Chapter Five: Roxiri – Lunch

Roxas looks critically into the mirror, staring in silence at his fogged up image as he rubs hard at his soaked hair.

He had just finished his shower to get the clay out of his hair and skin.

In Kairi's bathroom.

He was currently naked in the Seventh Princess's bathroom, with only a thin towel wrapped around his waist to preserve his dignity. Well, that, and his normal black and white wristband but… that didn't cover anything at all. He adjusts the towel, tying it a little tighter and he looks back into the mirror.

And he still had some clay on the very top of his fringe.

Spinning on his heel, Roxas walks back into the shower and scrubs harder at his hair, nearly scalping himself in his attempt to get the damn stuff out.

With him so focused on his hair, when the door opens with a hard slam and Kairi comes in with her eyes closed, waving a bottle of shampoo, there is no way that the young Nobody couldn't have jumped and nearly fallen out of the closed shower.

"Kairi!" He shouts angrily, thanking every deity that might have existed for convincing Kairi's dad to put in a fogged glass shower container rather than the clear ones he'd seen in the Organization's bathrooms. "I'm still in here! Wait your turn!" Roxas commands in his very best Xemnas voice.

Undaunted, Kairi waves the bottle again.

"Oh, it's fine, I have my eyes closed," the princess declares proudly before wandering over to the shower and ripping the door open.

"Gah! Kairi!"

Kairi smiles broadly at the very naked boy before plopping the bottle of shampoo into his hand. Roxas, numb and startled at the sight of a Princess with wet hair and grinning at him while wearing little more than a bathrobe, silently accepts.

"This is very good for taking out clay and other dirt," Kairi assures him before spinning on her heel, cheerfully walking out and humming as she went. "The boys and I use it all the time!"

After a moment of watching the girl walk out and then shut the door behind her, Roxas quickly darts out of the shower and locks the door with all the strength he's ever given behind a Keyblade stroke.

Kairi hums to herself as she moves around the kitchen, apparently steadily ignoring the boy in the rolled up sweatpants and borrowed t-shirt as she pulls out various spice containers and jars from their places on shelves. Roxas glares at her for a moment before plopping himself down onto a chair and watching her lazily.

She pulls one jar down to inspect its contents for a moment before placing it back onto the shelf. The Princess does this for three more minutes until Roxas finally has enough and asks: "What are you looking for?"

She turns around, smiles, and shrugs. "For the peanut butter. To make the sandwiches." Kairi replies honestly before going back to the jars.

Roxas stares at her for another minute.

"Wait, we're not going to go eat lunch somewhere?"

"Nope, we should have a picnic," Kairi replies, though her words are slightly muffled by the gigantic jar she was in the middle of pulling out of one of the cabinets. "Cause you've never been to the children's island, right? It's fun! … this isn't peanut butter…. Dad, why do you have this…"

Roxas waits a moment before jumping forward, opening various cabinets and pulling out ingredients for the meal he wanted to help make. Of course, since this was Destiny Islands, the food they made had to resist hot temperatures. If they brought something like tuna salad, it could curdle in the sun and make them sick later. Same with milk. Catching onto Kairi's mental plans, he starts lining up the jars needed to make some delicious peanut butter and jam sandwiches.

He also ducks into the underskirts of the cabinets beneath the counter, bringing several enormous jars of flour, granulated sugar, and powdered sugar out with a triumphant hmph and placing them up onto the counter.

Kairi grins at the sight of the ingredients. "Planning on baking?" She asks Roxas curiously, and she chuckles when he yelps and dodges a spider's web as he extracted a giant bottle of vanilla extract.

"What's a picnic without cookies, your majesty?" He teases, nudging Kairi playfully in the side as he hands her the bottle. She laughs and accepts the bottle, curtsying sweetly before throwing a hidden handful of powdered sugar into the boy's face.

He jump, dodging the sugar.

"No calling me Princess, Roxas," Kairi declares with a teasing laugh, though she gracefully bows her head when Roxas scoops up a handful of flour and smears it onto her red locks.

"I didn't," He snarks back, winking at her as she coughs out a breath of white powder. "I called you 'Your majesty,' Kairi." He then mimics her dainty curtsy, blushing hard as she glares at him.

He'd never curtsied before; who'd have thought that there was so much weight on your ankles?

There was a brief calculating look in the depths of the girl's violet-blue eyes that makes Roxas back up, ready to get another faceful of some sort of ingredient.

"Just give me a couple eggs from the fridge, smarty Nobody," Kairi mumbles in embarrassment, her cheeks turning nearly as red as her infamous hair.

Heck, Roxas sees to his intense amusement, she was turning as red as Axel's hair.

He stares at her for a few moments as she ties on a curiously frilly apron more suited to be the accessory of a French maid and starts cracking the eggs he quickly brought to her into a bowl.

"Peanut butter cookies? Or should we make some other kind?" Kairi asks curiously.

He grins, chuckling as she turns redder when he takes another curtsy. "Sire, your majesty, I'm fine with sugar cookies. As long as I make them; you might poison me out of spite, ya know," The boy drawls slowly, making her turn around and start laughing hysterically.

"Roxas! Cut it out and just help me!" Kairi scolds as he dodges yet another elbow and then gets dragged in closer by a caught sleeve. He soon finds himself holding a wooden spoon and being directed by his new instructor in the proper way to melt chocolate to drizzle over cookies.

As she explains the steps to melt chocolate in a weird pot in pot action thing, Roxas is struck by the similarities of the girl to his girlfriend.

Kairi is currently in the same calm lecturing mode that he would occasionally find Naminé in. The last time he'd seen it, they had been watching a documentary about painters that they'd found on the internet. Namine, since her powers revolved around her drawings, had become enraptured by the odd forms and colors being projected on the screen. Roxas couldn't have cared less, but had found himself in a lot of trouble when he dozed off in the middle of the show and woke to find himself being drawn by an intense-looking Nobody with a canvas.

She had spent the next few hours cheerfully telling him what she'd learned on the show, all while smiling and attempting to capture him with gentle paint strokes.

He still had the dot-filled, er, pointillism, painting in his room, hung up on the wall near the window. It had been the only decoration to grace his half of the small bedroom he shared with his Somebody.

Just like Namine, Kairi smiles a lot when she explained things, even if Roxas messed up. When he accidentally drops water into the bubbling brew, she only informs him that water ruined the bonds between chocolate and he quickly learns how to "unmess" it up.

He drops the rest of the ingredients into the mixture, turning it into a much thicker paste, or as Kairi called it: "icing."

When she brings out a small jar of almond cookies, he is the one to dip half of the treat into the chocolate and then the other half into the vanilla mixture Kairi had been making while he focused on the chocolate.

He's in such a good mood, he doesn't even mind when Kairi hand-feeds him the cookie with a cheerful "Open your mouth, Roxas! Taste!"

The sweetness of the vanilla and the slight bitterness of the chocolate melts in his mouth in a way that makes him stop, something that had never happened with food since he'd first eaten sea salt ice cream.

Kairi grins when he demands the name of the delicious cookie.

"Why, don't you know?" She asks curiously. When he shakes his head slowly, she giggles then motions him forward. He leans towards her and she presses her lips close to his ear. Her breath tickles as she whispers. "They're actually Roxas cookies!" She teases.

When the pair finally steps off of the dock onto the small island, they automatically press their hands together, cheerfully hooking their pinkies together like little kids.

Roxas swings the basket hanging off of Kairi's arm, laughing along with her as she animates a story of Sora and Riku running a race in which Sora had tripped and fallen on a coconut, only to come up with a mouthful of seaweed and shouting that he'd grown a beard. The girl makes a grumpy face as she mimics Riku's deeper voice and then a goofy grin as she goes into her Sora personality.

Despite the heat and despite Kairi taking over the oars because Roxas had slammed into the dock back on the main island, the two of them are perfectly cool as they walk along the beach. Every so often, she'd bend down to inspect a seashell or to nudge a little crab out of the way and into the safety of the surf away from Roxas' shoes.

When one story finishes, Roxas himself takes up the next one, describing a strange, half-remembered memory of talking with Axel and eating enough sea salt ice cream to puke the next day. His normally solemn expression turns serene as he wonders out loud about a girl he could have sworn was there. Kairi nods and thinks out loud with him, proposing ideas on why he couldn't remember her as they walk towards the paopu tree.

When a few drops of rain begins to trickle from the darkened clouds, Kairi is the one to squeal and run to the safety of the inner part of the island, much like how'd she had pushed the crabs. Roxas laughs as she scurries off with their picnic.

Instead of joining her, he twirls with the light storm, laughing as he feels the warm water flowing over him.

Kairi yells at him, laughing as she opens up the door to a small shack near the dock, inviting him to come inside before he caught his death from cold.

Roxas just smiles, waving at her as he ducks down to the sand and begins building a sandcastle… or much accurately, a sand-mush.

Something in his head… or maybe, really, his heart makes him stay out in the rain.

He is joined shortly by a now drenched Princess of Heart, laughing at him as his castle turns into a blob before cheerfully informing him that he was building it wrong.

Their picnic lies forgotten in the safety of the shack as their intertwined laughter fills the emptiness of the play island and their castle takes shape. Together, their joined hands start patting the sand into shape, carefully molding the sand into a tower.

If you couldn't tell, the cookies that Kairi and Roxas made are called "black and white cookies"... but I call them Roxas cookies for this one, cause they remind me of his bracelet.

I've noticed that for the Namine/Sora parts, they're told in long chapters that flow as a story. For Kairi/Roxas, they keep breaking up into one long story then into a sort of drabble. It'll be like this until the end, honestly, so if you don't like the format, I deeply apologize.

Please, read and review for me.

Thank you for reading this far!