Crossover with Valiant by Holly Black.

If you’re a fan of both KH and her books, you WIN. 8D;

PARADISE LOST

“I have nowhere left to go,
but I cannot stay where I don’t belong.”
(Exodus — Evanescence)

It’s funny, Kairi thinks, how you’d always think of roads, sidewalks, floors, as dirty. But it’s only when they’re underfoot.

When you’re looking up to the sky from a street corner — sitting on the very same paved place up against the wall of some used bookstore, watching people-traffic with idle interest, it’s not horrendous. It’s not the sea of litter you once thought of it as, and it’s nothing, nothing, nothing to fear.

There are greater things to fear.

It’s just the ground.

And you’re just sitting on it.

(She was sitting on it, back when Riku found her —)

“You’re lucky,” he still tells her seriously, sometimes, “it was me, not some old creep. You even looked like a day old runaway.”

(Clothes, scruffy but not torn. Scared, but not lost. And completely unsure.)

She always argues, but he’s right.

She was all of that and some more, that day.

But Riku found her, and Riku brought her to the abandoned café in a part of the city that was starting to get old, undesirable, like a diva past her day — and did you know Botox was originally designed for freezing the movement of buildings? How fitting. It was the former chorusline idol part of town, the sensation who lost her voice.

They all knew it, all of it, was going to be torn down someday. Picture skyscrapers, condos, the ideal lifestyle on the skyline. Picture the city’s bright future.

But everyone has their own vision of ideal.

For Kairi, it was out.

- - -

Hayner left the day he turned sixteen. Left home, left school. He was loud and energetic about everything, but it was all muted when he told Kairi. His mom was an addict. He wouldn’t say what of. His older brother was in some gang, it scared the shit out of him. It all scared the shit out of him. So he ran.

Naminé couldn’t meet Kairi’s eyes when she said it; her hands clutched tighter around her markers, poking holes through a sketchbook page. How sometimes she felt like a ghost already, a shaking leaf, a paper doll. How her foster dad unlocked her bedroom door.

Yuffie, she never said.

Somehow, you’d assume the worst, but Kairi secretly always figured that Yuffie’s motivation was as insignificant-in-the-big-picture as her own. And that made Kairi feel somewhat better, because whenever she saw Hayner’s smile sink, or heard Naminé scream in her sleep, she felt like such a fraud, like she didn’t belong in that group of real people with real problems. Which was in all likeliness why she got along with Yuffie so well.

Honestly, Yuffie fascinated her. She wrote with stolen markers on her fraying jeans and clipped fifty-cent buttons to the neck-creases of the army hoodies she never bothered to wash. Her pockets were full of hairclips. The only songs she’d sing were show tunes. She slipped candy she didn’t plan on eating into her pockets from subway newstands, because she was a self titled ninja, and she could.

Kairi couldn’t even bring herself to fish pennies from mall fountains.

Then again, that was just degrading.

And it’s funny how a definition changes so quick, but with the abandoned coffee shop to call their own, they were pretty well off as far as street kids went. Hayner, who managed to make himself borderline presentable every evening, had a pizza delivery job. Namine, when she was bored, did sidewalk chalk art along some busy stretch. Yuffie had her mad skills, of course.

And Riku — well, Riku...

- - -

Riku never said what drove him away from home either, but it wasn’t like with Yuffie. You just knew it was as real a reason as any. He’d been out on his own before any of them ever decided to leave, that was all Kairi knew. Riku’d found Hayner and they’d found Namine and one day they found the building. Yuffie hadn’t come until a few weeks before Kairi. There was the backstory. And it all started with Riku.

At first, Kairi, she’d taken it like Yuffie, not letting on what drove her away.

But then it was August, two weeks after she’d been taken in, and even though summer still had a month to go, the skies were storm grey to match the smog, and it was windy, and it was cold. She and Riku were on a bench, watching Namine do her chalk thing over on the other side of Trinity Square, and that was when Riku talked it out of her — not that it took much, since she was already feeling guilty enough to want to tell someone, anyone.

“You don’t need to know,” she said. “It’s not important.”

“Nothing’s important, not when you’re already gone. But I still want to know.”

So she told him, and it sounded all wrong in words, but the bottom line was, she didn’t belong. Anywhere, ever.

“It probably sounds so generic.”

He shrugged it off. “I’ve felt that way too,” he said, and it could have been agreement or reassurance, but she didn’t ask; she just took it as it was. And Riku hugged her then, and it was so warm.

- - -

By the time the city had its first snowfall, Kairi couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

“One demographic’s hell,” Riku said in his overly intelligent way, cupping his hands around styrofoam cup with a double shot of espresso, “is our glorified paradise.”

Paradise, Namine sprayed on the alleyside wall of their coffeeshop, in silver, violet, blue, black. The smell hung around for ages, whenever they slipped out that creaking back door. But it never got inside.

Poetry in the streets.

- - -

Three months, Kairi had been with them. Three months, and then Yuffie found Lolli.

Her eyes were lined thick with a glittering pale silver. Her hair came down in blue cascades, not quite straight, but gleaming like a doll’s plastic strands. She wore miniskirts and go-go boots, both white, despite the inconvenience of light clothing in the streets. But you didn’t notice the grey starting from the edges unless you were looking for it. She said she’d been ‘out here’ for ages, and she told the first part of her story with glee. Her overage boyfriend, his thing for drugs. Her revenge.

Hayner laughed and Riku raised one eyebrow and Naminé looked like she’d be happy never to see the creepy addition to their makeshift family ever, ever again. Yuffie was amused, annoyed, sometimes said she should have left the girl freezing on that bench — and Kairi, she decided that Lolli was highly prone to dramatic exaggeration, that was all, and Yuffie was all too happy to agree with her on that.

They heard the second part soon enough.

- - -

It was snowing harder than usual, and they were all crowded around the old portable heater — garage-sale gold — like a modern day parody of a campfire.

It was Yuffie who asked if anyone wanted to tell a story.

It was Lolli who said she had one.

“Once upon a time,” she said, “in a city bigger and brighter than this one, there were three stupid kids who lived on a hidden subway platform. They were runaways. Like us. Only they knew something more,” and here she grinned like a streetcorner psycho, the kind you see preaching the world’s end.

“They knew about faeries.”

“Fairies.” You could hear the smirk in Riku’s voice.

“Don’t you believe?” Her grin widened. “Yeah, faeries. Not your average Tinkerbell brand fairies either. Nasty little things, with their courts and rules and curvy little bloodthirsty grins. They’ve got their light court, their night court, but in the end, they’re all absolutely evil, batshit crazy.

“And these kids, they were crazy for getting caught up with them.

“Sure, it was great. For a while. The fairies had something they all wanted, and they got it, as long as they did their deliveries like good little rats. And it went on, just like that, everything was great. Until she joined them.”

“Let me guess,” Yuffie muttered, “was ‘she’ you?”

Lolli gave a bitter laugh.

“No way,” she said. “I was one of the stupid kids.”

- - -

So she told. And told. And told. The girl, the bridge, the stairs, the troll, the potions, the iron sickness, the cure, the poison slipped in that killed the city fey, one by one. How creepy and beautiful it was to see a dead mermaid by the lakeshore. How everyone else fucked it all up, how she left them behind before she could catch the ending.

And it wasn’t believable in the least.

But it was a great story.

“What did the fey have,” Kairi asked, “that the kids wanted so bad?”

“Don’t encourage her,” Riku whispered — but an animalistic curve of a smile was already set on the storyteller’s face.

“The potions the troll made,” she said, “they made the fairies almost immune to the iron sickness. But when mortals drank it, breathed it, shot it through their arms, into their veins — they could do things. They could use fairy magic.”

Yuffie was already turning away. “Sounds idiotic to me.”

“Just because something is a bad idea,” Lolli told her with the air of quoting someone far away, “doesn’t mean you can help doing it.”

She then unwrapped her blankets, shivering but thrilled, and shook off one boot. Her feet were so much smaller than the lower section — when she turned it upside down, a small bundle of cloth tumbled out of the boot. She unrolled it with glee.

“We called it Nevermore,” she whispered excitedly. “Because of the rules. Never more than— …” Her voice trailed off. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. We had rules, but we broke them all anyway.”

And they wouldn’t have been listening. They would have tuned her out, only she’d already opened the package, and the smell was seeping through. And if anything, you could taste the magic — in wavering whiffs. Just the fumes through the air and the surge through your head was enough to send sparks to your fingertips to your feet through your veins and it was no hallucination. Not then. Not there.

A dark promise drifted through paradise.

She was already pulling the instruments from her pockets, lining up dirty needles with the city’s sky in her eyes.

“Ever wanted to fly?”