So it's spring break and I've finally decided to get around doing the finishing touches on this story and posting it.

Beta-d by Legendary Kitty.

Inspired by a number of things, mainly commentary done by me, Legendary Kitty, and her sister on Kingdom Hearts II.

Enjoy.

Us Plus One

Kairi has always prided herself on having it covered. She knows exactly how her life will go after high school, no questions asked. She'll be a designer, owning a quaint little boutique on the corner of First and Third. It will be called Land, Sea, And Sky Fashions and the writing in the window will be curly and golden. Sora will either be a fisherman, or still off questing with that Keyblade of his, and Riku will inevitably be his partner in either endeavor.

Kairi knows exactly how the wedding will go. She has had the guest list planned out since she was thirteen and her dress is all but pre-ordered ( it's puffed and white with a sweet-heart neckline and gloves) Selfie helped her pick the flower arrangements (orchids to be exotic, lilies for the white and roses because it's a wedding for heavens sake and a wedding without roses is like pie without crust or Sora with straight hair) and Tidus's family will do the catering (something light, maybe with a little coconut milk to give it some flavor) Everything about her wedding, her life, will be perfect.

That's why this is all coming as such a big shock to her. After all, this was the day she had expected Sora to get off of his puffy-panted butt and pop the damn question to her. She has spent three days having heart palpitations over which dress to wear and had seriously considered hiring a professional makeup artist just for the occasion.

She knows she made a good choice when she bought that industrial strength waterproof mascara.

At least her makeup will be intact when she tosses herself off of the boat and tries to drown herself.

It's a classical Little Mermaid situation, secluded lagoon, two person boat, fireflies, the whole shebang. The perfect place to be proposed to, not dumped.

She splutters and coughs up pond weed as Sora drags her back up into what she has now dubbed, The Great Wooden Banana of Heartbreak and Death.

She can't believe it, the boy she thought she'd be marrying since she was seven-years-old has just broken up with her on the night she thought he would propose, and SHE CAN'T EVEN KILL HERSELF PROPERLY! It's a disappointment. A major one really.

She blames Selfie for making her wear the sequined turquoise dress, it's much to light. The ruffled pink one would have worked perfectly, weighing her down and dragging her all the way to the bottom of the stupid crummy five foot deep lagoon.

Damn too tall to drown height! Damn ridiculously buoyant dress! Damn world!

Sora is trying to console her, hair spikes limp and dripping and eyes wide and awkward looking. He's uncomfortable. Poor baby.

"Kairi I'm sorry, you're the only girl I'll ever love and I don't want you to be sad about this!"

Kairi sniffles, whipping her infuriatingly-runny nose on the skirt of her $108 dress and struggling not to snort blue-green sequins. She feels like a disgruntled red-head version of Elle Woods with smaller boobs and fewer prospects as a lawmaker.

"Y-you don't love me! You never did! It was only ever that stupid shy kissing crap with you! I always wondered you know! Always! And now I know why! Who else? Who's the girl huh? Is it Selfie, or Aereith maybe?"

Sora blinks and looks confused. "What?"

Kairi resists the urge to just up and punch the stupid heartbreaking, home-wrecking, son-of-a-biscuit right in the face. "You know what I'm talking about! I'm clearly too fucking ugly for you so who's the chick that you really want hmmm? Is it Yuffie?"

Sora blinks, slowly this time, frowning. Asshole.

"Kairi, I've never once thought about any of them like that."

Kairi would have smacked him if she wasn't sure his hair would impale her hand. "THEN WHO IS IT SORA?!"

He responds in kind, yelling into her ear and probably shattering her eardrum. "KAIRI! I'M GAY!"

The surrounding mountains reflect the sound back and forth across the lagoon. Kairi I'm gay. Kairi I'm gay. I'm gay. Gay. Gay. Gay…

"WHAT?"

Selfie, Yuffie and Aerith are all at her house hugging her and she feels a twinge of guilt for being jealous of them and Sora. Sora has Riku now, Aerith's got Cloud, Selfie's madly in love with Tidus, and Yuffie's been secretly dating Leon for years.

And Kairi, Kairi is the best chick-friend of a gay-guy who she, until very recently, had been in love with.

Joy.

And now that she looks at it, she knows she should have had at least the slightest bit of an inkling something was up with Sora. He'd always been a bit too happy, too bright, too…gay…What she and Sora had had always been just a tad bit dry and unromantic now that she thinks back.

Point and case, for Christmas last year he got her a unicorn charm bracelet. Yeah, that's right, Unicorns, a nineteen year old woman with a mind for snappy dressing, and unicorns.

But still, she wore it, shuddering with humiliation as she heard it jingle proudly upon her wrist. Jesus! It's still there, wrapped around her arm right now, covering her Tinker Bell wristwatch with its gaudy and disgustingly childish little unicorn charms. She always thought they were a tad bit too sparkly and pink and now she knows why.

With a shriek she tears the offending piece of most likely plastic jewelry and hurls it as far away from herself as possible. It soars a few feet before landing with a plop in Selfie's lap. Kairi never really was very strong.

Another thing that ticks her off is how little pity points she's getting from her other self over all of this. Namine tells her repeatedly, "You should have seen the signs with Sora and Riku. I sure as hell did."

"What signs?" Kairi shrieks at her.

"The blaringly obvious ones that you would have seen if you weren't playing Barbie wedding planner!" Namine sighs, flipping through another page in the expensive art magazine that KAIRI has ordered for her monthly. Well we'll see how long it takes for the new issue to arrive once she cancel's the prescription won't we? "Now calm down and stop blubbering, god, it's not like you're the first person who's had their boyfriend get together with their best friend."

Kairi sniffs indignantly. "Oh yeah? And who else is there?"

Namine flips to another page. "Me for one thing."

Kairi gasps, remembering Namine's short if not eventful time dating Roxas. "Oh Nami, I'm so sorry."

The blonde Nobody smiles and shakes her head. "Don't be. It's not like I couldn't see it coming after all. Roxas and Axel were ridiculously intimate. Seriously, what straight guys have hair like that ?"

Kairi giggles a little. "I thought Sora and Riku, okay, well mostly Sora. Riku I was a bit iffy about."

Namine grins slyly over the glossed pages of her magazine. "What makes you say that?"

"His belly-shirt fashion sense. That long flowing silver hair that he shampoos and conditions every night. The fact that he just exudes and air of repressed sadist incubus, I dunno."

Namine giggles and whaps her on the arm with her magazine and Kairi snorts in a very uncouth manner.

Then she sees Sora and Riku on the street below her window, holding hands and looking for all the world like a stable, happy couple. Namine hurriedly engrosses herself in her magazine and Kairi whimpers angrily.

She ends up writing another five pages of emotional poetry in her diary.

Kairi has to admit. Namine is right, the signs were there all the time, she had just never known what to look for.

It was so scandalously obvious, Kairi feels just a twinge stupid for not seeing the relaitionship between Sora and Riku before. After all, they slept over at each others houses nearly every night, usually in the same bed she might add! They were practically joined at the hip while awake and Sora's fashion sense was never really the epitome of masculine.

She scowls a bit, watching them. They're just so gay together. And they look so damn happy its almost insulting.

The scandalous way Sora and Riku walk together with barely an inch of space between them, for one thing even she had been more modest when trying to not so subtly seduce Sora! If you can call what Riku is doing to Sora right now subtle. Kairi flushes a little as Sora protests weakly, looking scrawnier than ever next to Riku's muscled physique.

She dreamed of the day she would give her virginity to this?

Kairi spends the next twenty minutes of class using her finger and thumb to crush their heads from her point of view and leaves campus feeling all the better for it.

When Olette pauses and asks her what she's so smug about she just cackles evilly and runs off into the sunset.

Namine is right beside her as she always is.

"You know Kairi," She says, examining her nails, "This new way of behaving is getting to be a good way of freaking people out."

Sora and Riku are now officially wearing matching rings. She sees it in one of the classes they all have together. Their hands are infuriating close together, pinkies only three heinous inches apart. On both ring fingers she sees a matching silver glint and her heart shatters into a million very broken and very un-put-back-together-able pieces.

For the rest of class she glares holes into the back of Riku and Sora's heads hoping that her anger and evil-eye will somehow inhibit their honest and beautiful happiness with each other.

God what she wouldn't' give to have psychic powers. Seeing both of them and their perfect gravity-defying, fruit-smelling hair burst into flames would be just what the doctor prescribed for this sort of situation.

The professor looks at her funny when she hands in a paper with margins full of doodles of two flame headed boys who look suspiciously like Sora and Riku. She has tried to cover it up by scribbling "Super Saiyan levels 87 and 59!" beside them but she knows that they both know and it makes it only more awkward when the professor puts her hand on Kairi's shoulder comfortingly and says: "So which one of them were you dating before they got together?"

It is three weeks and two days after she and Sora parted ways that Kairi works up the courage and civility to admit to herself that she misses them, just a little. She then proceeds to throw knives at her newly custom made Sora+Riku 4EVA! dart board. Her aim is horribly off and she ends up destroying most of her wall and stabbing directly into the eye of her favorite My Little Pony.

After some very panicked emergency care, the handy making of a sparkly eye patch so that Celeste doesn't feel like such a freak-pony, and way too many cackles of mirth from Namine, Kairi picks up the phone and dials Sora's number.

The meeting/play date/date/friend thing doesn't go as badly as she thought it would. Sora is merciful enough to leave Riku behind for this one and meets her alone at the entrance of the mall. He smiles and asks her how she's been and she smiles an equally forced grin and tells him something innocuous enough to sound like she's been okay for the last three weeks but with enough room for her to also have been wracked with horrible heart wrenching pain from his actions.

"Fine." She says, and they walk in.

It's almost sort of fun, very reminiscent of the times they used to spend together, except…maybe a little bit different in an sort of good way. For one, she beats the puffy-pants off of Sora in DDR for the first time. This is mostly because he has always had two left feet and no ear for rhythm and because she has always let him win to allow him just a little more security in his masculinity. That of course was before he broke up with her for his best male friend and now Kairi happily pile drives him into the ground on Expert.

He barely manages to score at all and years of facing off with Namine have made Kairi unnervingly adept at spastic foot stomping.

They go to eat and for once she pays for half of the meal, which is a little less than fair seeing as Sora eats a total of two thirty-nine cent taco's and a small diet coke while she orders the Grande Nacho Platter, two burritos and a chocolate shake.

This is also somewhat freeing because before the break up Kairi had always made it her aim to eat less than Sora, and seeing as Sora eats only enough to maintain his own girlish figure, that wasn't a lot of food. Now she's free to horc and she's living it up.

It's after ten minutes of face stuffing that Kairi remembers Sora's there at all. She draws away from cheesy, meaty goodness and looks up for a second to see him staring at her, taco uneaten and in hand, his face splattered with hot sauce the she had probably accidentally splashed on him at some point during her feasting. She grunts and wipes her mouth, grinning a cheesy grin that she feels not the slightest bit embarrassed about.

Sora giggles a little in a very girlish fashion and nibbles daintily on his taco. Kairi watches him carefully eating it and smiles a little to herself.

What a chick.

It is four weeks into the new world order and Kairi has reinstated her friendship with Sora full on. They talk to each other again, and Kairi finds herself genuinely laughing and interested at a lot of the stuff Sora says to her. Suddenly she doesn't care so very much about how she looks and what he thinks about her and it's a very freeing experience. She plays HALO with him and wins and afterwards does a ridiculous victory dance around his living room she would never dreamed of doing if she had still been dating him.

And by GOD is it liberating!

She hasn't worn sweatpants since Freshman year and she's forgotten how comfortable they are.

It's still awkward as hell to talk to Riku though, they both make it a point to avoid contact as well as meeting each others eyes, talking to each other, or being in the same room and or building as the other.

She can tell it's hurting Sora to watch them gravitate away from each other like this, but she has no idea how to fix such things. Should she confront Riku or just wait for him to come to her, which, looking at Riku, is like waiting for the sun to come down from the sky and say hello to her as its heat incinerates her to a nice blackened Kairi crisp. Plus, if she did talk to him, what the hell would she say? "Hey I've noticed you aren't talking to me lately and you're dating my Ex but that's okay because I may have had a few mental breakdowns before but I'm perfectly stable now."

Kairi sighs, opening up her textbook again to study for midterms. The composition of DNA is as simple as putting together Linkin Logs when you compare it to dealing to a moody and slightly socially-retarded guy like Riku.

Kairi has read her textbook cover-to-cover for the fifteenth time now and she believes it is time to take action.

She corners Riku in an empty classroom, locking all the doors and windows before hand to make sure he can't hurriedly escape using any of those routes. She's also screwed the bolts on all the air vents extra tightly incase he really gets desperate.

He is trapped like a rat now, as she advances on him, eyes traveling frantically around the room for some way of escape and finding none.

She stops a few feet away, surveying him slowly, arms crossed over her chest and hip locked to the side.

Riku gulps, stuffing a crumpled piece of paper in his backpack so at to have something to do other than stare at the girl examining him from above.

As it turns out someone has ever so creatively used said crumpled paper as a tissue and Riku is fairly grossed out. He drops it with a ridiculously unmanly shrill, whipping his hand off on one of the desks because he doesn't want to get snot on his designer pants either.

Kairi takes this opportune moment to begin to speak.

"You know, I can see what you see in him."

Riku looks up at her, eyes wide. "What."

Kairi snorts. Leave it to Riku to be reduced to a veritable vegetable when faced with such a situation.

"I mean, he's cute, funny, honest, brave. A bit of a dolt but still, he's so kind and…warm you're willing to let it go, just for him."

Riku straightens a little, unsure of how to respond.

Kairi continues, not looking at him as she paces along the room slowly. "And you two…I guess I always kind of knew deep down that this would happen someday. I mean, you guys are so happy together."

Riku still says nothing, eyes never leaving her as she looks up at him.

"But can you please tell me this," Kairi tightens her arms around herself, rocking a little on her heels. All the shadows have come back, rolling from the corners, the insecurities and hateful thoughts that have eaten away at her mind since this all started. "Did you guys ever…plan to do this to me." She sucks in a shuddering breath, "Was Sora using me as a cover up or where you two…while he and I were…"

She trails of, sniffing, her voice breaking.

Riku gapes at the tears that streak down her cheeks. "Kairi…never. Sora and I, we didn't even know ourselves at first, we never meant to hurt you, we never wanted it to be like this…it just…happened."

Kairi giggles just a bit. "Yeah, I guess that's how most stuff happens." She looks out the window and out into the courtyard below. Speak of the devil.

Sora is there, standing outside their building, probably waiting for both of them to come out.

"He's beautiful you know." She states, not looking at Riku, eyes still locked on Sora, memorizing him as he is, every dip and curve of his face, every odd and gravity-defying hair, silent saying her own sort of goodbye.

"I know." Riku says solemnly, starring out the window and at the boy below with her.

She smiles, her lips curving gently upward. "Take care of him."

"I will." Riku replies, "I promise."

Kairi grins, turning towards him. "You better. Or else I'll be right there and waiting."

Riku grins back, relieved that she is relatively back to normal. He grabs his bag and smiles, "I'm shuddering with fear."

"As you should."

He snorts and they leave together.

Sora gapes at them when he sees them coming out of the building with one another. His blue eyes are wide and confused as they travel between her and Riku. He smiles, and Kairi is dazzled by it's brightness for the very last time because, up until just now, Kairi had still been just the tiniest bit in love with him.

Beside her, she senses Riku stiffen.

Kairi grins knowingly, glancing at him from the corner of her eye and seeing the flush that has covered his face. She looks back at Sora and her features soften.

At least he's in good hands.

God forbid he fall in love with one of his other friends. The ones on the more anthropomorphic side of things.

God forbid him and King Mickey.

Kairi shudders and continues walking, determinedly thinking of other things.

"Oh well, now that I think about it, I'm sure it was never meant to be." Kairi says, leaning back and sipping at her BigGulp.

"What makes you say that?" Sora asks carefully, not sure how to act when dealing with the sensitive situation they now know as: That Gigantic Clusterfuck That Happened When You Two Idiots Came Out of the Closet Together.

"I was you're first love wasn't I?" Kairi says, not even bothering to wait for an answer. "And first loves never ever work out, both of you guys are lucky though. You managed to get it right in two."

"I guess," Sora says slowly, continuing to nibble at his tiny sandwich. Kairi looks at his ladylike bites and wonders how on earth this stick figure managed to save the universe multiple times. She leans back, rolling her eyes and biting another hunk out of her own sandwich.

"WEll, at least I got to be you're first kiss right?"

The atmosphere in the room becomes eerily tense and Kairi senses something amiss. She looks at Sora who refuses to take his eyes off of his ugly clown shoes and Riku, who is currently trying to hide behind a potted shrub. She frowns, unpleasantness brewing in the pit of her stomach.

"Right?"

They don't answer.

"Sora, I was your first kiss right?"

Still nothing.

"RIGHT!?"

"Well, you see," Sora mumbles slowly, still not looking at her, "We were playing on the island this one time when we were four and I fell and then Riku slipped and landed on top of me and…"

He trails of and Riku curls into a tighter ball, hoping the shrub will grant him some protection from the raining fire and brimstone the wrath of god is sure to bring.

Kairi is silent, slowly breaking the table in half with the force of her own shock.

"WHAT!?"

END

There you have it. The Ballad of Kairi's Heartbreak.

Anyway. Thank you for reading. Hope you enjoyed it.

Yours truly.

-Schyzotypal X