Chapter Text
The first week back wasn’t so bad, except for the fact that for three days after they returned, neither Sora nor Riku was seen outside of his house, and while this made Kairi sigh and consent to spend her days with Selphie, Tidus and Wakka instead, everyone understood. Kairi was gone for months, those dark months that no one could seem to remember, and then again these past few weeks, but there was a grace period in there, enough time to remind her parents that she was strong, that she was capable. And, Kairi thought to herself only once, and maybe not even that, they were not her real parents.
On the fourth morning Kairi was woken up by the sound of something hitting her windowpane. She’d think it cute: Sora and Riku in her yard, hidden behind some bushes, throwing rocks at her window, but it was also three o’clock in the morning. Still, there really wasn’t any hope of her going back to sleep, so Kairi crossed her room and slid her window open. She poked her head out, with her hair a frightful mess, and her eyes still three-quarters closed with fatigue.
“Morning, princess,” Sora crowed while Riku shook his head and hushed him. Kairi laughed and blushed, before signaling for them to wait and closing her window. She dressed with a speed she had never before achieved early in the morning, throwing on not the pink dress that had become her favorite outfit, since it had a rather conspicuous ice cream stain on it, but the tank top and skirt combo she had worn when the Heartless first arrived. The fit was a little tight for comfort, but, then, she wasn’t really going where she would be seen.
Kairi snuck out the back door like she had back when they hadn’t known a world outside of their beaches, and before she could admonish them or ask what they were doing, she was smothered in the most enthusiastic hug she had ever received, and, having been Sora’s friend for years, that was saying something. She bit back a laugh and caught Riku’s affectionate eyeroll before she buried her face in Sora’s hair and squeezed him right back.
Once Sora released her she smiled and slipped an arm around Riku’s waist, because he had never liked explosive displays of affection. “So, what do you guys have planned for me at this lovely hour of the morning?”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Sora said, rubbing the back of his head and giving her a hopeful grin.
“We just thought it might be nice to go out to the island without anyone else around, now that we’re finally off house arrest,” Riku told her, with something in his voice still wary. Kairi understood his trepidation, of course, understood it better than Sora, most likely, but it still irritated the part of her that wanted things to be simple again. She put her arm back around his waist and with the other pulled Sora to her.
“Well, I hope you two plan on doing all the rowing, because I’m certainly not,” Kairi laughed and felt Sora’s arm curl around her waist in return, and Riku cautiously curled his palm around her far shoulder.
“Whatever you want, princess,” Sora snorted.
They made it down to the dock without anyone noticing them, not, as Riku pointed out, that anyone would be awake to catch them. The dock hadn’t been used since their disappearance; either the world was consumed by darkness, or no one had felt like using it, as all they could think of when they looked at it was their missing friends. Planks were rotting, and Kairi thought that one of the support beams was close to giving way, but the three of them skipped and jumped over holes and tripped into the boat. As Riku launched himself off the dock, last, as Kairi expected, the boat wobbled, tilted, and overturned.
“Aaugh!” Kairi shrieked as she fell backwards over the edge of the boat, and clawed at the air, before realizing that whatever she had fallen on was much more solid than water.
“Watch where you’re falling, Kairi,” Riku teased, and slipped his arms around her waist to hold her up.
“It certainly wasn’t me who flipped the boat. Hmm, I wonder whose fault that was? Any ideas, Riku?” She laughed and squirmed against Riku, as Sora surfaced with a splutter and shook his head around like a dog.
“Oh, don’t mind me, you two. I’ll just float over here, alone and friendless,” Sora whined. Riku splashed at him, but Kairi, still tucked against him, took the brunt of it.
“Now who needs to watch what they’re doing,” Kairi taunted, spun away from Riku and kicked a wave of water at him. “Take that!”
Even as Riku tried to duck out of the way, Kairi saw the look he shot at Sora, and rolled her eyes. She swam up behind Sora, who had clearly perceived Riku’s look as a challenge on some level and was busy squirting water through his hands at the other boy, and pushed him underwater, laughing. As Sora struggled against her, and started to force his way up because, well, he had spent the past year fighting day in and day out and Kairi hadn’t, she looked at Riku and smiled.
“It’s going to be okay, you know,” she told him as Sora broke through her grip and back to the surface.
“Not fair, Kairi,” Sora shouted, even as he shoved Kairi’s head underwater.
“Oh, it’s on now,” she laughed as she came back up, deliberately flinging the water from her hair in Sora’s face.
“Yes, I rather think it is,” Riku said with a smirk, as he launched a wave at both Kairi and Sora with one of the oars.
As the whole thing devolved into a giggle-filled splashfight, a “Who’s there?” rang out across the dock. The three of them froze, and swam under the dock as they heard footfalls approaching. It was a male voice, older and gruff, grumbling about kids and disrespect. Sora stuffed a hand in his mouth the keep quiet, and Riku and Kairi rolled their eyes but couldn’t help smiling themselves.
Above them the old man moved slowly down the dock, and froze at the end, probably, Kairi thought, staring at the overturned boat and the absence of other people. The planks creaked and for a moment Kairi feared they would give way and send the man tumbling down on them, but instead he muttered, “Spirits, then,” and began to make his way back.
Sora kept his hand over his mouth until none of them could hear anything more, then removed and burst into laughter that made Kairi start violently.
“Sora, hush!” she hissed, “He could hear you and come back, and with our luck he’d probably fall through the planks and find us out.”
Sora paused and cocked his head, making a show of considering what Kairi had said. Riku spoke first, though; “Actually, Kairi, with our luck, he’d probably never discover us.”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ve been pretty lucky,” Sora added, “and besides, what’s going to happen? The old man’ll yell at us. That’s all.”
“He’ll drag us back and make our parents come collect us, actually,” Kairi pointed out.
“Awww, my mom’s used to it by now,” Sora reassured her, “me ‘n Riku’ve been getting in trouble since we could walk. And before. And it was mostly me who got in trouble.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Kairi sighed. “But, you know, my parents aren’t used to me doing this. I’m well behaved.”
“Nah, you just hid your adventurous side well, but we saw you with that keyblade.”
She didn’t argue with that, since, well, it was true, but instead drifted over to help Riku, who had begun righting the boat. Sora collected the oars, and minutest later found the three of them surrounding the boat, looking up at it.
“Sooooo,” Kairi began, “who wants to give me a boost?” and within second both Riku and Sora were there, though Riku moved just a bit faster, so she clambered onto his shoulders and then into the boat. Riku then helped Sora clamber up, but paused a regarded the boat after that.
“We can pull him up, right, Sora?”
“Man, Kairi, I dunno. He looks like a big lump. Maybe if we each took an arm?”
“Maybe.”
“Too slow,” Riku taunted, since as Kairi and Sora had joked around, he had levered himself up and into the boat, nearly overturning it again, of course.
“Sora can’t help it,” Kairi chided, “he’s born that way.”
“Then what’s your excuse, princess?”
“I was just humoring him, of course,” she sniffed. “Now row, if you please.”
“I’m not slow!”
Out on the island Kairi told them, in no uncertain terms, that she was not going to sit in the sand in her wet clothes, so they headed instead for the old tree house, and had been sitting there in silence for five minutes when Sora wondered, “Why don’t we just make a fire? Then our clothes’ll dry off.” This, naturally, sparked a competitive search for firewood which Kairi felt she had won, since she had actually found the most wood, but then had not been able to fit all of it in her arms so Riku, in a sneaky move that evoked his pre-Darkness nature, poached on her territory and returned with a massive pile of sticks. Regardless of which of them won, it still left Sora complaining that they had cheated.
Silence overtook them again, and for a while it seemed to Kairi that everything that needed saying was present in the snaps of the fire. Slowly she felt herself splitting in two, vaguely became aware that a part of her hand simply gotten up and gone, and so she looked over at Sora and saw in his eyes the same thing, and sighed; it was only Roxas and Naminé, enjoying the moment as well. Kairi hadn’t spoken to Naminé much, hadn’t really thought about in the rush of the past few days, but resolved to as soon as possible.
Riku prodded at the fire with a long branch from the pile beside him, and his eyes flickered to a spot beyond both Kairi and Sora. He smiled faintly. Then he turned back to the flames.
“You can see them?” Kairi asked.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Riku said into the warm glow of the flames.
“Really,” Kairi began, even as Sora broke in with:
“You can see them, Riku? That’s awesome!”
“There’s no reason you two shouldn’t be able to as well, they’re right there,” he gestured to the spot he had looked at previously. Sora looked.
“Uh, Riku, no they’re not.” Riku looked utterly terrified for a moment, before shrugging it away, so Kairi snuck a glance as well, and her breath caught when she realized Sora was telling the truth.
“I can’t see them either, Riku. I can feel them, and I know Naminé is there, but I can’t see her.” Riku shrugged again, and Kairi continued, “Maybe, maybe it’s because you had that blindfold on. Maybe you can still see what’s really there.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Riku scoffed, and Kairi decided to let it go. She wasn’t going to ruin the rest of their evening.
They ended up staying on the island till the sun came up, and at sunrise they were out by the paopu tree in their old formation: Sora and Kairi sat on the tree’s low, curved branch, bumping shoulders and laughing, and Riku leaned against the wood, occasionally joining the conversation, but mostly watching the ocean with a veiled expression. The sun bloomed over the horizon, spilling gold and pink into the sky, and Kairi smiled. She was about to say something when she felt a weight pressing in to her shoulder, and, seconds later, Sora snored right in her ear.
“Now that you mention it,” Kairi broke off to yawn, “I’m exhausted, too. I hadn’t been asleep for that long when you two came to collect me.”
“Same,” Riku nodded. “Sora woke me up, too, but I figured it was too good an idea to pass up.”
“Oh, definitely. I’m just not feeling up to rowing back to the mainland right now.”
“We could always follow Sora’s lead, just this once,” Riku suggested with a smirk, “and sleep here. Our parents,” he added when Kairi opened her mouth, “will figure it out easily enough.”
“You’re probably right,” she conceded.
“I’m always right, Kairi,” he teased, before the laughter drained out of his face and was replaced by something cold and bitter.
“C’mon, Riku,” she said, soft, “help me get Sora out of this tree.” Riku complied readily, obviously as eager as Kairi to push aside the pink elephant of his massive, overwhelming guilt, and between the two of them they got Sora, who was, luckily, a very deep sleeper, on the sand, and settled around him. Kairi rested her head on Sora’s stomach and stretched out, enjoying the warmth of the sand on her back and the stronger heat of the rising sun on her eyelids. “Mmm, Riku, move over here. Don’t mope. It makes us sad.”
“I’m not—“
“We can argue about this later. ‘M serious, though, get over here.”
Riku clearly heard the steel in Kairi’s words and obliged, crawling over to where she and Sora were sprawled, and pillowed his head on her thighs when she patted them. She ran her fingers through his hair and felt Riku relax a little against her, and gently curl up on his side, and before she realized it, she was asleep.
Sora, naturally, was not only a heavy sleeper but a wild one, given to tossing and turning in bizarre attempts to act out his dreams, and often found inflicting damage or at least mild molestation on whatever happened to be near him. Of course, that fine Thursday afternoon, since it was late in the afternoon when Sora awoke, the things nearest to him had been Riku and Kairi, who, jarred by Sora’s movement, were returning to consciousness as well.
“Mgrnh,” Kairi mumbled, sitting up with a nest of hair tangling in her face. Riku, similarly eloquent, had opted to express his disapproval at being woken up with a “Snfsdd,” type of noise. At some point during their nap, Sora had wriggled between the two of them, leaving Kairi’s head on the sand, and Sora’s head on her stomach, close enough to her chest that when he had sat up he’d maybe blushed, just a little, with Riku using Sora as a pillow and somehow getting his legs tangled with Kairi’s anyway. The whole thing was very confusing, but none of them really felt a need to complain, or even give Sora a good-natured ribbing for his unconscious exploits.
“What…time is it?” Kairi asked, rubbing sleep from her eyes and fighting back a yawn.
“Judging by the sun,” Sora told her, “I’d say somewhere around four or five in the afternoon.” His stomach growled. “Just in time for dinner, then.”
Riku looked like he wanted to say something typically obnoxious in response, but as his mouth opened, his stomach let out a rumble that made both Kairi and Sora giggle, and Riku roll his eyes. “Maturity Islands, they should call it.”
“Well, of course, with such prudish citizens as yourself,” Kairi said, elbowing Riku in the side.
“What should we do for dinner?” Sora mused, leaning into Riku and clearly attempting to put the conversation back on its salient track, but answered his own question before either Riku or Kairi could produce a solution. “We should fish!”
“Really, Sora?” Riku asked, with an arched eyebrow and a flick on the nose.
“Yeah! The poles have got to be somewhere around here, and, I mean, it’s not like there were any toxic spills while we were gone, were there Kairi?”
“No,” she answered, but Sora barely even stopped to listen just prattled on:
“So the fish are probably fine to eat, and we can make another fire, and we could just stay here just the three of us, and it’d be really…great.”
“Eloquent,” Kairi chuckled, but there was something in Sora’s rambling that struck her, the idea of just the three of them, still together at home. It was one thing, she knew, to be indivisible in the midst of chaos and adventure, and entirely another to be inseparable back in the calm waters of home.
“But maybe a good idea,” Riku offered up. When Kairi gave him a wide-eyed look, begging to know where ‘oh-so-mature’ Riku went, he shrugged. “Going back to the mainland is just too much to handle. Everyone asks too many questions.”
Kairi had about half a dozen responses to that crowding for space on the tip of her tongue, each a variation, “You idiot, you stupid, big-hearted idiot, you did wrong, but you did right, too, and you’re home now, it’s okay, and we—,” but what came out instead was, “Bet I can catch more than both of you!”
She did, too, as they stood first ankle-, then knee-deep in the crystal blue waters of destiny islands, using bits of wild fruit and nuts as bait, and even a few worms they managed to dig up near the springs. The final score came out to Riku: four, Sora: four and an interestingly shaped piece of driftwood, which he said counted but no one else did, and Kairi: five.
“Four each, then,” Kairi figured, and before either of the boys could leap on her for her addition, she added, “and one to give back.” So they let the littlest of the fish back into the ocean, where it seemed to give them a wary look before turning tail and speeding off into the distance.
They were able to easily restart yesterday’s fire, and were happily roasting their fish on spits which had, inevitably, Kairi knew, been used first as props in a free-for-all swordfight that ended in a hunger-induced draw, when nature decided that they were done having it easy and the sky opened.
Kairi had noticed the dark clouds rolling massing behind them while they were fishing, brought in by strong, sudden winds, so really, she knew she should have seen this coming, and besides, summer storms came with a comforting regularity to Destiny Islands. As the rain fell on them, she looked up and then over at her boys. “So, is it even worth heading for shelter now?”
“After we eat,” Sora suggested around a mouthful of fish.
“Mmmhmm, they’re already starting to get cold,” Riku agreed, at least having the good grace to swallow half of his bite before talking. Kairi laughed and dug into her fish, too. They ate ravenously, spitting out bones into the damp remains of the fire and wiping their mouths on the backs of their hands, while the weather raged around them.
Sora, who was done first, to no one’s surprise, stood, and Kairi took a second to wonder, again, how his hair managed to stay spiky even when wet. She chalked it up to being one of the little miracles that Sora seemed to carry around with him, tucked in his back pocket, given away freely to everyone he met. He danced from foot to foot, until Riku and Kairi finished, minutes later, then asked, “So, what are we doing now?”
Kairi pursed her lips in thought. “With this rain, it’ll be hard to get back to the mainland, but I don’t think the storm’s going to last more than another half-hour at most. So…I don’t know.”
“We could, man, why can’t I think of anything,” Sora groaned.
“Because there’s not that much to do on this island in the middle of a storm,” Kairi reminded him.
“We should at least get out of the rain, though,” Riku reminded them indicating with a jerk of his head the tree house.
Sora looked up at the tree house, frowned, and then exclaimed, “Let’s go to the Secret Place!”
“Sounds good to me,” Kairi said, but looked at Riku afraid that, well, that somehow the Secret Place would remind him of the past two years, but he just smiled and nodded, so Sora lead them through the foliage and the cramped tunnel that opened onto their Secret Place. They devoured those drawings with their eyes, most of them meaningless doodles drawn by Sora and Riku when they were very little, but the one sketch that none of them could avoid staring at was the image of Sora and Kairi sharing a paopu fruit, smiling.
“We still haven’t you know,” Sora pointed out.
“Haven’t what?”
“Haven’t shared a paopu fruit yet, Kairi,” Sora replied, with a leer that dissolved into laughter.
“They’re not in season yet, and besides, I don’t know if they work three ways.”
“Three ways?”
“Sora,” Kairi started, casting Riku a look that she hoped he wouldn’t catch. But Riku had always been just as clever and alert as Kairi, and of course, of course, they made eye contact. Kairi looked away, furious with herself for making everything worse.
“I just figured we’d do it in pairs,” Sora explained, apparently oblivious to what had passed, “y’know, you and I’d share one, Kairi, and me ‘n Riku, and you and Riku. It’d work the same way, right?”
“Uh,” Kairi started, but found that she didn’t have anything to say. She couldn’t believe that thirty seconds ago she had thought Sora had pulled the most callous moved she’d ever seen; he’d never, no matter how clueless he could be, say something like that, hurt one of them like that.
“It might not work the same way,” Riku mused, snapping Kairi’s attention back to the world around her, “I mean, couldn’t it split our destinies up into segments, then, or something? Like, five years per duo?”
“I didn’t know you were a professor of paopu studies, Riku,” Kairi laughed.
“That’s Riku, though,” Sora chimed in, bumping shoulders with him, “he always had to be the know-it-all.”
“Wasn’t hard, really, with you guys.”
“Hey!” Kairi protested.
“Not including you, of course. You certainly gave me a run for island know-it-all when you first came here.”
“Oh shut up,” Kairi fumed, blushing, “it was just a phase, and you know it.”
“Sure thing, princess.”
“So, Kairi, if you’re so smart,” Sora laughed at Kairi’s perturbed expression, but carried on, “what do you think of our paopu problem?”
“I think we should just use one; Riku’s probably right.”
“No! You can’t tell him things like that; it only makes him worse,” Sora groaned, while Riku thanked Kairi.
“Didn’t know that was possible.”
“Hey!”
They settled down after that, sitting on the floor and making weak attempts at ghost stories, when something crossed Sora’s face, and he grabbed the chalk-like rock they used for drawing, and started to change the picture.
“Sora? What are you doing?” Riku asked.
“Adding you in, doofus.”
“Oh.” At that, and the stunned expression on Riku’s face that morphed into a goofy happiness, something in Kairi swelled and she grinned until her face hurt, and held off pointing out that the rain had stopped until after Sora had finished.
They went home after that, and had quite a bit of explaining to do, or at least Kairi did, though she suspected that Riku and Sora’s parents, even with the recent events, had become inured to their impromptu camping trips almost a decade ago. The next day Kairi slept in, happy to roll around in her sheets and drift in and out of lucidity until nearly noon, when she dragged herself downstairs and made toast, while wondering what to do for the rest of the day.
She called Sora as soon as she had showered and dried her hair, and he answered, sounding thoroughly miserable.
“Ab I de only one wib a cohld?”
“Uh, yeah, I think so? How did you manage that? We were all out in the rain for the same amount of time.”
“By dad had a cohld when I god back. Di’n’t thing I’d ged id.”
“Aw, no fun,” Kairi said, and they chatted aimlessly for a few minutes, before Sora sneezed loudly into the receiver and Kairi laughed, taking that as her cue to hang up. Without even setting the phone down she dialed Riku’s number, and waited. Unlike Sora, who had grabbed the phone two rings in, probably bored out of his mind, Riku, or his parents, who Kairi suspected were at work, but could have taken the week off to spend time with their returned son, let the thing ring off the hook.
Just before Kairi was about to give up calling and simply walk to Riku’s house, so, she thought, not really giving up, since she had promised herself that she would never give up on Riku, he answered.
“Hey, it’s Kairi, and I know Sora’s sick but I was just thinking that we could go get ice cream or something and then bring Sora soup or something,” Kairi blurted, without even giving Riku a chance to say hello or ask who was calling
“Do you wanna run that by me again?”
“Sure,” she laughed, and repeated herself. They agreed to meet in five minutes (more than enough time for both of them to get to the nearby ice cream parlor) and then head back to Riku’s to make soup, though both of them admitted that they didn’t know how.
Kairi threw on her customary pink dress, now clean, and bolted out of the door. She ran the entire way there, and when she got there, bracing her hands on her knees and trying to regulate her breathing, she looked up into Riku’s undeniably smug face.
“Shut up,” she wheezed, and Riku laughed.
“What flavor do you want?”
“You know,” she told him, watching him carefully for a change in expression, but Riku just nodded and turned to the girl behind the counter.
“Two sea-salt cones, please,” he drawled, and smiled at the girl, who Kairi vaguely recognized as being a year above her in school, so she would have been in Riku’s class and, judging by her blush and averted eyes, she was one of the many girls who had, for reasons unknown, found Riku’s aloof nature attractive. And even though Kairi was afraid the girl was going to drop something, she was actually very fast and efficient.
“You didn’t have to pay, you know,” Kairi told Riku as they walked off.
“Really, it’s no problem. Besides, you can pay for the soup."
“Fair enough. Are we going to get canned soup or are we going try and make it from scratch?”
“As nice as making it ourselves would be, we’d probably end up killing Sora.”
“True,” Kairi laughed, and turned her attention back to her ice cream. They made their way to the grocery store, a small local thing, in a companionable silence occasionally punctuated with slurps. The silence stretched through the buying of a can of chicken soup and roughly half of the walk back to Riku’s house, when Riku finally shattered it.
“So, what did you want to talk to me about?”
“Hm?” Kairi looked over at him.
“C’mon, Kairi, you can’t fool me. We wouldn’t have gone through this,” he waved his hand to encompass, Kairi assumed, the ice cream and the soup buying and even the walking together, “if there wasn’t something you wanted to talk to me about.”
Kairi pushed away her first half dozen impulses: to ask Riku if he really thought the whole thing was a painful waste of his time, to remind him that even though they had never been particularly close before, and, now that she thought about it, that was probably because Riku was jealous of her and her friendship with Sora, which made her also want to explain to him how important he had been to Sora even before the darkness came, but she skipped over that and admitted that Riku was right, she did have something she wanted to say.
“Look, Riku, this is sort of hard for me to articulate, but,” Kairi stopped, torn between rude and blunt, and convoluted but hopefully kind, “we, Sora and I, we never blamed you for any of this, and I, I know we weren’t very good friends and, yes,” she added as he shot her a glance, “I know part of that was my fault, but I know you tried to help me find my heart, too, and it does matter to me. Why do you think I could see the real you under that disguise? Because I trust you Riku, and so does Sora, and no, we never forgave you, because there was nothing to forgive.” She didn’t look at him once during her explosion, and when she finally cast a glance at him, Riku was staring at her with his mouth slightly open and his eyes wide.
“Kairi, look,” he began.
“Before you say another word, Riku, Naminé showed me everything from when you were at the castle. And I stand by what I said.” He closed his mouth after that, and though his shoulders were tense, a smile was also teasing at his lips, so Kairi felt like she had done right after all.
“Hurry up,” she laughed at him, running ahead, “Sora’s probably driving his mom up the wall already!”
“Oh you have no idea,” Riku agreed, “he’s ten times worse when he’s sick. Always has been.”
“I do too have an idea.”
“When Sora was six, he got the flu and ended up drawing all over his walls. Like, every inch he could reach. I was afraid his mom was actually going to kill him.”
“God. That’s…totally Sora.”
Riku pushed open his front door, and pointed out the kitchen to Kairi, who was busy trying to take in everything at once; she had never been inside Riku’s house before. The walls were all painted white, and beside the kitchens door hung a framed photo of Riku and his parents, taken when Riku was probably ten or so. It was, Kairi thought, actually pretty cute.
Once in the kitchen, the two of them managed to open the can before they got stumped, and stared at it.
“Well,” Kairi started, “we need a pot. And we need to turn on the stove.”
“Yeah, I figured that much. But I think we need to put water in the pot, maybe?”
Kairi checked the back of the can. “Yeah, that’s what we need to do. So, go on, do it!” Riku did, deliberately taking his time and making Kairi stop her foot and toss her hair, and absolutely make sure to act every bit the princess she was. When they were done, they manage to pour it into a transportable pot while only spilling a little bit, wiped at the spill quickly, and all but ran to Sora’s.
When they range the doorbell Sora’s mother gave them a huge smile, and Kairi thought she saw relief creeping at the edges of it, and let them in.