portrait in his peripheral vision.
The passageway in the open wall was dim and narrow, and as Riku turned the corner, it opened up into a cavernous turbine lined in towering columns of power cores. Looking down through the glass floor of the bridge made him queasy. This must power the entire castle, he thought. Maybe the entire world.
Leon’s startled voice echoed from the open door of the chamber at the end of the bridge. “Hey!”
Riku bolted the last few steps, raising his keyblade as he went. When he skidded into the room, Leon was swinging his blade over the console like he was shooing a swarm of insects. A cluster of heartless scrambled out of the far side door in a panic.
Riku eased out of his stance, his heart still hammering. “What happened?”
Leon pushed his hair back a frustrated sweep. “Ugh, they’re worse than cats,” he muttered. “This whole area was open to the outside.”
Riku peered around him at the row of monitors embedded in the control console. Some of the keys had been pried clean off the keyboard and were strewn across the floor, and two of the monitors were just collages of brightly colored static snow.
Leon hovered over the console, cursing quietly. He set his hands to the ruined keyboard and tried to punch in a string of numbers.
A shower of sparks sprayed out at him, and he stumbled back. The screen flashed, a buzzer sounding overhead, and the doors at either end of the room slid shut with a ringing finality, the lights above them glaring red.
Riku cast Leon a sideways glance. “I’m guessing that’s not what you were going for.”
Leon stabbed at the keyboard a few more times, but the display was frozen in place. He crossed to the control room door and pulled a keycard from his pocket, swiping it in the reader affixed to the wall. When the door remained stubbornly shut, the light above it still an uncompromising red, he unsnapped a communicator the size of a pack of cards from his belt.
“Cid,” he said, “I think we found the problem.”
After a moment, a muffled reply crackled from it. “You wanna give me a little more to work with?”
“Security system’s on the fritz. The console got trampled by stray heartless. Looks like they did some hardware damage.” He rubbed his temple in irritation. “Oh, and we’re locked in.”
There was a short snort of laughter on the other end of the communicator.
Leon’s expression turned deadly. “Cid,” he warned.
“All right, all right, gimme a minute. I’m running a diagnostic.”
Riku leaned into the wall behind him, dismissing his keyblade. His limbs still felt weak and jittery, and there was a pit of sour adrenaline in his stomach that he could taste on the back of his tongue. He swiped a hand over his forehead, his messy bangs sticking to it with sweat.
The room was starting to feel claustrophobic.
There was a string of muttering over the communicator line, nearly drowned in audio fuzz. “Uhh…okay. Okay, listen…I think I can override the emergency lock and get you two outta there, but you’re not gonna like it.”
Leon grimaced. “Why.”
“Look, I don’t wanna break my code. Do—do you know how fragile this shit is? It’s basically duck tape and string. I could put the town security out of commission for weeks if I fuck with it too much—”
“Can’t we just brute-force it?” Leon interrupted, his hand going to the hilt of his blade.
“Uh-uh, no way! My system is half trashed already. You keep your mitts off.” He paused. “Gimme two hours,” he said, then added: “M…maybe more like four.”
Riku felt dizzy. He pressed his back against the wall and slid down it until his hands found the floor.
Leon was standing with his arm braced on his hip, his head hanging in defeat. He finally spoke into it again, his voice strained. “Do what you need to do, and keep us updated.”
He snapped the communicator back onto his belt and turned towards Riku with a sigh. “There goes my morning,” he said, then suddenly straightened. “Shit—are you okay? You don’t look so good.”
Riku blinked at him. He realized that he’d been digging his fingernails into his forearms, and he uncurled them slowly. He shrugged.
Leon crossed the room and dropped to one knee at his side, rifling in his satchel. “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t even think to warn you about the study—”
“It’s okay,” Riku said. His tongue felt thick around the words.
Leon pressed a waterskin into his hands, wrapping them around the neck of it. “Here. You should drink something.”
The thought of swallowing didn’t do much for him, but he raised it to his lips anyway. Leon slumped down next to him, pulling the sheath of his blade off his shoulder to lay it beside them.
For a while, they sat in silence, broken only by the low electrical hum of a thousand diligent machines just trying to do their jobs. Riku tipped back his head, the last of the sour adrenaline leaching out of him. His body felt like it had been hollowed out and filled with sand.
Eventually, Leon glanced in his direction. “What happened back there, with those heartless,” he said, “that happen often?”
Riku didn’t bother to open his eyes. “Not lately.”
Leon shifted beside him, his boots dragging along the floor. “Can you control it?” he asked.
There was no judgement in the question at all; there was even a gentleness to it that made the surge of humiliation climbing Riku’s throat feel all the more childish. “I could,” he answered, then added weakly, “I thought I could.”
He heard the ring of Leon’s blade sliding on the tile floor, and he cracked his eyes open. Leon was running his thumb thoughtfully over the metalwork in the hilt, his lips pursed. “How long until your exam?”
Riku tried to ignore the wave of nausea that swept through him. “Less than two weeks.”
Leon hummed, no particular inflection to it. He nudged Riku with an elbow. “You’ll figure it out by then.”
“You’re awfully confident in me,” Riku said flatly, but when he glanced in Leon’s direction again, his expression was clouded and solemn.
“I’ve felt it, too,” Leon admitted quietly. “The call to darkness.”
Riku didn’t know what to say to that, and Leon didn’t offer anything further.
About halfway through the waterskin, Riku started to feel like himself again. The walls had stopped closing in on him, and the gnawing anxiety had reduced to the usual stir.
At some point, Leon had shuffled down until he was laying with his hands folded under his head, his legs sprawled out across the floor.
Riku tossed the waterskin in his direction. “Thanks,” he said.
Leon was knocking his foot absently against the side of the console. “Sure,” he said.
Riku pulled his knees up to his chest. “Leon,” he started, “why do you…do this every day? There are whole teams of people on the rebuild effort now.”
Leon stopped tapping his foot. He was quiet for a long time. “I failed this place once before,” he said. There was something steely and resonant in his voice. “I’m not going to fail it again.”
Riku stared at him, and something inside him began to tentatively unfold.
He wondered how much he and Leon had grown alike because of…this, this quiet, constant flame in Riku’s heart, one he never really knew if he was supposed to have. A flame he kept one hand cupped protectively around, terrified to let it die, and terrified to let it thrive.
The piece of Riku that would take a killing blow for his best friend and then dream about finding constellations the freckles beneath his eyes. The piece of him that would swim out of darkness and back in again, for the love of a boy who would never love him back.
There was a tickle at the back of Riku’s throat, an urgent, alien impulse that made his insides turn over. If he could say it out loud, just once; if he could be understood by someone, by anyone…
Then Leon turned to face him, perching his head on his hand, and the thing unfolding inside Riku collapsed back into formless uncertainty.
“The notorious Riku,” Leon mused. “From the way Sora talked about you, I thought you’d be more…”
Riku swept a hand nervously over the back of his neck. “More what?” he said. After a moment, he ducked his head and added, “What, uh…what does Sora say about me?”
Leon shot him a knowing look, and Riku’s face started to burn.
“Hm,” he said with an infuriatingly smug smile, “I guess I thought you’d be taller.”
Riku stretched out his legs. “Give me a couple years,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”
Riku had no idea how long had passed by the time he was lying flat on the floor, one arm tucked under his head and the other folded over his stomach. On the opposite side of the room, Leon had taken to flipping a coin and snatching it out of the air in turns.
“I don’t get it,” Riku admitted. “I found such a reliable balance, and now I’m this close to the Mark of Mastery exam, and I can’t keep a hold on it anymore.”
The coin produced a bright ringing as it spun from Leon’s hand. “I don’t wanna presume,” he said, “but I don’t think the darkness is what’s out of balance.”
Riku frowned. “You sound like Mickey.”
“Sora hasn’t told me much,” Leon said, “but near as I can tell, this is the first quiet moment either of you have had in a long time.”
Riku hummed. Leon tossed the coin in his direction, and Riku scrambled to grab it out of the air, then propped himself up on an elbow.
“It’s easy to force down what you think doesn’t matter when the world’s falling apart,” Leon said.
Riku closed his fist around the coin, his fingernails biting into his palm. “Maybe,” he said.
“If you’re anything like me,” Leon said, casting him a pointed look, “what you force down won’t stay down forever.”
Riku’s heart knocked against his ribcage as if beckoning him to open it, a call he was never brave enough to answer. He dragged himself upright, pulling his legs underneath him. “I don’t see why it should matter now.”
Leon shrugged. “Nothing to distract you.”
Riku turned the coin over between his fingers. He flicked it back. “I’m out of touch with my heart,” he conceded.
“I hear that’s kind of important for keyblade masters.”
“What if…” Riku cleared his throat. “What if I’m not ready for what it has to say? What if it asks more of me than I can give? What if—” His voice broke, and he swallowed against it.
Something shook inside him, something almost as old as he was. A joke with no punchline. A thrum like a second heartbeat.
“What if it wants too much?”
Leon propped himself up. He looked at Riku thoughtfully for a moment, then scooted back until he could lean into the wall at Riku’s side. “Honestly,” he said, “it probably will.”
Riku huffed out a laugh. “That’s reassuring.”
Leon smiled at him—actually smiled, with his whole mouth. Riku mirrored it.
After a moment, it hedged into a smirk. “You should ask Cloud out,” he said.
Leon’s smile faltered, and he punched Riku on the arm. “I—I’m working on it, okay?”
“Hah! So you do like him—” he broke off with a yelp as Leon caught him firmly around the neck with one arm and twisted his knuckles into Riku’s hair until it was a frazzled mess.
“Lay off,” he laughed, “I get enough of that from Yuffie.”
The buzzer rang through the room again, and they both jumped. There was a heavy metallic thud, and the lights glaring over the doors flicked off. Leon’s communicator crackled to life.
“Alright, boys,” Cid said, his voice satisfied but worn, “You should be off lock-down. Just in time, too—I think our other master-to-be is about to touch down.”
They exchanged glances. Leon climbed to his feet and crossed to the door, pulling his keycard from his pocket again. He held it up to Riku with a nod, as if asking him for luck.
He swiped it. This time, there was the tinny chorus of the intricate machinery inside unspooling. The door slid open.
Riku breathed out.
“We’re cleared. Nice work, Cid.” Leon turned back to him, relief plain on his face. “Come on,” He said, extending a hand. “Radiant Garden Restoration Committee never rests.”
Riku took it, and Leon pulled him to his feet. It was like the open door had flipped a switch in him, and the easygoing side of Leon receded back into a worn-out leader.
“We’ll need to set up routine patrols to keep the strays in check until Cid can get the security system back up and running…” he seemed to be talking to himself more than to Riku. He started towards the door, thinking out loud as he went. “I’ll have to recruit some additional hands, and we may need you two on patrols. Maybe we can fit it into your training schedule…”
“Leon, wait.” Riku grabbed him by the wrist, a flash of panic suddenly spiraling through him.
He turned, raising an expectant eyebrow.
Riku’s mouth hung open as he searched for the right words. “I—I don’t want Sora to know about…whatever’s going on with me. He’s got a lot on his mind already, and I…” his fingers tightened around Leon’s wrist. “I know it would upset him,” he mumbled. “To see me like that again.”
Leon’s eyes softened. He glanced down at Riku’s hand, and Riku hastily released him.
“Sparring is Yuffie’s territory,” Leon said, “but I’ll make sure you stay on separate patrols.”
A wave of relief washed over him. “Thank you,” he said earnestly.
Leon looked him over, offering him a genuine smile. “It’s none of my business, but…if you need someone to talk to.” He shrugged, his tone almost sheepish. “I’ll be around.”
The sun was reaching its peak as they made their way back towards the cottage. Riku’s limbs were still weary and loose, but his head was clear, and his heart was lighter in his chest.
A swell of laughter drifted through the air as they climbed the stairs to the village, followed by the commotion of slamming doors and thudding boxes. The committee was gathered outside the open cottage door, milling around a bright, blocky mass of a ship.
Aerith reached out her hands for Sora’s as he climbed down from the cockpit, the duffel over his shoulder half-zipped and spilling clothes onto the cobblestone plaza. He looked up as they approached, and his eyes sparkled when they found Riku’s face.
They were a bottomless blue, half-hidden in a galaxy of freckles. His smile was vibrant and wide.
Riku’s heart seized in his chest. He stood, rooted to the spot, as it spoke to him.
For the first time in years, he listened.