D.isclaimer
Kingdom Hearts does not belong to me. If it did, then it's obvious what I would have wanted. Yet I must be content with what I have gotten.

S.ummary
Riku has been sharing nightmares with Sora – how he is quite sure that he'll be the one to open the ever-alluring and mysterious door inside their Secret Place. However, the two boy's destinies seem to contort and shatter at the last minute, ending up with Sora missing and darkness rapidly engulfing their island. This forces Riku and Kairi to search for their companion, leaving little other choice – while Riku must put back the pieces of their destinies using only simple glue and duct tape from elementary days.

N.otes
Don't let confusion stop you. It's better than the summary sounds, believe me. So I will not continue to hinder your interest with my pointless rambling words that come from my thoughts rather than the ones from my dreams.
Rated T for language, some crude sexual humour, and just… to be safe.
Reviews are appreciated; since this is practically my first fanfic – even though Tatikara had helped a lot and I love her for it – other's people's opinions are cherished, too. I'd like to know how I did or what you dear readers thought. X3;

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Glue & Duct tape
Chapter One . All the Places in between
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Door Door Door Door Door Door.

That was all I could think as I looked at it. I stood a few yards away, never closer. If I took a step foreward I think it would somehow grow invisible feet and take a step away from me. Then it would be an illusion and I'd be relieved to know that the door was just another figment conjured from my nightmares. I'd wake up, duck my head into the severe black darkness of the Secret Place and check if it was there or not, staring back at me with veiled eyes that glow an ominous animal yellow propped on the back wall. Except I had already done that chore during consciousness. The out-of-place cavern exit had been there, mocking my collected demeanor, threateningly innocuous and tempting me to touch it while it taunted me to feel its realness against my skin.

In my sleep, my palm twitched and my hand nearly clenched.

Door to the Light.

I knew that already. It was a fact that had made itself well known to me in the past month. Yet I cannot help but to speculate and think the exact opposite. In my dreams, it was always submerged in darkness. Inky tendrils like thick smoke curling beneath the door, reaching out to me with their snarling fingers. Soon the whole place would be blacked out, and I'd feel their icy death grip around my throat. Suffocating me. Killing me.

It wasn't a door to light. It was a door to the darkness.

And I was supposed to be the one to open it. I knew that, too. I had been the only one who ever expressed any interest in the strange door; to Sora and Kairi and the rest of them, they were oblivious of its tantalizing existence. Still, I couldn't help but start to feel a little afraid. Those dark figures would surely launch themselves out at me behind the door the minute I opened it just a crack and devour me with their pointy teeth that I knew they had because they had bitten me with them before on my hands and arms in my reoccurring nightmares. Sometimes when I woke I thought I saw faint marks that could have been puncture scars, but they went away within a day. It might have been because I forgot about them.

What would happen to the world if I opened the door?

Doors brought you places. Doors also kept you out of places and kept you in places.

Like this imprisonment of an archipelago.

Sora had been pestering me with his dreams that I couldn't help but find startlingly familiar to my own, crazy stuff about giant silhouettes that attacked him and being swallowed up by pits made of tar-like substance. Listening to him and making sense of it was like trying to hold an intelligent conversation with a delirious, insane and raving baboon.

Like a few days before.

"I've been having these weird thoughts lately."

"Oh, yeah?"

Sora bobbed his head encouragingly. It only provoked me.

"Puberty," I handed out in a mocking voice.

He blushed wildly, tossing his mane of spikes to and fro to see if anyone was around who had heard that. "Riku!" The kid tried to hiss but only succeeded on gushing out his chords of embarrassment. Hell, I nearly felt embarrassed at myself. Surprise, surprise.

So I pushed him away, and all the outrageous things he said. Declared they were such adjectives. I knew better but I didn't want to believe I was falling under the same fate as my friend. Wouldn't it be nice if these were just regarded as wet dreams? I thought those were supposed to be pleasurable – nearly being brutally killed in each of them, unless I had just converted into masochism, I did not find pleasurable at all. The only wetness I came up with when I awoke would be my own cold sweat, reeking with fear.

They were still clawing at my face, shadowy creatures ripping it apart. I just wish they'd do that to my nightmare instead of me.

Door Door Door Door.

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"Riku."

So far away. I'm not there.

"Riku."

I can't breathe. I'm being murdered. You can't save me from this death with just my name. No matter how angelic it may sound coming from your heavenly vocals, I thought.

"Wake up."

I wish. It was easier said than done. I woke up anyway. Satan's bidders were done with me until tonight's haunted slumber.

A soft groan escaped my cracked lips, probably from me biting them in my unconsciousness rather than the sea's sharp breeze that rose up from the ocean and whipped at the beach where I lied. My head erupted with a splitting headache that hadn't been there before I had drifted off peacefully this late afternoon. I could still feel their hands locked around my neck, choking me. My own hands almost flew up to clutch the place I surely thought would be a canvas of black and blue.

"Get up."

I'd rather die.

"Please."

Piss off.

"Please, Riku!"

My eyes flew open. I was staring up at the darkening sky, the last orange dredges of the sunset drifting lazily through the navy blue of evening. No matter how much I tried, I could not ignore Kairi's pleas any longer, wherever she was. I had a notion that she had stuck her face near mine earlier when her voice had been loudest, but had drawn back in failure of her desperate attempts to rouse me. Knowing my present luck, it had only sounded close because I was gradually being lifted from my sleep. Even further knowing my sorry luck, that was not Kairi's sweet and naturally feminine perfume that entered my nostrils and what I thought were her articulate words had actually been the squawking of a seagull while it decided which part of my body should become its toilet.

I was obviously not chipper even after being resurrected from a deadly nightmare of horrors galore.

Sand was in my hair, but that was no problem. Not entirely sturdily, I propped myself up on my elbows and flicked my head. It felt like I had been decapitated at that second, my neck probably worn down from the death massage of the demons in the nightmare, and was now flying across the ocean like a projectile. Shit.

Kairi was sitting there beside me, finally looking up and noticing my signs of life. She appeared to be sniffling.

"Kairi, what . . . ?" I began somewhat gently, though incredulous and half-pissed at her for letting me endure this headache as I already began to slowly lose recollection of the nightmare. But my voice was also pitying. She appeared so hopeless and helpless, like a little lost doe. I was also grateful that she had rescued me from being at mercy of those dreadful monstrosities. My pulse was loud and clear in my skull and was acting as the throbbing beat of my headache so I knew I was still living. This wasn't a continuation of the nightmare.

"You're awake! Oh, good!" She sounded more relieved than I had been feeling, yet acting as if she had just been caught doing something she wasn't supposed to.

"Yeah, thanks to you. What do you want?" I was beginning to become more snappish, my sarcastic apparel coming into play. It was a bitter taste on my tongue; I didn't like acting like this around Kairi. Besides, she looked like she was dancing to say something really important. It reminded me of how Sora once looked when he was littler and had to go to the bathroom but there wasn't one on the islands and refused to piddle in the bushes. Ha, ha. How I had teased him for years about that time.

"Be a man, Sora. You're not a girl that has to sit down to do that!"

"But I . . . I can't!" The brunette protested while doing a strange jig and pouting his lips. I couldn't ever pout like him. It's physically impossible for me and besides, I would never allow myself to if I could.

"Why not?" I had gone a couple times when no one was around to look. Or I had always been able to hold it and row back to my house with running water and porcelain toilets. It startled and amused me at the same time that Sora wouldn't just get his ass behind a tree and get it over with.

"Because . . . well, what would the plants think if I peed on them?" He whispered, horrified for the bushes' cause. Sora, the tree-hugger who pissed weed killer. Oh Jesus.

"Um . . ." Her large blue eyes dragged over to the side, diverting her gaze to the sand as she wrung her fingers. I continued to watch her carefully. She struggled for composure and I struggled for patience. Had I been dwelling too long in the past that she had forgotten the exciting thing she wanted to tell me so badly? Her dark crimson hair brushed into her face as she inclined her head, and I watched that, too.

"It's Sora," She said suddenly, finally deciding. "I don't know where he is."

That wasn't entirely bad news. He had been there on the islands before I had fallen asleep on the beach from abrupt drowsiness, playing with Kairi on the eastern islet. His lack of absence had let me sleep without a dream for at least a half hour. But as I remembered the franticness of her voice penetrating my stupor, I began to get a whiff of her worry.

"So?"

"So I want you to help me look for him," She said with worried eyes. Pleading again.

"All right." There was an uncomfortable feeling in the air that made it so I couldn't refuse. If I had pondered harder and longer on it rather than gone with my impulses, it would have reminded me of the stuffy, cold feeling of the nightmares. Regardless of the headache, I still held my leadership dominance as I swaggered up into a standing position with her. Scouting for Sora wasn't my first priority, but if I could do it to be with Kairi and prolong the search a little bit . . . "Let's first check the dock to see if his boat is missing, okay?"

It was.

She stared down at our pair of small wooden boats bobbing nonchalantly on the tide, silent. The fourteen year-old was contemplating something and I knew it. I tried to peek beneath her shadowed visage and see her expression but her darned pretty hair was in the way. If I had been able to I would have seen her face collapse with dread.

"See? Sora just retired early, that's all. Probably wanting dinner, since he didn't bring anything for a snack today."

"I . . . I'm not sure."

I blinked. "What do you mean?" It was undeniable proof that Sora had indeed done what I had predicted. He just can't deny his stomach.

"I mean . . . can we check somewhere else, okay?"

It wasn't like someone had stolen his boat. Tidus, Wakka, and Selphie had all left before I had taken a nap and they weren't coming back. No one wanted his stupid boat anyway. It was in the worst shape out of all of ours.

Something was wrong. I could feel the tension on the air like earlier and breathe it into my lungs like poison with difficulty. I think I knew it when I saw Sora's puny boat floating yards away, cast off to the side in the reeds.

Kairi had seen it too. Before me, apparently.

"He probably just bumped his head or something, and is off in a corner, crying it off." I reassured her, wrestling with the fact that he might be in more danger than that. He was such a wimp sometimes, so I could believe that self-told lie.

Kairi was unconvinced. It was hard to get through to her, and even in my degrading attitude she did not point out my meanness of accusing Sora of crying. I tried and I tried to ease off her troubled thoughts of Sora but to no avail. Getting her mind off of him was hopeless on my part. She was like a mother duck, a nurse, or a lover. I shut out that last option, of course.

Faultily, I made another attempt at this with a soft sigh, bottling up my frustration. "When did you last see him?"

"I don't . . ."

Kairi looked desperate and in distress. She was still entwining her hands together nervously. My eyelids fluttered, the last of my patience drying up and being carried on my voice with an undertone of steadiness.

"You were with him, weren't you?"

"He . . . he wandered off. I was working on my bracelet. At first it really . . . interested him . . ." Her eyes nearly glittered like diamonds with tears. Kairi wasn't a crybaby like Sora. She was always happy (don't get me wrong, Sora was too – nauseously so – but he was also extremely sensitive), and seeing that unexpected buildup of moisture made me want to punch something in my chagrin. Whatever she wasn't going to say wasn't going to be good.

"You know Sora, Riku!" Blurted she in her last attempts to hold herself together, squirting a fountain of glistening tears. Seeing her break down like that made me itch with losing control. I wanted to wrap her in my arms and hold her close, telling her not to worry about Sora because she still had me. I was there to protect her and always look after her. I was there to love her and not cast away my love like it was an in-and-out subject on my short attention span.

I didn't. I waited for her to stop crying and she wiped her eyes with a sniff. In the meanwhile, I was watching the sky that had thunderheads billowing up on the horizon. They had not been there earlier when we began our search.

My attention warily turned back to my friend. I swallowed before trying to wriggle information out of her. It was important, dammit. Every pore on my body agreed with me on that decision.

"What aren't you telling me, Kairi?" I prodded.

She glanced back at me uncertainly, almost ready to skip away and continue our fruitless search.

I think my Adam's apple became a lump of lead in my throat and sank before her lips parted to speak.

"I think Sora was killed."

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N.otes
I suppose I should be sued for an ending like that. I know one person is already filing a death warrant for me. In the meanwhile, the next chapter is my biggest concern. And don't worry about any out of story rambling at the beginning of the next chapters. That annoys me when you're itching to read and have to wade through all that junk first, neh? And if you're wondering about the whole 'glue and duct tape' thing… I'll get to that. Metaphors at their best.