Pairing: Riku x Sora
Theme: 8:二人の世界 (our world)
Genre: Angst/Yaoi/Fluff
Rating: M
Warning: Contains spoilers for Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts 2.
Author's Note: This story takes place between the end of KH2 and the secret ending/KH3.
Disclaimer: These characters were created by Squaresoft and are owned by Disney. The first two quotes in italics come straight from the ending of KH2 and are strictly the property of Squaresoft and Disney. I make no money from this; it's just for fun. Please don't sue me.

Summary: Sora and Riku have returned to Destiny Islands, but is it really possible to go home again? Some things can only be understood by someone else who's been to hell and back.

s

s

s

Pain Shared

In the bright light of day, if someone had had the balls to go up and ask him, Riku would have been unable to come up with a reason why he was still alive. The sunshine and beautiful blue ocean of Destiny Islands only served to make him feel empty and alone and, most of all, terribly horribly out of place in his surroundings.

In the blinding light of the afternoon sun, Riku struggled to understand why he'd come back here. He'd never intended to return home; after what he'd been through, it would never be home again. There was no such thing as home for people like him.

All along, he'd thought the best he could hope for would be a few minutes to make his apology to Sora before saying his final farewell. He'd planned on it, gone over that last good-bye in his head a million times. Riku had known just how it would go when he got the chance: the heartfelt speech, the swift lean-in at the end for that last-first shocking kiss. He'd even known exactly what the look on Sora's face would be.

But when that time had finally come, it hadn't gone that way at all.

"Issho ni iko!"

"…aa."

It had been far too easy to agree. After all their time apart, Riku had forgotten the power his best friend had over him, even moreso now that he'd proven himself to be the true keyblade master; Riku had seen it with his own eyes. And it was difficult to say no to the keyblade master, much less his beloved friend over whom he was still labouring under a heavy burden of guilt for having put through hell.

But, more than anything, Riku had agreed to come back through his own selfishness. He was addicted to Sora, after the way they'd fought together at the end, side by side and back to back, merging in a seamless harmony of destruction, moreso than ever. That was a high he found himself unable to give up so easily.

And so he'd gotten himself stranded here. Again. Only this time Sora and Kairi were 100 certain about their feelings. This time there was nothing standing between them. This time there was no room left for Riku at all.

Sora tried his best to include him, kept on fumbling in that awkward sincere way of his, as if recovering their old friendship was still possible if only he tried hard enough. But Riku knew when he'd become extraneous. He spent a lot of his daylight hours in the cove, thinking.

And at night, the island was his. Riku had made the decision not to return home. After all this time, his mother should have given him up for dead, and he felt it was better that way. He was dead, in so many ways. It could only hurt her more to see him now.

The dark was a blissful respite from the pressures of trying to appear as if he still fit in when the others were around during the day. At night, he didn't have to lie or pretend. He could just be. The gentle roar of the ocean as it carried up to the fort was soothing. And after days when he felt particularly out of place, Riku would take his bedroll to their secret place and rest there, surrounded by chalk drawings of childhood memories.

It was there that it first happened.

Not many days after Mickey had taken his knight and the wizard and returned home, Riku lay curled on his side in the comforting darkness, trying to escape the phantoms of guilt long enough to achieve sleep. It had become harder and harder since he'd chosen to wake up inside Castle Oblivion. Some days, he toyed with the idea of abandoning sleep all together, as it seemed so determined to elude him, but part of him still seemed to need it.

So Riku had been there alone in the late hours of the night when he'd heard footfalls at the mouth of the cave, entering the tunnel. He'd held his breath and closed his eyes, squelching the old fear with an effort as he waited to see what would happen. And then suddenly a warm body had lain down next to him in the darkness, bigger than he remembered it being, taller, stronger now. It would take some getting used to. They'd both grown in the years they'd been apart, but Riku felt Sora had changed the most.

And as he'd thought about this and waited for his friend to say whatever it was that had compelled him to row out to the children's island in the middle of the night, a callused hand had hesitantly reached out for his. Riku had stopped breathing, part of a suppressive instinct to restrain the selfish desire that was giving him a wild hope as to why Sora had come to see him so late, knowing it couldn't be that. But when the other boy had rolled toward him and he'd felt a stiffness pressing against his thigh as an awkward shuffling of limbs ensued, Riku had given in to what he wanted. Just this once, he'd told himself.

Their lovemaking had been neither passionate nor gentle, but instead reflected the slow burn of the ash-buried embers of their friendship mingled with the masculine bravado of their long-standing rivalry. Almost before they'd both acknowledged what they were about to do, a struggle for dominance broke out, the quiet desperation each had for the other making it more violent than it had to be.

But it had felt so good to be blatantly honest for once. Things were not fine between them; had not been since long before Riku had opened The Door. This was what they were: not calm, smiling old friends, finally at peace with each other and themselves at the end of a long and arduous journey, but two lost boys struggling to put themselves back together from memory, afraid to find out what they'd become after everything they'd been through, having survived their own personal hells only to find they were still angry over previous wrongs done one another, and yet each still desperately needing the other somehow, in spite of everything. It was a bond that repelled and attracted both at once, strong as elemental force.

The first time it had happened, Riku had clung to Sora like life, gasping under the weight of his guilt, unable to comprehend the absolution his friend was offering. Because somehow, Sora did forgive him. It was the undeniable unspoken fact in the younger boy's trusting surrender to him that night. Sora had not lost the struggle; Riku knew well from first-hand experience that his friend could easily beat him at anything if he just put his heart into it. Being granted the lead was a boon, not a prize Riku had won from the other boy.

Humbled by Sora's inexplicable forgiveness, Riku repaid his trust with an intense tenderness, slowly leading him through the steps necessary to what they both wanted, finding in the younger boy an emotional focal point in the darkness that overwhelmed him to the point of tears he would not shed.

Afterward, they had lain together in the soothing lull that had followed the ecstatic storm of need, when it was all right to hold one another, to run bare hands over the scars they'd left on one another's bodies and offer hesitant kisses of apology. Things that there were no words for by the light of day could be said there in the dark without words. And Riku's mind had been sent reeling from the revelation of an intimacy they'd never before acknowledged. It had made him dizzy, and he'd fallen into an exhausted sleep, feeling both less empty and more confused than ever before.

It had come as no surprise to wake up alone the next morning. He might have written it all off as a dream but for the unmistakable imprint of Sora's teeth on his shoulder and chest; concrete evidence that kept him away from the others all day. He needed to think, and doubted Sora wanted their friends to know what had happened between them. Certainly he could do without the inevitable razzing he would have gotten from Wakka at the sight of them.

But, as long as he thought about what had happened, Riku did not know what to make of it. He could not conceive of what must have been in Sora's mind to lead him to do such a thing. Perhaps it had just been the appearance of Roxas he had been waiting for. Kairi had taken up drawing since their return—something she'd never before had an interest in, much less skill—and Riku had felt it was only a matter of time before the second Nobody showed himself in Sora. Perhaps that was what it had been: Roxas missing Axel. He resigned himself to merely having been on the receiving end of a wild act of grief perpetrated by a sub-persona over which Sora had little control.

The saddest part was that he was okay with that, to take what he'd gotten, even if it had not been intended for him at all.

Riku refused to think about the new low this set for him. And he didn't have long to avoid thinking about it, because the following night, Sora proved him utterly wrong by showing up again. And again they fought before and during, and afterward Riku collapsed into a stunned, blissful silence, nursing a split lip and a bad bruise on his cheek that would no doubt have turned into a nice shiner by the time he woke up.

He couldn't believe it, didn't understand it, but he was not about to argue with it. He was that selfish.

That was only the second time of many. Sora came to him almost every night after that. And every time, it was the same. Without a word, he would lie down beside Riku and slowly reach out to take his hand. From there, it could go any number of ways, all of which inevitably erupted in the violent struggle for dominance. It was a lot like those first battles they'd fought, only this time they were fighting for instead of against one another. Even though Sora often let him win, Riku woke up the following mornings with many a minor injury, not excluding the bite marks, which became standard.

It was Riku who taught Sora about submission, being the one of the two of them who knew from painful experience. He had learned at the ungentle hands of that one who had called himself Ansem, back in those early days when there had been no reason at all for living, no Sora to stand between him and his darkness, challenging him to fight it instead of just surrendering to it.

Because he was the one who knew, Riku led the younger boy by example. Sora was an eager student and a fast learner, often greedy to maintain the dominant role over the older boy who had always been better, stronger, faster. Until now.

Surprisingly, Riku found that he did not mind as much as he might have thought he would. Sora was not Ansem. And letting the other boy top was part of a long healing process in which Riku gradually learned it was all right to make himself vulnerable to someone else, so long as it was the right person and by his own choice.

And slowly, very slowly, he came to be able to bear the loneliness of the unforgivingly bright days, secure in the knowledge that night would come when once again there would be no need for words and all the things that could not be said could at least be shared and, impossibly enough, understood.

Nights on the island were an entirely different world from the days, a private world that existed for them alone. Riku lived for that time, when everything else would disappear, and his world came down to a beloved voice gasping his name in the dark.

The days, however, remained the same. It was a surreal dichotomy for Riku, the awkward, grinning Sora by day who still struggled so hard to include him and bring Riku back into the comforting circle of old friends, and the greedy hellion who came to him in darkness, demanding and possessing, taking everything he was willing to give and then some, spilling his hot seed across Riku's bare skin most every night.

But his life was almost entirely composed of dichotomies now. This was just one more in a long line of those he'd come to discover on the road to dawn. And because of that, Riku knew he didn't have to reconcile them, he simply had to accept them.

Sora, however, seemed to have other ideas.

It was early one evening and the two of them were looking out at the horizon from the paopu island, the older boy perched in the submissive position on the windblown trunk of the tree, the younger boy leaning back against it with arms folded across his chest. They were alone, sharing an easy silence as they watched the sun descend into the water, its fading glory painting the horizon a thousand shades of fiery gold and scarlet. And then, without a word or a glance, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, Sora reached back and took his hand.

And, shockingly, Riku found that it was the most natural thing in the world.

Perhaps he had just imagined the dichotomy of Soras after all, for those same feelings that lit up the darkness still existed here in the light of day, Sora's presence steady beside him here as it was when all he knew of his friend was salt and sweat, panted moans and knowing hands that needed no light to see by.

As Riku staggered under the weight of this revelation, Sora continued to quietly hold his hand, all the way up until Selphie and Kairi returned from their shell hunting expedition.

That night when Sora came to him, Riku repaid the gesture with one of his own…

s

A/N: Sorry to cut this piece short, folks, but I'm really not sure how strict the webmasters want to be about their censorship of mature content. I might've posted too much as it is. If you'd like to read the rest of this story, please follow this link to Livejournal (by adding the necessary punctuation to the web address since the site doesn't want to let me post a link):