sora-riku-kairi | AU | rated pg14 | romance/friendship/angst

[By AU I mean there will of course be plenty of KH/Disney characters/worlds but the story will be totally different and if that bugs anyone well I guess this AU isn't your thing? But if you do check it out, thank you so much! Pairings will be Sora/Kairi/Riku, any mix/match thereof and potentially others (possibly Roxas/Xion later). There will be romance in this story, but no actual lemons. Just a heads up. [/AN]

The sand was warm and inviting as the thinly framed young woman lie there on her back, the heels of her sandals just reaching the water. The sun was beaming directly over her barely clad body so it was lucky for her that she wasn't one to burn easily. Her strange shade of red hair fanned out behind her head, one of her small hands grasping aimlessly onto a fistful of stand right beside her. The other rested across the white, lacy cloth of her sundress.

"My name is Kairi," she said aloud to herself, lest she forget. Again. Never mind it being an odd practice, she made sure to once a day at least – just in case. Heavens forbid she find herself with them again, only to still not realize who they are, right in front of her own two, shimmering blue eyes.

Squinting up at the sun with one eye open, Kairi mouthed the name of one of her best friends, before switching eyes and mouthing the name of the other. Afterward she brought her hands together, clasped over her heart as she willed these two - wherever they might be - to realize that despite the shortcomings and failures on her part, that she loved them more than they'd ever know. . .

Her memories had been scattered, mismeshed flypapers before – that was all. And they were finally all complied now, like in a notebook, both in her head and in the journal she kept on her person. Little good it did her now, stranded in some world between light and darkness; living out day after day and night after lonely night on a mock island of one she once truly lived, loved and laughed upon.

Groaning, the fair-skinned girl rolled over onto her stomach there on the sand, her sight adjusting to look down at the literal notebook lying there, closed in front of her. She'd rather they show up, take her hand and carry her away from whatever kind of mirage place this was . . . but they hadn't yet. They wouldn't be doing so today, either. Maybe they'd never be coming. And with that last thought Kairi quickly opened the lilac book, squeezing her eyes tight as she shook her head.

"No," she said to herself firmly, refusing to give in to that last, obnoxious little voice in her mind that would seek to diminish the tiniest bit of hope and light she did have left in her heart. "They'll find me," she reassured herself instead. "I might be a hundred by the time they do, but I know they'll find me. Just – just as long as I can keep our memories alive . . ."

Flipping past the first blank page, Kairi scanned her eyes over a dotted number and a diary entry title. "Number one – delirium," she said with a bit of a laugh, before commencing the reading of the book of verses of her self-history that she'd written all on her own during the days so far spent on this in-between island, just to make sure she could never forget them.

Not ever again.

d e l i r i u m . 1

Kairi had felt surely delirious when the idea first came to her. Legitimately delirious, as it so happened, for the blue-eyed girl with hair the hue of sangria red had fallen ill while at school. A bug had gone around and though Riku and Sora – her best friends - had impressively lucked out and dodged the little flu flitting around the campus, Kairi had drawn it to herself like a moth to a flame.

Ugh, she inwardly groaned as she lay in her bed, head propped up atop two stacked pillows; she'd just awoken from an all day long event of dosing off, only to get stuck somewhere between deep sleep and near-consciousness. This annoyed her greatly. She felt convinced that the whole ordeal would pass by her all the more quickly if only she could fall to sleep and stay that way for a little while.

"Miss Kairi, your friends have come to visit," called her nanny through the door then, just as the nightgown-clad seventeen year had made to roll over onto her back from her side.

Or not, she thought to herself. Oh well – I probably wouldn't be able to really sleep like I wanted to anyway, right? At least they might be able to cheer me up then – I haven't seen either of them in three days . . .

"Maybe she's still asleep, boys," the nanny's voice said then, in a noticeably quieter voice. "Maybe you should come back another time, Sora, Riku."

"No!" Kairi exclaimed, quickly sitting up and swinging her legs over the side of the bed. "I'm not asleep! Guys don't go ye – aughhhh!" Her words getting lost as they dissolved into a high-pitched scream, Kairi soon found herself lying face first on the floor, her legs from the calves down all tangled up in her bed sheets.

"Kairi, what happened?" exclaimed Sora then through the door; a turn of her doorknob and then Riku's voice called out, "I think your door's locked, Kairi – are you alright in there?"

That's a good question, she thought to herself, before pushing her achy and tired body up from the ground as quickly as she could manage to, which – being in the state that she was – actually ended up being a relatively slow process. "I'm fine. I just fell," she called out as she got to her feet.

"You didn't twist something did you?" Riku asked her then, before Sora's voice was heard: "Ma'am," he said to the nanny. "Is there a key to get in with?" And then Riku spoke again, saying, "Yeah, what if she fell on her leg the wrong way and can't get back up right now?"

"There's a right way to fall on your leg, Riku?" Sora asked aloud, and Kairi stifled a laugh as she approached the door; the laugh wasn't born solely of Sora's sarcasm, but rather also stirred within her due to the simple fact that these boys – her boys –were acting so worked up over nothing, really. It didn't make her laugh because it was amusing but rather, a laugh played at her smile because it was her instinctual reaction to feeling heart-warmed by something.

They've always been this way, she thought to herself. Them worrying about me – me worrying about them . . . It was one thing, she figured, to be like that when you're unsure about, well, pretty much the entire universe; for instance, if your friends were out there, somewhere in that universe, and you didn't know, then it followed quite logically that you'd be hypersensitive to wondering about their well-being and about looking out for them.

But really, Kairi, Riku and Sora were back to being normal for the most part, if you could call that. Their biggest sources of stress came in the form of tests and pop quizzes at school. Yet here the imprinted natures to always be on-guard to how one another were doing were still perfectly present, completely intact.

Maybe it was weird – or – maybe it was so perfectly normal. Kairi didn't know and Kairi didn't care.

"I'm up – I'm opening the door so just hold on," she said aloud, one of her small hands grasping the doorknob as the other took hold of the somewhat rusted lock built into the knob itself; with only a hint of trouble at doing so, achy and tender, an in much need of a restful sleep Kairi was able to pull the door open and summon all her inner strength to contort her mouth into a large, beaming grin as her sight fell upon the two boys standing before her; her nanny, newly hired, stood between them with a wary expression on her face.

"Erm, Miss Kairi, here they are," the older, portly woman needlessly pointed out. "Do you need anything right this moment?"

"Oh, no thank you, Myrta – I'm all set," Kairi answered her, before gesturing for her guests to follow her on into the bedroom.

"Yes, Miss Kairi," the nanny replied, before pulling the door to a close and walking away to head for the main room of the mayor's grand house.

"Soo . . . how's it been, guys?" Kairi asked as she turned away from the door to face her bed as Riku and Sora sat down upon her overturned and strewn-about bed clothes.

"It's been okay," answered the taller of the two; Riku, who looked at least three years older than he actually was due to his height and build, shoved some of his silvery-white hair back from his eyes as he shifted a bit on the bed and cast a glance in the direction of a spiky-haired brunette, whose school uniform – in contrast to the muscularly fit Riku's – seems almost a size and a half too big on him. "Right, Sora?"

"Er, yep, I mean, other than you being sick and not around for the past few days, everything else has been more or less . . . normal."

Raising an eyebrow, Kairi shifted her weight from one foot to the other as she stood there before her best friends. She eventually crossed her arms and gave them a lopsided smirk. "Two words:" she said. "Spill it."

"Spill what?" Sora asked in a genuinely blank, clueless sort of voice.

Glancing to Riku, Kairi caught his eyes with her own and she attempted to read them with all the perplexity and frustration it takes a person to try to decode the ever-changing pattern of the waves of the sea itself. She ultimately decided that something had happened; there was definitely a furtive sort of look in Riku's eyes – some sort of secret was being kept, she just wasn't sure what it was.

"So-ra," she said in a sing-song sort of voice, the cerulean-eyed Kairi stepping up to him there on the bed before sitting down carefully, purposely placing herself within a proximity of him that would (with any luck) unnerve him enough to tell her what was going on.

"Yes, Kairi?" he answered her in a slightly nervous-sounding voice.

"I was talking about the whole 'oh everything's been normal; everything's been okay' stuff that you and Riku were just talking about," she answered him. "I saw the way Riku kept looking at you, like he was trying to catch your attention. Maybe he was trying to get you to uh, not say something?"

"I don't think he was doing anything like that at all," Sora replied in a bit of a hurried, bumbling way.

A particularly awkward silence followed this, one that caused Sora to give a strangely forced cough to break it up, and when that didn't work, he gave a little chuckle and said, "So . . ."

"So . . .?" Kairi returned, thoroughly not amused about being potentially left out of the loop.

"Soooo I'm just gonna go get a soda, 'kay? Kay."

"But Sora –" Kairi began to say, her hands at the sides of her hips as she stood up and called after him, but Sora flew right past her anyway and was soon gone through door before she could've tried to stop him.

"You know, I'm kinda thirsty, too," Riku said as he stood up from the bed, as well.

"Don't even think about it," Kairi said at once, stepping forward to place her hand against his chest, halting him. "I've been in near-solitary confinement since I got sick. You guys haven't been over in three days, and now you're being weird and running from the room. I mean, what's going on?"

"We did try to see you," Riku said to her then, before taking a step back and sitting down on the bed again. "

"Oh. You did?" the redhead replied, moving to sit down beside him. "So, they made you go away on account of me being sick?"

"Yeah, they said you needed to rest," the silver-haired teenager explained. "So Sora and I didn't try to visit yesterday after what happened the day before, but we decided to try again today, hoping you might be feeling better."

"Thank you," Kairi said with a kind smile. "I do feel a lot better off now than I was feeling a couple days ago . . . you know though, I can think of something that would make me feel one-hundred percent better."

"What's that, Kairi?"

"You could . . . tell me what you and Sora were acting so weird about earlier."

Riku gave a sound of annoyance at being so easily led back into the situation he wanted to avoid. "It was nothing, Kairi!"

"You're lying, Riku!"

"Hey guys," Sora said then, pushing open the partially left open bedroom door wider with an elbow as he stepped into the room, juggling three soda cans. "I brought you back some soda, too."

"Thanks," Riku and Kairi said in unison, though neither would look at the other.

"Here, Kairi," the spiky-haired Sora said with a smile, placing a peach flavored soda into her hand and then turning to Riku, handing him a cherry-flavored one.

"Huh . . ." Riku said, slowly standing just as Sora sat down on the other side of Kairi with his own, orange-flavored drink in hand. "Thanks and all again, Sora, but I don't really care for cherry flavor; I'm gonna go grab a different soda."

"But it's your favori –" Sora began to protest; Riku, however, bolted through the door before he could finish his train of thought.

"Right," Kairi said with a note of finality in her voice as she also stood up and went to the door, though she simply pushed it closed and listened to the locking mechanism click into place before turning to look back at Sora. "You – you're going to tell me what's up."

"But, but –" Sora sputtered.

"Right now."

"But it's just – Riku and I agreed to –"

"Agreed to what?" Kairi asked in a sharp tone of voice as she marched toward the bed, not stopping until her legs bumped into Sora's bent knees.

Slowly looking upward at his friend, Sora felt as if Kairi was towered right over him. On her face she wore a stern look, and it wasn't an expression she often took to showing off. It looked, to Sora, strange – an unwelcome look, a foreboding and intimidating look. He gulped, and then sighed, as if in defeat.

"Riku and I were just hanging out yesterday after school and we were thinking about the dance next week and he told me – Riku that is – that he wanted to ask you to go to the dance with him –" Sora said incredibly quickly, blurting out his words without pause for breath, not stopping even when the girl standing before him flushed a nice, deep pink color all over every visible inch of her skin.

" – and I told him, 'Oh? But I was gonna ask Kairi to the dance'; 'When were you gonna ask her?' he said to me then. I told him how I was going to ask you the day before but we weren't allowed inside to see you. Then I asked, 'Why? When were you going to ask her?' and he said 'Monday' and I said to him, 'Ha! I win!'"

Even as Sora continued rambling on, Kairi felt like she was having a very, very weird dream. It was one of those dreams where everything is rushing around you, beyond you, through you – but you stay put, gravity holding you perfectly in place as the invisible waves of all that is surreal crash over you. Feeling as flushed as ever still, she moved over and sat down beside Sora on the bed, staring blankly ahead with widened eyes as Sora turned slightly to better face her.

"Well Riku didn't like that. He said for me to go ahead and ask you to the dance myself," he said.

Furrowing her brow slightly, Kairi glanced back at him.

"He said I could ask you to the dance because he'd just wait and ask you to be his girlfriend afterwards."

Kairi's eyes grew wider than before.

"I argued that of course I wanted to ask you that instead –"

Surely she was imagining all this.

"He told me it wasn't happening, though, and so I told him to shut up. He said 'Make me', and then . . . well, then things got a little weird."

THEN they got weird? Kairi inwardly thought, leaning back away from Sora just a fraction of an inch, seemingly taken aback.

"Well . . .he said it like a challenge – 'make me shut up' – I tried to tackle him and wrestle him to win the argument. Somehow. But he ended up pinning me instead! He had this smirk, you know, all 'Ha. You can't make me. You – can't – make – me!'"

Kairi had since leaned back in toward Sora in the moment or so that had since passed by. She was very caught up in this bizarre story, even if she didn't feel sure enough to consider it real just yet.

"I figured that the only way to make Riku shut up would be to make his lips stop moving."

A thought then struck Kairi, and while it was wild and crazy and surely impossible, she placed one hand on her forehead just above her big eyes, while the other reached forward and grabbed onto Sora's forearm. "You guys . . . you didn't . . . ? No way!"

It was Sora's turn to blush now, and it was a deep red color, too. ". . . yeah, we uh, we did kiss. It was kind of short," he said sheepishly. "But yeah, it just sort of happened, you know? I kissed him and then we talked about it right after 'cos, well, at first we were all freaked out."

Kairi slowly moved her hand away from her forehead though she kept her hand on Sora's arm. She couldn't believe her ears.

"When we talked," Sora then said. "Riku and I figured that, well, we liked the kiss . . . but we knew we still wanted you too, Kairi – we still wanted to ask you out regardless."

There was a couple seconds' silence and stillness, and then a startling – albeit slightly muffled – voice rang out through the other side of the locked bedroom door. "Sora – I'm going to kill you!"

"Riku!" Sora gasped, scrambling up further onto the bed.

Kairi, on the other hand, simply stood up and walked over to the door, light giggles escaping her all the way. Unlocking the door again, she pulled it open to reveal a startled and nervous looking Riku, his same old cherry soda still in hand. "So I take it you were listening in?" Kairi said to him, a hand moving to her hip.

"Just near the end, I was . . ." answered the young man with aquamarine eyes, though he averted his gaze from that of Kairi's.

"I see," she said simply, before reaching forward and taking hold of Riku's free hand. "Come on, sit with us."

Riku did as asked, letting Kairi first reach beyond him to push the door to a close again with her fingertips before then tugging on his hand and guiding him to the bed, where Sora was still half-hiding, now attempting to do so behind a small tower of wobbling pillows.

"Sora, you dork," Kairi said as she plopped down onto the bed, her hand releasing Riku's to instead playfully push Sora over.

Landing sideways across the bed, Sora gave a bit of a laugh himself, before crawling over to her and kneeling on the other side of her. "So . . . really, Kairi? You're not angry with me and Riku?"

"Why would I be?" she asked simply, before emitting a small shriek of surprise as Sora took his turn to give her a small shove, causing her to fall back across the mess and tangle of bed sheets and blankets.

Laughing a bit, eyes closed, Kairi soon blinked a few times, only to glance upward and find Sora's face hovering over her, appearing to look upside down from her perspective. Also hovering over her was the face of Riku, who had the faintest of smiles on his lips as her eyes locked with his and then also with Sora's. She wasn't sure why, but from the pit of her stomach arose a flutter of sorts, and it travelled slowly upward, moving beyond her bosom and up the sides of her neck before finally showing itself on her face in the form of a sun-kissed glow of a blush.

"Guys . . ." she said quietly, tentatively, glancing away when she felt one hand on her stomach, and then another. Her eyes looked to find that Sora's palm was pressed against her middle with Riku's hand resting slightly over it, his fingers on Sora's fingers, the rest of his hand pressing against Kairi, as well. She smiled, finding her voice again.

"Riku – Sora – would you guys be . . . be my . . . I don't have a word for it. Just . . . instead of it being some struggle or decision to make, what if the three of us just . . . were? You and you and me, and me with you both and you both together; just, all of us – I mean, we've known each other for what feels like forever and . . . we love each other, right?"

Kairi glanced upward to watch as Sora and Riku glanced at one another.

"Of course we love each other," Sora said with a smile.

"Yeah, we do. It kind of goes without saying," Riku agreed with a smile of his own and soon he and Sora both were glancing back down at Kairi, their hands still touching as they simultaneously lowered their faces toward hers.

Kairi felt completely dizzy-headed and breathless as she watched Sora and Riku draw closer and closer to her. She felt tempted to flutter her eyes closed as they did so, but at the same time she felt a need to keep them wide open in order to take in every second of this moment in every which way she could.

"To answer your question, Kairi," Riku murmured, now that the corner of his mouth just above hers. "It's a yes. Right, Sora?"

"Right, Riku," Sora said, his own lips just above the opposite corner of Kairi's mouth.

The corner of Kairi's lips twitched upward into a smile upon hearing this, and then she gasped softly, feeling Sora's and Riku's lips finally press against her own, both at the same time. Kissing back as best she could, she moved her hands to place them atop those of the boys' – her boys' – one hand over Sora's and one hand over Riku's.

Maybe I am insane, she thought to herself. But I wouldn't change this for the world . . .

. . . . . . . .

Feeling the breeze of the sea pass over the calves of her legs, Kairi inwardly shivered as she turned another page. beached it read. "Heh, how fitting."