Chapter Text
Every year on the last day of the summer holidays, Kairi would have Sora round at her house to stay the night. It had been their special best friend tradition since they were just starting secondary school, and it served as sort of a preparation for what was to come: the academic year being back in full swing, swiftly punching them in the face with homework and Monday mornings. They needed to fade into that shit carefully, and scientifically speaking, the best way to manage that was to stay up all night together eating crap food and talking about crushes.
Now, it is a truth universally acknowledged that when you’re up at 4AM, conversations get weird fast, and the scale of said weirdness (and the rapidity at which it grows) is directly proportional to the amount of sugar ingested by all involved parties which, in Kairi and Sora’s case, was a metric fuckton. This in mind, it was somewhat understandable that, while they leafed through Kairi’s wardrobe to try things on, they were playing Fuck/Marry/Kill with cartoon characters.
“Okay, I got one,” Kairi announced, trying on a particularly gaudy sequined cowgirl hat. “Papa from Berenstein Bears, Miss Finster from Recess and the Pink Panther.”
Sora ‘hmm’ed thoughtfully as he held a cute miniskirt to his waist and, judging that there was no way it would fit him, discarded it. “I’d definitely kill Finster, but that kind of leaves me with no choice but bestiality, and that’s not really my aesthetic, you know?”
“This game was your idea,” she sang-spoke, tossing a nice A-line with a wider waist in his direction.
He caught the skirt, looked at it in the mirror and, in approval, shot Kairi a nod. “Well, I guess I’d have to, uh, do it with Papa Bear. He seems more human than the panther.” With that, he started pulling the skirt up on over his pyjama trousers.
“He has a wife and kids, you total homewrecker.”
“Give me a break, Kairi!” Sora chuckled, then turned back to his reflection. His outfit- well, technically Kairi’s; they were her clothes, after all, but he was wearing them, so there- was pretty freaking awesome if he did say so himself. The skirt Kairi had tossed over was a light lilac that complimented the shimmery teal top he’d picked out. Kairi looked kickass too, of course, in her favourite pink summer skort and the pretty flowy pleaty white top, and of course that fucking hat. There was only one thing to do.
“Selfie?” he proposed.
“Do you even need to ask?”
They pushed some random crap (Dairy Milk wrappers, Sora’s PE Kit, a bazillion teddy bears) off the beanbag on the floor, and on it they posed with peace signs and silly expressions for their favourite dumb teenager activity. Sora was one of those people who wasn’t satisfied with taking just one picture, so he jabbed the button at least twenty times, he and Kairi changing their stances after every click. When they were done with their super intense modelling session, they flicked through the photos.
Sora stopped on one picture about halfway through and grinned. It was one in which Kairi’s hat had fallen down, just obscuring her eyes, only showing her happy, lazy smile, and Sora’s entire face was blurred from the headbanging which had seemed a good idea at the time but had resulted in a kind of mild headache. “I like this one,” he said, smiling like a little kid. “It really…feels like us. If that makes sense?”
“It actually really does.”
“I’m making it my lock screen image.”
He went ahead and did so while Kairi played with his (unnecessarily spiky) hair. She yawned. “Would you rather only eat asparagus forevermore, or live the rest of your life in the body of a rabbit…?”
“Rabbit,” he answered without a second thought. “I need my chocolate.”
“Chocolate is poisonous to rabbits, actually.”
Sora put his phone down and stared at her. “Well, then, what’s the point?”
Kairi giggled. “I’m glad to know where your priorities lie,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Gosh, I’m kinda sleepy.” She took her hat off, chucked it aside and flopped back to lie on the beanbag. “How long until we have to get ready for school?” She was quickly losing the ability to keep her eyes open.
“About three hours,” said Sora, doing a quick double check of the time on his phone.
“Ah.”
“Riku’ll be fast asleep.”
“Yeah.”
“Wanna wake him up?”
She shot up, eyes suddenly bright and attentive despite the dark circles. “You bet I do!” She grabbed Sora’s phone, unlocked it- passcode 1234, because he had no common sense- and selected his contacts list.
However, before she could get scrolling for Riku’s name, Sora snatched the phone back from her. He tilted the screen away from her and started tapping at the screen with more vigour than he had ever outwardly expressed before. Where was this work ethic during our history assignment? Kairi wondered, and then, noticing her friend’s bright red cheeks, adopted a sly smile. “What are you hiding?”
“Nothing!” he insisted. “It’s just my phone’s froze and I’m trying to get it to work again.” He kept tapping, like the phone wasn’t cooperating. His eyes bore into the screen like he was pleading it to just this once please do what he wanted. Kairi, though, saw his apparent distraction as the knock of opportunity. She took a quick peek over his shoulder.
Sora couldn’t hide his phone screen as fast as Kairi could read. His finger kept tapping in the name field of an ‘edit contact’ page with Riku’s picture on it, for which the name field read ‘the babe’. Sora looked in horror at his friend, who had put two and two together and was grinning in delight.
“Sora!” she gasped, clasping her hands together. “Oh my gosh! That’s adorable! Does he know? Have you told him? Are you going to ask him out? Are you ALREADY out? Oh my gosh, Sora, you need to tell me these things!”
In truth, he wasn’t exactly embarrassed that Kairi had twigged his crush on the guy. No, he was just embarrassed that she found out this way. By reading his silly contact name for Riku. The one that he’d made just-for-the-lels at 4am some night when it was too hot to sleep.
“Uh, no, he has no idea, actually,” Sora admitted, “so I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell him. I’m not sure how he’d take it.”
Kairi nodded.
“Promise?”
She took his hand, a serious look about her. “You know I’d never go around blabbing your secrets, right? Sora, I’m your best friend.” Intertwining her fingers with his, she looked at him with eyes that demanded a response.
He smiled faintly. “Yeah, of course I do. Thanks, Kairi.”
“But Riku! For how long, Sora? Oh my gosh, it would be so romantic if you liked him way back when we were little kids, oh my gosh, you could be like those soulmates-“
“Kairi, stop,” he laughed. “It’s nothing like that. It only really started a couple weeks ago.” He took his hand away from hers and wrung it with the other, staring downwards. He looked up with a new heartiness. “Crush for a crush! You have to tell me who you like now!”
Now Kairi’s face reddened. “I don’t like anyone,” she said softly, drawing her knees up to her chest in a defensive gesture. Her smile was embarrassed, even nervous.
“You’re not getting off that easily!” teased Sora. “Come on. Who is it?”
She looked down and covered her face, tense giggles erupting from her throat.
“Aw, come on, Kairi. You know you can tell me, right?” He put a hand on her shoulder. “I’d never go around blabbing your secrets,” he echoed. “I’m your best friend.”
Kairi laughed for a few moments more, then stopped. Hugging her knees now more than previously, so tightly it seemed she might cut off their circulation, she looked Sora in the face. “Okay, okay. Fine.” A few more seconds of the giggles. “I can do this!” she breathed. A moment’s pause. “Okay. Do you know Naminé?”
“I think she’s in my cousin’s nurture group. Uh, is she the smart blonde kid?”
Kairi gave a curt nod. “Her.”
“Oh my God, Kairi, really?” Sora beamed. “You two would be great together, I just know it!”
Her face lit up. “You mean that?”
“Of course!”
Kairi looked happy but still eager to change the subject. She gestured to her friend’s phone. “So, are we going to call the babe?”
“Shut up,” he chuckled, adding 141 to the start of Riku’s number. They sniggered as he hit the call button, but Kairi’s look quickly turned to one of worry. Simultaneously with the first ring, she grabbed her friend by the sleeve. “Sora, what the heck are we even going to say?!”
“…Dammit!” he said. “You speak!” He thrust the phone into her hand and jumped up and away so she wouldn’t just hand it back.
“What- Sora! Come back!” Kairi ordered. “I don’t know what to-”
“Who the fuck is this?”
Riku had picked up, and Kairi knew she had to improvise something. Heart pounding, she mouthed ‘screw you´ Sora and then closed her eyes, hoping a good idea would come to her in the precious few nanoseconds she had before she really needed to speak. She prayed for a sudden stroke of genius to hit her so hard she’d be lucky to stay conscious. It did not come, of course, but what did come was as follows:
“Hello, am I speaking with Riku?”
“…Yes…”
“Um, this is Charlotte from Forth One! You just won three tickets to see...” Her mind blanked and she looked to Sora for help. He shrugged fantastically, so it was all down to her to save the day. She took a deep breath and searched her mind for the name of a band. Oh God, please, any band.
“Westlife!” Except that one!
Sora gave her a kind of what-were-you-thinking glance. She threw a hand in the air, no idea herself.
“It’s, like, four in the morning or something.”
Well, Kairi decided, go big or go home. “All you need to do to claim your fabulous prize is answer this question!” Another few seconds of brainstorming, then: “Who is objectively more attractive out of the mouse from An American Tail and the artist formerly known as Prince?”
“What the fuck kind of question-”
“Ten seconds remaining on the clock! Hurry up with your answer!” Kairi and Sora’s eyes met and in the sheer gracelessness of the moment they couldn’t help but collapse in laughter. Sora doubled over first and Kairi fell right beside him, taking good care not to let his phone hit the ground hard. They curled in on themselves as they laughed, and thus inadvertently cuddled into each other.
On the other end of the line, Riku was clearly fed up and, in a slightly more awake state, aware of exactly who he was talking to. “Oh, very funny, jackasses.” The call ended less than a second later, and the two kept laughing until their stomachs hurt, at which point they were pretty much running on zero.
They fell asleep at half past four in the morning, curled up together like drowsy kittens.