o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

P E R C E P T I O N
- ; SORIKU c o l l e c t i o n

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

#004 ; Raindrop

The forecasters said it would be sunny until evening, and then the clouds would come, pregnant with fifty percent chance of rain. We, being the 11 and 12 year-old kids that we were, took our chances. We did a lot of that, those days – in fact, we do a lot of that now. Jumping into darkness, chasing after bad guys . . . Nothing much has changed.

Some kids never grow up. And if I said I learned my lesson of falling astray from time to time fully, I'd be lying.

But Sora – Sora was the adventurous one. A different sort of adventurous, however: he was the little-kid kind of adventurous. I myself call it the Reckless and Rambling Syndrome, unlike the case of what I had when I was fifteen or so. That would be the Meticulous Thinking, Teenage Rebellion and Wandering Lone Wolf ( or Stray Dog ) Syndrome. It wasn't a pretty thought when you had dreams of sailing away on a raft with just a bottle of fresh spring water and a couple mushrooms, heading off to explore the worlds. I didn't even think of the waterfalls at the end of the earth that could have been there, or what would happen when I ran out of water. So much for thinking ahead.

I look back on those days, reflecting, and thinking of how stupid I was. I wasn't an angsting teenager, not quite; I was still a child, a young child, hiding in an older boy's body. A raft that would lead to a completely different world – shit. That thought had only been implanted in my determined half-brain because of Kairi washing up on the shore 13 years ago, thinking there must have been an entire different territory beyond these simple islands. Now I know that she had actually come from the stars, fallen like some angel ( or devil ) out of the heavens like when God kicked Lucifer out of His Mighty Courts. I'd been through a similar situation when Sora and I arrived back to Destiny Islands, after we defeated Xemnas. Together.

No more world-hopping for me. I was sick of it. Not just physically sick – mentally sick. There I had been, running across worlds as a darkness-driven manipulator, and then working behind the scenes tirelessly . . . Now I'm happy to say that I'm retired. Sora can take Kairi out on trips to Christmas Town to meet Santa Claus ( see what I mean, about kids never growing up? ) and Port Royal to see the famed ( or infamous, by the sounds of it ) pirates, but I'm staying home. The Gummi Ship's interior is a place I've only seen once or twice, but I don't like to see it. To be all sorts truthful, it gives me a sense of insecurity. I hate knowing that Sora still has that old thing, that dirty time-warping machine, and knowing that he's still impulsive. He can jump in and leave me anytime. Might even get himself killed – run into an asteroid, or something. And I swear, he'd probably be grinning and yakking to his friends Donald and Goofy at the time to fix him up something to eat in the back of the ship.

Jealousy is something I'm trying to stay away from these days. A jealousy abstinence. Sounds funny when you hear it, but not when you chew on it a while. You get to thinking – what if I can't stop? What if I can't grow up or learn to control myself?

So I lock myself up on this prison, and try to tie Sora down to it with me. But I won't completely bind him. Some birds' colours are just too bright – they and their wings need to be free.

But I'm straying away from my story. My mind does that sometimes – too many thoughts floating around in my brain. Too many memories. It gets me musing, and that isn't always a good thing. Maybe I have the curse of the Reckless and Rambling disease like Sora, because man, can that boy ramble – and not just walking-rambling but talking-rambling. I don't consider myself a very imaginative person: I like to stay to the facts and the point. Sometimes I'm so concise that I'm almost blunt. But I was the one who thought there were other worlds out there . . . but that was real. And boy, can I prove it. Regardless, I don't think there are clowns hiding beneath my bed at night that want to eat me like Sora believes.

We were lazing around his house, avidly watching the television. At least, Sora was – even the Weather Channel could amuse that boy. 'That boy,' I keep on referring him to. So impersonal if used by a stranger, so condescending if by an enemy, but so affectionate if used by a friend. Well, he isn't really a boy anymore at 18 years old. He can vote on our next world ruler. Hopefully it won't be the Antichrist he decides ( or doesn't ) to pick. He can smoke, too – but we all know that Sora won't do that. Because he's Sora.

With his big blue eyes like saucers filled with ocean water glued to the screen, I languidly flicked my eyes to the swirling blur of turquoise and forest green colour with red lines crisscrossed on what he was watching. Cloud patterns. Scattered thunderstorms to the east. Boring, unimportant stuff. Sora didn't think it boring, however – in fact, he nearly attacked his mother when she came in with the vacuum.

"Moooom! I'm watching the weather forecast!" I think saying 'forecast' was like repeating a big word he had heard in a previous conversation to him, as a child might include an SAT word in a sonorous speech unusual to its regular speech patterns. Of course, there was still the whining pitch to his voice that didn't make it all that soothing and mature. He still had his little high-pitched squeaky voice that he still hasn't completely grown out of.

"You don't need to hear to watch, honey." She gave the vacuum another hearty pull, closing in on the TV. Sora scrambled back to the couch, nearly sitting on my legs/lap area before I kicked him to the edge of the seat. If I remember correctly, Sora was afraid of vacuums. Okay, I'll give him a little more credit than that. He didn't like the sound of them, or something. Hurt his ears. He always used to get uncharacteristically snappy at Kairi when we were hanging out at her place and would walk around the manor in the rooms farthest away from hers, hands clamped over his ears. She had a maid, and I don't really understand why she'd pull out that little handheld vacuum for her own room, but I think it was just to annoy Sora, like friends do. Or she was just a neat-freak. "Besides, the weatherman's almost always wrong, anyways."

"Yeah, doltface," I happily agreed, knee bouncing lightly with recharged sarcasm. I heard somewhere that sarcasm was for the weak and the lazy – back then I had a façade of strength, but I was still vulnerable. I only put on that mask, that clever guise, for Sora. He needed someone like me in his life, I subconsciously thought – someone to always be there to correct him, like a big brother. Any siblings he had died when they were young or simply were there no longer – I heard rumours of a baby brother that had passed away quietly, and then an older one that moved away for college years before. It wasn't wit either that made one strong – wit was just as crude as cynicism. It was inner-wisdom, something I'd thirst for in my later years – and still don't have, and probably never will completely have.

"Think we can go fishing today, Riku?" He asked eagerly, eyes alight with hope and anticipation. That was another thing you needed when you were lost in the darkness – hope. The darkness can take everything from you, but there's one part of you that won't die, and that's hope. Hope to find your friends again. Hope to be saved. And I might have heard that hope was for the weak, but those people are just fooling themselves. They don't have any dreams to hope for.

I glanced lazily again at the television screen and made an 'mmph' of consideration. "Maybe." My voice was a playful drawl, and I rolled my icy aquamarine eyes away as he tried to further convince me with those large, pleading eyes. I was like the owner, taunting the dog with a piece of meat dangling above its head, just out of reach.

"Pleeeeeease?" He placed his hands on my shins, testing me. I wriggled them out of his grasp, my barriers not failing yet. I could resist his pleas. Surely I could.

"I thought the weatherman said that there was a fifty percent chance of rain tonight," His mother stated calmly.

"It's morning!"

"Noon," I corrected. The clock had just ticked twelve.

"And I thought you didn't believe in weathermen, anyway!" He said stubbornly to his mother, crossing his arms and a small frown tugging at his mouth. She said nothing; a silent smile was on her lips, though, and I could see her watching us act out of the corner of her cornflower blue eye. After we quarreled some more like boys do, Sora tackling me repeatedly and me shoving him away, she finally turned off the vacuum and did something about it. Sora was threatening to pull my hair at that time, and I was close to the edge.

"Go on, boys. You're disturbing the peace." She never said a single rude thing, his mother – her tone was always friendly. Unlike my mother, who I couldn't recall barely a single thing about except for her faintly floral scent when she rocked me in her arms at night. But those ancient memories can be dismissed. I'm not completely haunted, you know.

"'Kay!" Sora called cheerily, bouncing up off the couch and leaping across the room towards the back door. I followed him, sedated, trailing behind like a particularly slow wave making its way to shore. "We won't be out for that long."

Familiar with Sora's rather relaxed and eccentric method of fishing, I figured we'd be out there for hours before one of us even got a bite.

Our chosen destination was the lagoon. It wasn't entirely by the beach, so we had to trudge deeper into the island where the vegetation grew thickly around the clusters of trees, wild and untamed. We used to play Jungle Explorers here, conjuring up invisible monsters and dinosaurs to fight and vicious natives that ate human flesh. We'd always have our faithful wooden swords grasped in our sweaty palms when we did so, because traversing the jungle could actually lead to sudden danger. In those days we searched for other worlds, as if foolishly thinking they'd be buried deep in the heart of Destiny Islands. Not so. The door that led to another world had been on our play island the whole time, right in front of our faces. And we hadn't known it.

At least, Sora hadn't known it. I always had a vague intuition . . . I was, after all, the one who first saw the door opened. And fuck, I wish I hadn't. So many things could have been different – but probably not. Then everyone on the world would have been destroyed. It wouldn't have a chance. There would be no Sora, no Keyblade Master. And even if it could have been prevented, if I hadn't been so stupid and given into temptation, the darkness' allure . . . No. You can't beat Fate. And you can't go back now – your mind might play tricks on you at night when you dream of past events, but you can't change the past.

Luckily, the lagoon wasn't far away. After we walked a ways, Sora barefoot and me safer with sandals, the grass began to grow longer, thinner, and softer. We were coming close to our destination, and Sora no longer complained about stickers that clung to his feet as if he were wearing invisible cowboy boots with spurs. Now the only thing to worry about was quick mud and leeches. They say that boys like bugs, but leeches are just plain disgusting. I've never seen a boy who hasn't freaked out, at least just a little bit, when a leech is sucking the living blood out of his calf or thigh. Mosquitoes are easily-handled because you don't even feel them, and they're small ( but somehow bigger out by the lagoon ), even though the itch afterwards is nasty. Leeches are like bloodsucking slugs, and ripping them off once they're attached means you have to wait for your skin to grow back five days later.

We were walking with our hands crossed behind our heads casually and enjoying the humidity that touched our bare skin. It was then, before I saw the depression where the deep blue water lurked, that I realized something.

"You didn't bring the fishing poles."

"Nope."

Sora ran off ahead of me, jumping up to snap off the branch of a low-hanging willow tree, or something of the sort. I was never much good with trees; the only tree I knew was my slightly warped paopu one, back on the old island.

"We'll use these!" He said, holding up two prize limbs. A little knobby, with some moss draped over their bark, but they'd do.

"What're we gonna do for line, O Genius?"

"We'll use your dad's back hair."

I grinned. "Fair enough."

He ended up pulling up some stringy reeds that were flexible and didn't break when we tied them onto the ends of our makeshift fishing poles. Kids are creative, you know – we use what we have and pretend they're something greater than just a bunch of trash. In our eyes, they were top of the line fishing poles, fancy automatic reels and everything.

We used burs for the hooks, of course. The large kind – with curved claws like the talons of a hawk. Not very sufficient, but good enough. Bait was worms dug out from the lagoon's mucky bed.

We were ready. We were as unprepared as a bunch of hoodlums, but that didn't matter. We plopped down on the steepened shore where the grass still grew and hung our hooks over the side. The water was so dark and slightly murky that we couldn't even see the minnows that were inevitably darting around in the shallow water.

I didn't expect us to catch anything. It was just the very act of fishing, of waiting, of trying our patience that made it a nice experience. Whenever I came home and someone asked me if I had fun fishing, even though I supported no aquatic animal for supper that night, I'd always reply, Yes. Because when Sora and I sat in silence like that, he didn't need to talk anymore. He was focused. We shared what time we had together in silence, soaking up each other's minds and brain waves and whatever little fidgets we gave off. Best friends in the company of one another needn't speak often – they know too much about each other and have no need to ask more.

He twitched. He yawned. His teeth were white and clean, reflecting what little sunlight seeped through the canopy to make them sparkle like in a toothpaste commercial. I watched him closely in my peripheral vision, because, well, there wasn't much else to watch. I doubt much lived in that lagoon, anyway – you could possibly catch something if you were out in the ocean, say, on a raft. Destiny Islands had no coral or volcanic reef to speak of, so whatever you caught probably wasn't colourful, but perhaps eatable instead. Here, there were only the sounds of hissing bugs and other such things, a humming atmosphere of nature.

It began to gradually get darker. I looked up from time to time to peer through the tangle of leaves and branches above me and look for the sky, watching it change to darker shades of blue. First cotton, then grey, then steel. Clouds began to move in; great, hulking and disfigured shapes that were both looming and ominous for us ants. It was like playing a game of I Spy – not cloud watching, not exactly.

"Ready to give up?" I asked lightly, feeling the oncoming rainstorm begin to clog up the already stuffy air around us.

"Never." He wore a confident grin on his face. Of course; Sora never gave up. Not when Organization XIII said he was giving them hearts for their terrifying, supernatural ( but not so evil ) plan, and not when he was trying to find me while I was lost in darkness or purposely avoiding him.

I pulled on a slight smile and ruffled his spiky hair with a hand. He batted his hair back down 'in place,' eyes never leaving the lagoon – not once.

Would we even be affected by the rain? There were slits and holes in the canopy, but as soon as it began, I would hustle my friend out of there. I didn't like the rain myself – it wasn't about Sora catching cold, not really. Although he did do that a lot whenever he was caught out in the rain, and I was the one he called on to take care of him. Not Kairi, not his mom: me. Did I feel special? Hell no. Did I feel entitled to give him snot rags to blow his nose with and serve him chicken noodle soup, fresh from the microwave? No way. You couldn't blame a guy who wanted to prevent doing all that. I could be doing something much more productive with my time – such as . . . Well, okay. I guess I was with Sora and Kairi most of my time back then. So I had to stay with him while he was withering and sniffling away in bed. I was attached.

I began to see tiny circular ripples that appeared on the lagoon's surface. First they were scattered and spread far apart, and then they began to materialize more steadily out of the blue. Sure enough; they were rain drops, dancing on the swampland and beating the semi-protective trees.

"C'mon, Sora. Let's go." I muttered, putting down my fishing pole to save for later use, if we ever came back. Then I looked over my shoulder. "Sora?"

"Just a little longer, Riku? They always bite more when it's raining!"

"Your mom'll murder you." I stared at him as gravely as possible. "Actually, she'd murder me, because you'd probably already be dead."

"Huh?" He murmured beneath his breath, gaze affixed still on the water even as rain poured down all around him.

"You know . . . the swamp monster, or The Creature of the Black Lagoon . . . they always come out when it's night."

I turned and began to hike up the hill with that lingering note. He jumped up behind me, quickly abandoning his pole and post to tread after me. His feet squished in the dampening ground.

"Riku, Riku," He chanted behind me, once we broke out of the copse and into a clearing. "It's raining."

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. I held my tongue and refrained from saying so. That was one smart thing I did back then. Insulting your friend was only fun for so long.

I lost track of the squishing footsteps, so I turned around and saw that he was stepping around in the grass, his head tilted back and his eyes squeezed shut. Another odd thing: his tongue was sticking straight out.

At this comical and slightly unnerving sight, like a balancing act done by a clown in a circus, I only stared and blinked, and then finally asked the typical question:

"What are you doing, Sora?"

"Trying to catch a raindrop!"

He didn't seem to be having much luck at the sport. Even then I thought it was childish – who would dance around in the rain to catch one dirty raindrop? – but I didn't scold him. I was used to his antics, and the act in which he expressed them I caringly dubbed as 'pulling a Sora.' Right now, he was thoroughly pulling a Sora.

Suddenly, a long and drawn out 'aaaaaah' sound croaked from his throat. If catching a raindrop was like saying 'ah' when your doctor wants to look at your tonsils with a flashlight, then it couldn't be much fun.

He twirled and tripped around some more, until he began to yell excitedly: "I got one! I got one!"

He rushed towards me in delight on the tips of his toes – or at least, where he thought I might be. His eyes were still drawn closed, and before I could stop him he crashed into me, and our mouths instantly met.

It was my first kiss. Our first kiss. And it was completely accidental . . . on my part, anyway.

He didn't even open his eyes then.

After a moment or two ( my actions delayed due to the shock ), I pulled away from him roughly. Only then did he slowly open his eyes and smile at me.

"Hey Riku, I got a big one."

He was then greeted with a clip on the back of his head.

Some kids never grow up.

AUTHor's NOTe - -
Oh my goodness. An update? From me? ( I think I said that last time. )
..I don't know why this is in first person. I think I'm craving to write my Riku/Sora/Kairi chaptered fic, which is in fact, in first person Riku's POV. And, it was somewhat inspired by the book I'm reading right now, It – by Stephen King. Even though that's not written in first person. 8D;; Well, most of it isn't, anyway. I'm also faultlessly reminded of The Shawshank Redemption – okay, I'll shut up now.

And I've noticed… that pretty much all of these have different writing styles. I guess I change mine too much. I hope it isn't too diverse to throw you off.

Anyway. Hopefully you won't have to wait so long again for another update. ;-; I need to be reminded that I have chaptered fics and collections waiting…