Disclaimer: -sob-

Garden

As far as he knew, they were called day lilies because that's how long they lived. And he could have walked by that house a thousand times more than he already had without ever having to see them for what they were.

Riku Litman was a fittingly domestic person for his fittingly domestic life, and every day he walked home from school. One long straight line down one long narrow road to one short wide house.

It wasn't that the houses were identical, exactly, but they were about as memorable as the faces of strangers. He could have described every house on his walk back from school with his eyes closed, but he wouldn't do it very enthusiastically.

Tuesday afternoon brought tired, washed-out sunlight that didn't feel warm on your skin and barely made the effort to reach past the trees on the bank of the sidewalk.

He sneezed three times in a row ("Atsu! Atsu! Atsu!"), stopped walking, and blinked down at his sneakers.

"Ugh, typical," he muttered, bending down to retie the left one for the second time. He had difficulty finding his balance, crouched on the sidewalk, and sat down on his butt instead.

He noticed his laces were becoming unraveled; the plastic caps at the tips had come off and they ended in tufts like dirty, white lion tails.

When he stood up, he brushed his nose against a bush of scraggly white roses, which felt like butterfly wings. He shook his head, as if to clear it of the experience, and hitched his backpack over one shoulder.

Absently, he fingered the petals of one; when a few came off and fluttered to the ground he suddenly felt quite embarrassed to have ruined somebody's gardening and looked up at the house. It was, of course, still. There were no fluttering curtains. No busy-body old ladies scrunching their noses at him for mussing about in their lovely roses. Riku sighed.

"They're beach roses, y'know. So they don't even grow around here or anything."

Riku coughed abruptly and looked up. A boy, his own age or maybe a little younger, was standing next to the furthest corner of the house. He touched the wall and watched Riku with the sort of careful smile of a stranger.

"Yeah?" Riku said cautiously.

"Uh-huh," the boy said, coming up a little further so that he was standing directly behind a bed of purple flowers. "They're supposed to grow next to beaches, which is why they're called that."

He came forward a bit more and stuck his hand straight out, over the fence, and Riku had to back up a few feet to accommodate the arm. "I'm Sora," he said surely, and continued to hold his hand straight out from his body.

And Riku knew there was something strange about that.

"…Riku," Riku said, shaking Sora's hand reluctantly. Sora seemed satisfied with this, and smiled, putting his hand down next to his body again.

"Are you coming home from school?" he asked.

"Ah…" Riku hesitated, "Yeah."

"I'm not allowed to go to normal school."

Riku paused and looked at Sora, who stood quite happy on the other side of the fence, flanked by lilies, with dirty-brown hair and a sunny smile. He was odd, sure, but not that odd.

"You aren't?"

Sora shook his head and fingered the roses growing in front of the fence. "No," he said quietly, "I'm not. It's because I'm crazy. They're scared that I'll do something."

Riku didn't quite know how to respond to that. He stared at Sora, who seemed occupied with his beach roses. After a while he looked up and made eye contact with Riku, and he had nice blue eyes the color of blue crayons, but otherwise ordinary. He walked over to the gate and unlatched it, swinging it towards himself.

"Do you want to come in?"

Riku looked at Sora and said nothing for a long while. The kid had just, himself, claimed to be crazy. And not ha-ha-you're-such-a-goofy-nutball crazy, or at least, Riku was mostly sure he hadn't meant it that way. Even if he hadn't, they were past the age where you could just meet a stranger and start playing in the sandbox. Outside of a school, something like this, even with a normal kid – was odd.

Sora sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Listen, I'm not like, serial-killer, come-at-you-with-a-chainsaw psychotic or something, okay? I'm not going to come at you with a knife. I've just been stuck in this tiny house all day. And there are only so many comics a guy can read before he starts to – " He stopped himself and laughed. Not a crazy laugh, at least, that's what Riku thought, but a nice laugh. "Well," he said, "I guess it's too late to say 'I'll go nuts cooped up in here,' right?"

Riku shrugged and batted one of the day lilies absently. "Then why aren't you allowed to go to school?"

Sora looked at him, rolled his eyes, and leaned on the fence on the other side of the gate. "I dunno, maybe they think I'll do something weird and get my mom sued? She's a surgeon, you know," he said.

"Oh," Riku said, because he couldn't think of anything else to say. He kind of just wanted to leave, already, because he was getting more and more uncomfortable.

Sora shot him a glance that could have been a glare and could have been a plea, then charged up the steps to the house. He opened the door with a creak, leaned inside, grabbed something, then slid back out and closed it. He had a cell phone in his hand, and he tucked it into his pocket.

"Sorry," he said, "Just in case, you know?"

"Cool," Riku said, even though it wasn't, really, and he stepped through the open gate of the white picket fence.

The first thing he noticed was that their front yard wasn't one. It was all garden, and no grass to be found. There were big flowering bushes, and tiny little white flowers, and purple ones with buds that looked like balloons, and funny-shaped red ones.

He was careful to stay on the flagstone path laid out for visitors.

"It's pretty, huh," Sora said, coming to stand next to him and tapping the tip of his foot against the ground. "It's my mom's stress reliever, she says."

"That's cool," Riku said.

Sora shrugged and made a face, then sat down with his legs in a pretzel and started to paw through some violets.

"So, you go to the public high school?"

"Yeah."

"Is it really big? I've never seen it."

Riku sat down too, next to Sora, and felt the heat absorbed by the rock through his clothing. "It's pretty big, I guess," he said, "I think it's got maybe two thousand kids, so it's pretty big."

Sora picked what looked like a weed, and began to tear off the leaves systematically. "Wow," he said, tear, "Two thousand kids…I can't even imagine two thousand anything…" he was starting from the bottom, the biggest leaves of the weed, and winding his way up until he was left with the tiny new fresh ones.

"It doesn't seem so big," Riku said, "'Cause all of your classes are with the same group of like, maybe a hundred or two hundred kids."

Sora picked the last leaf off of the weed and tossed the stem behind his shoulder. He fingered the grass growing between the rocks. "A hundred or two hundred is still big," he said. "At least, I think so. My elementary school only had two hundred kids I think."

"Oh," Riku said, "That's cool." Riku Litman had never met a crazy person before, or at least, not to his knowledge. He wondered how it was that you could tell if a person was crazy or just weird.

"Can I ask you something?" he said, looking up at Sora, who had moved on from the grass and was swaying the stalk of a day lily back and forth. The sunset-orange flower on the very top quivered slightly. Sora's hands moved over the garden like he'd memorized it long ago.

"Yeah," Sora said absently, but he looked Riku in the eyes.

"You said you were crazy?" Riku didn't mean for it to come out as a question, but it had.

Sora smiled at him, the sort of smile Riku offered the relatives who gave him action figures for Christmas, and shrugged.

"It's okay if you ask," he said. "My doctor says it's multiple personality disorder." Sora considered this briefly and squinted up at the sun, his nose bunched into tiny wrinkles. "I don't think that's right, though. It's not…" he harrumphed and spread his fingers out on the stones in front of him. "It isn't two different people – " He made chopping motions with his hands, palms facing each other a few inches apart. "Well, I mean, it is. That's the point. It's not two me's. It's not two personalities, it's two people."

Riku didn't like to think of himself as blunt, but Sora seemed willing to share. "Isn't that what having two personalities means? Two people? Or, I mean…yeah. Two people who take turns with the one body?"

He wondered what Sora's other personality was like. What his other person was like.

Sora frowned. "That's the thing. It isn't. With…me – s-sorry, this must weird you out."

"No, no." Riku wanted to say that it was interesting, but something told him that was incredibly rude. Telling a kid your age that his mental disorder was tantamount to a good book or a pretty flower, interesting.

A silence settled over them and propagated itself.

"It's not two people and one body," Sora said at length. "It's…me, and my body, and he's…trapped inside. It's not his body." He put his hands in his lap. "He never takes over."

"Oh," Riku said for what felt like the thousandth time that day. Was that how it worked with schizophrenia? What was the difference between schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder? Was there one? It wasn't the sort of thing anyone taught you in school.

Sora shrugged, "Yeah. I just…I don't know. I get the feeling that he was meant to have his own body, and his own friends and his own family – " perhaps he realized he was beginning to rush, or it was something else entirely, but his voice fell down then. "…somewhere else."

Yeah, Riku thought, somewhere else, far away. I wouldn't mind that.

He didn't know what made him think that, but he did. He could almost understand Sora, to a degree. Imagining a self that was somewhere else. Maybe that was why the boy was the way he was. Was multiple personality disorder a coping mechanism for anything?

"Yeah," he said.

Sora looked at him, and went back to grasping the stem of the day lily and swaying it back and forth. He watched the flower with distracted eyes, then reached up and plucked off an orange petal streaked with red in the center.

"It's hard to understand," he said. "But it's like…if this petal is me. Or, was me." He held the petal between his thumb and forefinger and showed it to Riku, who nodded. "And then…me and Ro- the other boy," Sora licked his lips and paused. "We got separated." He tore the petal down the middle. "See? My doctor says this happened when my parents got divorced."

Riku nodded understandingly, even though he didn't.

"And even though he came back or…not, not came back," Sora stressed and moved his mouth around to look for words. "Not really came back, but that's the best way I can put it…and…" he put the two halves of the petal back together and lined them up so that it looked like a whole petal again. "But there's still the line down the middle, see?" he wiggled the two halves separately.

Above them, a cloud passed under the sun and took the brightness of the day away for all of ten seconds.

"Yeah, I think I sort of get it," Riku offered, which seemed like the right answer. Sora gave him that same halfhearted smile.

"You can see where the two halves still are," he said, looking at the petal again. "And you can't put them back together again, not really." He sighed, a big, heaving, put-upon sigh. He put the two halves on top of each other and ripped them in half in the opposite direction he'd torn the first petal. He tore the bits a few more times before letting them fall onto the flagstone path.

"Sorry," he said, "That was a dumb example."

"No," Riku said, because that was what you were supposed to say. Or, at least…he didn't know what applied here. How did you act around a crazy person, anyways? "I get it. At least, I think I get the gist of it." Sora poked at the petal bits on the flagstone.

"Hey," Riku said conversationally, "Now you can't even tell which parts of the petal belonged to which half of the flower!" He laughed. "So you kind of fixed it, right?"

Sora looked at him oddly. It took Riku a few seconds to recognize it as a look of typical teenage disbelief. "Yeah," he scoffed, rolling his eyes. "If you say so."

--

"You'll come again tomorrow, won't you?"

"Yeah, if you want me to."

"I do. It gets so boring. Hardly anyone walks down this road."

"Oh."

"Yeah…but I'll see you later!"

"Yeah, okay. Bye."

--

Riku stopped by the library on his way home, just because he could, or rather just because it was there.

They had a nice library, where he lived, and it wasn't too big but it almost always had what you were looking for. And if it didn't, it had something similar.

He pushed open one of the two doors at the entrance and ignored the carts of cheap old magazines and used books being sold next to the return slots.

He considered his day so far; he considered why he was where he was. He knew he had at least a good few hours of homework ahead of him, but the fact was that curiosity had gotten the better of him. Or rather, he'd let it. He didn't want to sift through pages of useless online gabble, or risk getting distracted.

The library catalog computer told him that what he was looking for was a book in a section two floors down and across the room with all of the encyclopedias and dictionaries, and when Riku found it, he found a stack of three thick, shiny, recently-published volumes on psychology.

He flipped to the page where multiple personality disorder began, then flipped through the following pages to see where it actually ended.

It took up several pages of a large book with small print and no pictures. Riku decided this was too much to read in just one day, so he hauled the large book, which was comforting in its musty smell of disuse and fresh ink, to the librarian's desk.

He smiled at the woman behind it and offered his library card to her, which she took. She typed some numbers into the computer, then opened the front cover of the book.

She wrinkled her nose distastefully and looked up at him with her librarian eyes. She frowned. "This is a reference-only book," she said, "Didn't you get it from the reference section?"

Riku blinked. "So?"

The librarian was a young woman, as librarians went. In her early thirties, maybe. She sighed. "You can't check out books from the reference section. They have to stay in the library."

He frowned at her and picked the book up again, slowly. "It's a library," he said quietly to himself. "You shouldn't call it a library if you aren't even allowed to check out any of the books."

But he left, anyways.

--

Riku wasn't the friendliest of the boys his age, but he'd been brought up with a healthy respect for politeness and a guilty conscience to match. Or, well, he liked to think so. And the next day, walking home, he stopped outside the fence to Sora's garden-house and waited patiently.

After a minute, he began to grow edgy, fidgeting awkwardly. The sun had been trapped behind muggy clouds all day long, and still was; everywhere looked like a flashlight being shown through a blanket.

The day lilies from yesterday had begun to wilt, and new ones were open. Dead flowers from several days ago were there, too, tiny shriveled brown stalks.

He fingered one absently. It felt like the back of his grandmother's hand before she'd died. Soft.

"I figured he meant the same time…" Riku told one of the newly blooming flowers and its unopened sister. "I can't exactly wait around forever. Maybe his other person took over."

Having said that, he began to feel a little guilty. He had never known anyone with a real mental disorder; he'd never talked to a psychologist about it. For all he knew, Sora only thought his other person never came out. Maybe days were missing from his life.

It seemed like an odd thing to be thinking, especially when the kid came around from the backyard wearing jeans and a windbreaker that rustled when he walked. Sora smiled at riku, and twirled the dandelion stem in his hand. The fluff of the flower had been blown off.

He looked perfectly normal, all things considered, or at least Riku thought so.

"Hey!" said Sora, pushing through a patch of flowers onto the flagstone path. "Sorry if you were waiting, I kind of lost track of time…" His eyes were bright and his jaw shook just a bit when he smiled.

"Yeah, yeah, it's…it's no problem…" Riku told him, fingering the point of the fence post.

"Well…do you wanna come in? It's kind of gross, out here. It'll probably rain soon." A fine fog floated in the air like dust; the beams of headlights were visible. Riku looked at Sora, whose short blond hair clung limply to his forehead, who smiled and twirled the dandelion stem in his hands.

"Sure," he said.

So he was led inside by his new schizophrenic friend, and sat at a wooden kitchen table in a green and yellow kitchen. He kept his backpack on, and perched on the very edge of his seat because of it. He didn't feel entirely comfortable there. It seemed like a normal home, but he didn't feel comfortable.

"Hey, I have to go do something real quick," Sora said, heading for the door outside. "But I'll only be a few minutes, okay?"

Riku nodded. "O-okay." He didn't know how to feel, in the house of such a lonely sick person.

He sat at the wooden kitchen table in a green kitchen chair in the green and yellow kitchen for only two minutes before a woman in her early fifties came into the room.

"Oh!" she said, her voice staccato with surprise. "I didn't expect anyone to be in here." She frowned, paused thoughtfully for a few seconds, and continued. "Are you a friend of my son's?"

"Uh," Riku began, feeling increasingly misplaced. "Yeah, yeah, but – he said he'd be right back, so I'm just waiting for him."

"It's no problem," she said, and gave him a smile which made the wrinkles around her mouth stand out. "I – " she looked at something behind him, and the wrinkles disappeared from her mouth and showed up on her forehead, above her raised eyebrows. They narrowed. "Did you write that?"

Riku looked at her like a shaken rabbit. "Wr-write what?"

"That." She pointed behind him. "Did you write that on my refrigerator?" He recognized the disgruntled parent in her.

Riku turned around in his seat, twisting awkwardly, and stared at the white kitchen refrigerator. Written with a black whiteboard marker in uneven, boyish script, taking up almost half of the space, was what might have been a poem:

you were right
and maybe the only way to be whole again
is to be smashed into a thousand tiny pieces
so I'll stand in the road
ready for it
arms spread wide
and smiling
eyes closed
in the rain.
I never was very good at subtlety

"Oh, God," Riku said. "Oh, oh God." His heart felt like it was getting smaller and smaller.

He turned back around and stared at Sora's surgeon mother, who was looking back at him with pursed lips and raised eyebrows with a question on her tongue, and all he could think of was to apologize. But he couldn't.

"God," he said, bolting out of his seat with his heavy backpack on just one shoulder. He carefully unlocked the door and stepped out onto the grey porch, the paint peeling on the exposed steps.

And it was raining.

Sora was there, in the middle of the road, staring down it intently. He couldn't have been able to see much; the fog faded everything away into whiteness eventually.

"Hey!" Riku shouted, and he clattered down the steps. Sora looked up at him and smiled. He took one hand out of his windbreaker pocket and waved like it was the first day of school.

There was the sound of a large car – a truck, maybe, or a van – coming from the direction Sora was looking.

He was true to his word. He shrugged at Riku, What can ya do?, and turned back. With his arms spread wide and his eyes closed. He smiled.

Riku shouted at him.

"No! No, no, you idiot, you idiot, I didn't mean it! I didn't mean it like that! Sora!"

And Sora, with his arms still stretched wide, opened his eyes and turned his head to look at Riku, eyebrows furrowed and mouth slightly confused.

"I thought – "

A/N: There's a reason it isn't tagged with tragedy.

Just think of it in the context, okay? (I'm not saying Sora's suicidal.)

Thoughts are really great, but it's a oneshot, so...