Derivative

Summary: Because dueling with wood swords isn’t fun without a partner, and blue eyes don’t look quite right without brown mussed-up hair crowned above them.

SoRiku | AkuRoku one-shot.

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The day Sora died, Riku was nine, three days shy of his foray into double-digit adolescence. He hadn’t been upset when he was pulled out of class, guided down the hall, and into an administration office, not even after a stoic father and tearfully emotive mother broke the news that changed everything.

At the time, Riku thought it would all be fine, that like a mainland vacation or a sick period necessitating out-of-school bed rest, Sora would be gone one day and return the next so life as best friends could resume on its predestined schedule.

Riku hadn’t understood the true significance of words like permanent until he encountered his first taste of death as an unyielding constant. It hadn’t hit home at an admin office sit-down or even during the brief but heartfelt funeral. Instead it was learned when his loneliness coalesced, forming smaller revelations most would consider mundane facets associated with the living of everyday life.

He felt it traversing the beach in the singular set of footprints left in his wake, saw hints in the discontinuation of sleepovers and the knowledge that other-world supposition wasn’t nearly as fun when posited solo. It cropped up in the newfound dearth of one-on-one blitzball skirmishes. It was even a mirthless hard hit that his age-worn velveteen Mickey plushie wasn’t the same now that his friend’s two complementing Disney toy animals had been boxed into storage.

Above all, it was the harsh realization of the impossibility to duel with wooden swords as a party of one, absent a boy once happy to yawp declarations of ‘best friends forever’ to the depths of oceanic heavens under the rising swell of a tree that grew paopu fruit.

The anger would feature later. It’d come in waves, ebbs and flows like emotion-based tides. Those natural occurrences were controlled by the moon, but nothing Riku experienced by way of this miserable heartache could ever be anticipated with such routine accuracy.

He learned that grief didn't end after a set number of weeks or months, but that people had timeframe expectations they were eager to impose anyway. Not only did grief sometimes twinge at emotional peripherals, he discovered it could just as easily twist even deeper into an impotent soul and throw positivity more permanently afield. For him most of all, it found a place ripe for festering in the vulnerabilities of a heart left considerably feeble. There it settled, solidified in time, unbeknownst to everyone but Riku himself.

He wasn’t alone in this initial despondency. Sora had been well-liked; he’d been the nucleus of a cadre of mutual friends. There had been others forced to endure similar stages of the process, those probably even willing to help divide the hurt into more manageable pieces, if Riku’d been willing to ask. His reticence to share anything associated with his best friend in life extended effortlessly into the realm of death, however. Now that only a memory remained of an affable smile, of blue eyes, brown hair, and sun-kissed island skin, Riku found himself enduringly less amenable to the idea still.

Wakka and Selphie were the first he let go, with Tidus not far behind. Kairi was trickier. In the beginning, she was indefatigable, insistent on them remaining in contact despite the well-set mask of his glowering countenance and an increasingly acerbic disposition in place to complement. Eventually, she too began to visit less and less, until all that remained of his former relationships was the occasional greeting during inevitable, unavoidable encounters in school corridors — and the memory of a blue eyed boy with a smile too big for his face serving as an everlasting reminder of the permanent hole at their core.

o - o

The first time Riku left Destiny Islands for more than a vacation or basic day trip, it was to attend college on the mainland, and he already had an inkling he’d never return home. His peers departed with him, and Kairi and Tidus were even assigned the same dorm house. That being said, Riku’s intentions were to start fresh, to sever past island ties with the cleanest of cuts possible. By then, he’d become superb at avoidance, singularly focused on classes, and it was easy enough to keep his door locked to the rest of the world.

Despite his best efforts to remain apathetic, there were times when the walls of his dorm room seemed to close in on him, others when his roommate would invite over noisy friends. Then Riku would leave, and the easiest destination requiring the least amount of effort was the downstairs community room. With his nose in a textbook, hard expression set, and earbuds pulsing an assortment of indie rock at externally audible levels, people were well on notice to leave him alone.

It was this very same community room where Riku first saw him, a nucleus surrounded by an assortment of friends around a pool table, focused on the myriad worlds of multi-colored stripes and solids. His features were subtly off-kilter, but the smile was perennially recognizable, and there was no way Riku could forget eyes so blue.

The boy laughed a laugh so similar to Sora’s it cracked grief in two around the cage of his heart, and long-stifled feelings crept out like spiders, static and prickling into his limbs. Riku watched from off in one corner in a chair near the board game storage locker as the boy chalked up the tip of his pool cue and took aim with Sora-esque confidence. He watched, held his breath, then waited, pretending the ache of longing at the lower dips of his ribs couldn’t possibly belong to him.

Sensing the weight of another’s gaze, the boy looked up, then over until he located the observing interloper, and they shared their first moment of dual awareness from two places across the same single room.

The boy was all mussed-up blond hair, ocean blue eyes, and the pale skin of an indoor-centric urban upbringing. These were superficialities Riku could ascertain immediately. Instead of averting his gaze, or shooting off a dirty look for staring so flagrantly, blue eyes looked at him for a beat of time, then two. Before turning back to his waiting friends, their owner offered Sora’s smile and a look that was just a little too big for such a diminutive, cherubic face.

Much like grief, the smile led to new things, to introductions and sitting together at dinner, to meeting people by the mere experience of close association. It led to Riku being able to say his best friend’s name again daily without unqualified anguish, if only in the silence of his mind. It led to learning names like Demyx and Zexion and Larxene, to late night dorm cafeteria cereal reconnaissance and shooting the shit on the campus green between classes while cramming for quizzes. It meant listening to Demyx’s off-key singing and learning about myriad instruments that made music via strings; and taking an extra class in Physics beyond his own major’s requirements at Zexion’s encouraging behest; and when Larxene needed a designated driver late one night after an unequivocal failure of a blind date, it meant Riku riding passenger-side, bleary-eyed, on the way out of the dorms and toward downtown in one particular blond’s car. It led to remembering that Sora had never had the chance to grow old enough to learn how to drive in the first place.

It also ushered in a fully resounding heartache, a feeling he thought he’d long ago learned to stifle. Because, most of all, meeting Roxas meant learning about Axel.

It’d have been easy to withdraw again after such a jarring revelation, a simple process of making himself increasingly unavailable just like before. It'd take a few ignored texts, a handful of unreturned phone calls, and people would start leaving him alone again, Riku figured.

But blues eyes kept calling, remaining steadfastly companionable, and the invites for nights out kept arriving. Riku, in turn, kept accepting as a direct consequence, no longer with Kairi, Wakka, Selphie, or Tidus, but with a new group of people who might residually count as friends. Growing up, some people might call it, and others still would be quick to note that he’d finally found a way to move on.

Only Riku still knew the agony afresh when he saw childhood remnants, whenever blue eyes looked at him with intimate familiarity at one moment only to silently recapitulate the wrong name the next. Roxas was his own person, with a different charge to his persona, augmented by Axel’s encouraging presence. Riku knew all this; he watched it play out day after day. He tortured himself with it every evening.

Just the same, the blue eyes were enough for him to keep on remembering, for the time being.

In a way, it seemed fitting that pain collected like fresh rain water every time he was in not-Sora’s presence. In that way, Riku discovered there were more ways to self-harm than the act of externalized injury and that mental scars lasted longer than sarcoline marks to his skin. It also fit, seemed somehow appropriate, to fall in with this crowd, a group of nobodies on campus whose shared experiences were formed by their mutual outsider status. This included, among other things, romantic same-gender attractions they’d all grown up believing constituted some inherent malfunction of being.

Riku knew enough about darkness and a half-lived, incomplete existence to find himself at home among them, even if he didn’t seamlessly jibe with their histories of urban adolescence, of parenting that more often encompassed enduring absence over supportive presence. Maybe this sense of tenuous acceptance was why he found himself saying yes to Roxas’ invitation to Axel’s off-campus apartment one Saturday evening to watch a movie with the rest of these new faces and different names than the ones he'd grown up with.

In the beginning, it was all popcorn and cheap alcohol, some jokes posed by Demyx, a bit of Larxene’s snide laughter, and an exasperated abundance of eye rolls from Zexion.  By intermission, it was Axel kissing Roxas who was nestled on his lap, Zexion conceding and sliding his hand into Demyx's, and Larxene hissing operatic indignation when she spotted both sets of boy-on-boy demonstrations of patent affection. By movie’s end, it was a trio of college seniors taking their leave while Riku remained curled up on Axel’s oversized beanbag, head filled with buzzing, with unwanted mnemonics occasionally punctuated by the soft vibratory purr of Roxas’ snores. Chest rising and falling beneath Axel’s attenuate arm on the love-seat only a few inches away, it served as a mocking reminder of what he himself might’ve had if death weren’t so persistently permanent.

At some point, he supposed, he’d fallen asleep, because at some point he found himself jolted awake under the weight of another’s observing scrutiny. Vision bleary, heart ever resignedly leaden, Riku fought a yawn and tilted his chin to look up toward the couch.

Blue eyes were studying him, the wide-eyed gaze overpowering subsidiary features on a cherubic face. In the stagnant silence of early morning, they shared their second moment of dual awareness from two places in the same single room.

This time there were no waiting friends or a pool game to turn back to, not even a familiar smile for Riku to latch onto. Instead, Roxas was staring and surveying, an affable nucleus at the center of the two who surrounded him.

“Swords,” he said, voice hushed, and Riku blinked at the vivid image the word induced. "I remember now. It’s impossible to play without a partner.”

He extended a hand attached to a pale arm, and Riku knew this was skin that had never felt an island’s sunlight. He reached up and twined his fingers into it anyway.

Roxas didn’t speak again, and Riku neither asked questions nor demanded a logical answer. Hand-in-hand they remained together, worlds apart, simply watching each other on the way to dawn and its patent reminder of the lives they were meant to finish with others.