Goodnight Moon

Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts, or any characters, places, or items appearing in the Kingdom Hearts game series, nor do I own any lyrics to songs used here, and I do not receive payment for the use of these materials in this fic.

Author’s Note: I thank all my readers for my reviews! What I’m most interested in hearing from you is what you think is real or a hallucination.

Thank you, Brit, Maria M, Amane, Zak, LostinThought, Anorexic Muffinz, and Mana-Garmr.

I apologize for the long delay.

Goodnight Moon

Chapter two: Escalations

‘Got a big plan, this mindset, maybe it’s right
At the right place and right time, maybe tonight,
In the whisper, or handshake, sending a sign…’

—She Wants Revenge, “Tear You Apart”

~*~
“Which one is that?” Sora asked, his voice shaking. Riku gave him a lop-sided look, then turned his head to look at the bottle in his hands.

“Your sleeping medication,” he replied succinctly. “You won’t need this anymore,” he added, pocketing the white, plastic bottle.

The brunet gaped, feeling blank and no-no-no-this isn’t happening so why should I be afraid? He glanced at the floor, then up at Riku’s face again, hoping for a sign of softness to disperse the threat of his words. But Sora’s face fell when he peered at Riku’s pale face; his grin was too sharp, and his eyes were unrelenting.

Seeing no words on the brink of bubbling up from Sora’s throat, Riku turned to leave. His boots sounded heavy on the hard, wooden floor. He paused in the doorway, rested his closed fist against the wood molding, and turned his head back to Sora. His hands moved gracefully to replace the pill bottle with the yellow apple once more. He held it out to Sora.

“Want it?” he asked, not unkindly.

Sora’s eyes narrowed in a misdirected rage. He balked at the repetition of the offer of the apple instead of the fact that a stranger had waltzed into his house—section of the house—and had the audacity to steal his bloody medication.

“Déjà vu?” the brunet hissed, “No, I still don’t want it. You asked me before.” He squeezed wads of the bed sheets in his hands.

Riku’s expression softened at the edges, perhaps with concern—Sora could only hope. The silver-haired male tried again.

“You sure? You might need it later,” he said. His hand was still outstretched, bearing the yellow apple with its swimming skin and swimming colors and the vipers all underneath and, what? Sora tried to focus his eyes; the apple was growing blurry as he stared at it. It took him a few seconds, but eventually his surroundings returned to clarified forms. The skin of the apple was not swimming, nor was its pigment, and there were no vipers underneath. However, the apple’s skin was now a fiery blossom with its new orange and red tints.

The tan male repeated himself again. This time his voice seemed like an insubstantial ray, originating from a place in his chest now void of anything but silky darkness, rock, and soft breezes breathed from nowhere.

Finally accepting Sora’s answer, Riku folded the apple into the dark of his jacket and stood upright. His eyes, now unreadable, rested on Sora’s form for a long moment. Then he smirked a little and made his exit, but not before knocking his knuckles against the wooden molding of the doorframe.

The resulting rokrokrok echoed in Sora’s head for hours and made electric eels swim up and down his ribs beneath his skin.

-o-o-

Until the clock read that it was past nine, he could not peel himself from his bed sheets and brave whatever, or nothing, lurked in the rest of the hou—his section of the bloody, stupid house. Eventually he rallied his courage—or not really, but he managed to push down his fear so he just felt cold inside—and crept downstairs to the kitchen.

He flicked on the light switch in the kitchen. He winced as the harsh, yellow light cut into his retinas with its abrupt blast through the air. The light did little for the dingy appearance of wood paneling and cupboards. And who the Hell used dank gray as the main color scheme of a house? Like it needed it. Like the fact that it was old and creaked in ways he really didn’t need to hear late at night and rearranged its lower levels was tame for a living space.

But these observations were convenient for only a few seconds. The distraction melted quickly when Sora’s blue eyes set upon the medicine cabinet under the cupboard. The cabinet was still white, still plastic, and still nondescript, bearing no smudges or marks of telltale hands that had no business snooping around in his drugs. Ironically, the medicine cabinet was the only white thing in the kitchen, and would be the only object to show dirt. All other surfaces in the room seemed to be covered in a layer of some thick something that absorbed stains and grime. The layer was of a substance against which Sora’s cleaning supplies were no match. This allowed the medicine cabinet to stare expectantly at him like no one else in the world mattered, as though it was silently running over its thoughts of I know what you’re looking for, sonny boy, and relishing the moment. And that made it worse. Sora was unprepared and reluctant to find out exactly how bad his situation was. Still, he needed to take his anti-psychotic medication—unless Riku had changed his mind on his way out and taken everything. Sora held his breath, trying to calm himself by counting the number of contractions his heart made in thirty seconds.

Sora finally approached the medicine cabinet when he noticed movement in the corners of the room: it was difficult to describe, and Sora could do no better than say that the walls were licking themselves. He did not need hallucinations on top of this bullshit.

The white storage cabinet opened with a sharp snap, a crack, and then a bump as the back met the wall. Sora grabbed the bottle of anti-psychotics and downed his dose with a glass of water. Once his pills were on their way into his bloodstream, he allowed his eyes to hover over the empty space in the cabinet. Bright side: Riku did only take one of his drugs. Bad side: he’d have night terrors without his Restoril. Oh, er, and he wouldn’t sleep, either. Maybe.

He shook off the little salt water imps trying to climb over his eyelids and strode over to the kitchen desk. He pulled open the drawer and pulled out an address book. He had two of these, plus the contact list on his cell phone, because he couldn’t remember phone numbers or email addresses to save his life.

Which probably meant he was going to die, because every page in the address book was blank.

Sora closed the book, counted one-two-buckle-my-shoe with his breaths, and flipped open the cover again. He turned from page to page with increasing speed as one blank entry was followed by another and another, until his heart was beating with the strength of a freight train. The brunet felt cold trickles of something crawling slowly down his inner walls. Riku didn’t have time to find and erase the entries in this notebook. The pages were smooth and crisp and clean, without eraser shavings or even remnant graphite marks. This was Sora’s address book and it had been filled with everyone he knew years ago.

The ivory cardstock pages became grainy and started moving. Sora pulled his gaze away from the pages and the threatening pit of quicksand in his hands. He breathed, mentally groped for something he might have missed, then flipped through the address book again. The brunet carefully rubbed each page between his thumb and index finger, demanding the leaves of cardstock to separate if they were secretly banded together against him.

He reached the end of the address book without even an eraser smudge to validate all of his memories concerning the object.

With a sudden jerk, Sora fished his cell phone out of his jeans pocket and flipped the top up. He pressed a few buttons and all the cold, scared things inside him softened as he watched the animated “loading” icon on the digital screen cycle. The tightness progressively coiling inside of him relaxed, then abruptly seized up again in shock when he saw the state of his contacts list.

The muscles in Sora’s throat closed over a pained mewl and he had to fight harder to keep the leaky water pipes behind his eyes from bursting. With heaviness at home, he weakly slid out of the rolling chair. His sneakers hit the floor heavily as he walked, face cringing and salt water threatening in the corners of his eyes, to the door. He grasped the brassy door handle firmly, pressed down on the button with his thumb, and pulled. A dull thud reached his ears and the wooden door shook in the frame. He pulled again, and again, repeatedly until the gesture had degenerated into rough, incredulous tugs as Sora tried to pretend it was just something wrong with him and not the door.

The wetness that had been beading up in his blue eyes broke over the rims and started dribbling down his face. The little streams fell over his cheeks, into the taut creases from his contorted expression, and onto his lips.

-o-o-

As Sora resolved to avoid sleep in the following hours, his mind seemed to separate and hover in two separate planes of existence, weakly connected by old memories of I-used-to-be-connected-to-that-lobe and the occasional falling feeling that raced from one cortex to another through the starry road of his midbrain. A soft, willful air cushioned and swarmed around his fragmented mind, making his eyes droop in what he imagined was a silken, white veil, like the substance of souls and supernovas. He wondered if these sensations had arisen as a consequence of his missed dose of Restoril. He doubted it and cast the cause to his own mind, searching for symptoms his medications were supposed to mask and, when the expected was not found, constructed something comforting to fulfill his prediction.

Sora’s focus skated perfectly over his notes from his Animal Behaviors course and his Emily Dickinson essay for his Victorian Literature seminar. He flew dreamily through the entreaties he broached for himself, his attempts to gather up his attention like silver fish in a waterman’s net futile. His notes couldn’t claim his attention, the refrigerator wasn’t calling, and only the quiet murmurs from the television—some pleasantly calm special on the Borgias in Renaissance Italy—seemed able to send out their siren song to the brunet. He began dozing, his head dipping gently as part of his mind drifted through the twilight sea within his skull, on the dully colored couch in his sitting area.

He was faintly aware of little bits of darkness curling together somewhere near him. The flat pool gained depth and, through the slits in his drooping eyelids, Sora’s eyes registered a dark shadow stand up in the corner.

The sound of the front door’s meal gears shifting gently drew Sora’s mind from the soft bed of moss in the dark, quiet swamp of his mind. He stirred slightly on the couch, part of his attention softly drifting forth to take some note of the stimulus, though it was disinterested and wanted to return to the near slumber on the soft, moist green.

The brunet’s eyelids lifted slightly and twitched as a blurry figure stepped softly through the front door. As the person turned to face him, Sora’s eyes reluctantly focused on the head of straight, fair shoulder-length hair he’d seen hours earlier. Behind the lighted head, the dark-thing curled back into a corner, hiding.

He noted a jacket. It was cold outside at this time of night, although he wouldn’t say that thought was relevant.

Sora’s threatening consciousness extended its claws and tried to cling to the slumbering swampland in his skull, but in this activity, his consciousness was pulled further into being. The muscles in his eyes made the final, autonomic contractions, allowing his prefrontal cortex to interpret his clarified surroundings, thus snapping a conscious Sora out of the factory line without ceremony.

Sora moved his fingers, arms, and legs, then turned and sat up straighter to view the intruder. It took him a moment to note the definite absence of sharpness in the paler male’s expression. That observation wasn’t much, and Sora sure as Hell didn’t know how to interpret it. And he wouldn’t know for a while yet whether that was better than an outright threatening facial expression.

Strangely, Riku’s demeanor seemed to be fraying somehow, or swarming over itself. Riku tapped his fingers on his thigh and swung his eyes around the room listlessly until whatever cannibalistic forces inside him banded together and culminated in an abrupt and earnest energy. He directed it at Sora.

The silver-haired male advanced on him, his eyes glinting oddly, like they were truly just spheres filled with water and gold dust and there was no One at all behind them.

“Sora!” Riku breathed as he clasped the brunet’s shoulders. He leaned in eagerly, like the breath of his life was dragging on something inside of Sora; now, having gotten it, his face bore a Cheshire Cat smile. “How did you sleep?” he asked with his aquamarine eyes bright and soft, still glinting.

Sora pulled out of his grasp by sliding backwards off of the couch. He wiped his hands on his jeans to dissolve the sensation of the dreary upholstery on his fingertips. He could not do the same for the lingering weight of Riku’s hands on his shoulders.

“I haven’t,” Sora replied acidly. “Because I can’t sleep without my god damn medication and I have night terrors to avoid.”

Riku seemed surprised. The information took time to register, and eventually Riku wound up executing a cognitive reset. His mouth opened in what may have been disbelief, but then his lips slipped back together in a relatively straight line with a small curl in the corner.

Riku considered Sora solemnly for several seconds, then his eyebrows cinched, raised, and relaxed again.

“You were dozing, at least,” Riku observed quietly, then sunk his focus into the hidden pocket on the dark, inner lining of his jacket. He reached into the pocket and procured a red dog collar.

The silver-haired male pressed the dog collar into Sora’s hands with the words, “You should learn how the dogs speak.”

Sora swayed backward in time to Riku’s forward movement. His brown brows furrowed and angry ruts grew on either side of his mouth.

“What is this?!” Sora spat, throwing the collar onto the floor. “Why the Hell are you doing this to me? If you want to give me anything, give me my pills and my god damn front door back!”

Riku swiftly retrieved the dog collar and stood, shoulders squared, to face Sora.

“You’re ill, Sora,” Riku stated firmly. Whatever warmth he had was now cooling.

“And what do the ill need?!” Sora yelled, blind to the point at which the logical train tracks from point A to point B in Riku’s thought process were broken. He was about to lunge at the intruder but Riku, apparently foreseeing his choice of action, caught him securely in his arms.

“Medicine,” Riku answered with a small grunt as his muscles strained against Sora’s. The taller male swiftly replaced the dog collar in Sora’s hands and leaped back before Sora could make another move.

The silver-haired male had one foot out the front door when he turned and saluted.

“I’m better than you know, Sora,” he said with a devilish smile and slipped soundlessly out the door.

The brunet should have run and wrenched the doorknob before it was locked again. In the last second while his opportunity still stood, little armies were raising themselves on the edges of his mind, ready to run, yet he remained firmly rooted into the old wooden floorboards. In the theater of his mind, Sora sat in the back row, subject to the looping two seconds of memory in which that head of silver hair vanished through the doorframe. He wasn’t the only one watching.

He heard the lock click. Sora felt cold things pooling in his stomach at the confirmation that he was isolated, again. He gripped the dog collar harshly, part of him bent on crushing the bloody thing, but another part of him was softer and plucked the choice from his anger’s hand.

Sora’s gaze dipped from the door to the collar. There was a steel buckle and a steel dog tag on it, both quite luminescent even in the gray din of Sora’s section of the divided house. He flicked the dog collar around so the center front was pointing towards him. The dog tag jingled. The blank side looked up at him. He turned it over to see the name.

There was none. Figures.

The anger in him, momentarily quieted with curiosity regarding the dog collar, abruptly burst and curdled at the thought of his captor. In the dark of Sora’s mind, Riku’s eyes glinted like the gray dust he’d once been on Sora’s bed for the rest of the night.

You should learn how the dogs speak.

He could just hang himself.

-o-o-

Sora tossed the stupid dog collar into the drawer of his nightstand. The wooden drawer shut with a dull snap.

Sora turned away to leave, then paused. There was something in that drawer, in the corner of his eye. It was Something, a nameless Some-thing, else that should have belonged there but no longer did.

In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of --

Sora shivered. He noticed something curling upwards in the edges of his vision. The motion centered in the corners of the room. He knew he shouldn’t look.

He crushed the air out of his lungs and closed his eyes, pretending he could count all the stars in the sky. He still had his Ziprasidone—this was not about to turn into a psychotic episode. He could keep a grip on himself—he could, he was capable of that.

Buck up, now. Don’t be so hard on yourself.

When his eyes opened, the walls had ceased their curious curling, but now the shadows around the nightstand had migrated to frame the top drawer.

Right here, right here—oh, baby, you know it. What the hell are you talking about?

Sora’s hand strayed forth to dust over the drawer knob and hover over the potentials contents of the nightstand. A faint crunching sound, like something eating itself, echoed from a distant place in the back of his head.

Sora gripped the knob between his index and middle finger and snapped open the drawer. He stared piercingly down into the dark, his eyes for the moment offering a rare, daunting challenge to any opposition. There was nothing new in the drawer, except for something he forgot.

A relieved sigh broke from his lungs as he plucked the second address book out of the nightstand. It had everything that the one downstairs used to hold. He ran his fingers over the shiny, black binding with obvious reverence. Riku hadn’t had the time to find or deal with this address book when he was in Sora’s bedroom. This thought was supported by the placement of the other objects in and on top of his nightstand; undisturbed and as he remembered leaving them.

Sora drew his cell phone out of his jeans pocket and flicked open the top. As he moved to open the address book, he heard the quiet moan of an old floor board behind him, and he turned to look. Water jets abruptly burst inside of him, and he flinched, a yelp smothered by the dark things in his throat before the white sound could be birthed from his mouth. He felt the freezing droplets tumble over everything dark and precious beneath his skin. The person standing in the doorway was no one he knew, but the build, the hair, and the color of the glowing orbs on its face were very similar to someone he had recently met.

It waited for him, docile in the doorway, its skin appearing as soft as the dust on a black moth’s wings.

The brunet glanced back at the page of the address book to which he’d opened. He flicked rapidly through the other pages, wilting, before tossing the book onto his bed. Useless. With this thing watching him, he couldn’t think. He forced down the wetness that was trying to creep up behind his eyes and tucked his phone into his pocket.

Now for the unwanted dust-construct standing before him.

Sora grabbed the voice quavering in his throat and forced it to work. He thought it was peculiar how the black figure snapped to full attention exactly when his lips opened to deliver a demanding tone though the words hadn’t even risen to the back of his throat.

“What are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded quietly, silk on steel, to the new intruder. This one’s eyes lacked whites or pupils; instead, they emitted a constant, aquamarine light.

The Anti-Riku’s eyelids lowered. It swayed slightly.

“Answer me!” Sora barked. “Who are you, you freak?!”

The Anti-Riku’s orbs widened and its mouth spasmodically trembled with its response, like it was trying to piece together all the words Sora had imparted to it. It puffed out little black-cloud words without sound that resonated in the brunet’s skull.

“I’m no-nobo—dy, who are You??”

Sora felt something squirming beneath his ribcage. The thing continued.

“Are you nobo-ody, t-t-too?”

The black specter’s wide eyes rested softly on Sora’s face, waiting. The oceanic orbs seemed to be the only anchored thing about its physical person—the edges of its form seemed to be perpetually dissolving into the shadows behind it.

Sora’s brow’s furrowed. He had heard that somewhere before.

The Anti-Riku opened its mouth, to answer Sora’s questions, he assumed, but the “o” shape its lips took kept collapsing on itself. It opened its mouth to try again, but its jaw shuddered as the breath escaped, so it only shook out something unintelligible.

The Anti-Riku shifted from on foot to another. The gloved hands began clenching rhythmically at its sides as it struggled. His brow furrowed as the seconds passed, until his head had drooped so far down that it was staring at the floorboards.

He flicked his oceanic eyes up at Sora’s face and looked away with a pained, sorry wince.

He kept trying, eventually choking out something like syllables but not much better than silence and dust puffs.

As Sora watched the black figure, the sharper points inside his chest softened to sorry sounding notes like I-should-be-able-to-say-all-this-to-you, like he had failed this thing that was trying so hard to exist for him.

I-should-be-able-to-see-what’s-wrong, he thought. I-should-know-what’s-hurting-you.

Sora was still filled with prickling anxiety about this thing, whatever it was—demented—but he obeyed a sudden compulsion. He jerked forward and placed his hand on the thing’s head, near the center part of the hair. Immediately, the Anti-Riku shivered all over, resetting, and looked openly at his face without apprehension.

If Sora could whistle, he would have. God, he would have.

“Okay, enough,” Sora said. The Anti-Riku flinched, prompting Sora to follow his statement with a milder tone in his addition: “You can stop now, if it’s that hard for you.”

The dark thing before him had seamless black skin which vibrated with a quiet, latent energy. Sora thought he could see tiny motions of tiny, secret, vulnerable things just beneath the moth powder coating the Anti-Riku’s skin; tiny lives made of gossamer strings, and iridescent wings made of little, gold wires.

Sora glanced around the room—and no, the walls were not licking themselves this time, thank you very much—for any stimulus to spark him in any direction. After his hopeful scan, his brows fell slightly and a tiny puff of disappointment brushed past his teeth. He did not know where to go from here.

The Anti-Riku stepped forward at that last thought and, for a moment, its glowing, aquamarine eyes reminded the brunet of ship cabins and a lost girl lying, lifeless, on the wooden floor.

“You’re not Riku,” Sora said, in part to himself in an effort to confirm his hope. The Thing did not respond negatively to this—well, it didn’t respond positively either, but Sora didn’t notice.

“You’re not him at all,” he said, his voice warming with obvious relief, and he moved as though to cup that blessed Anti-Riku face and beam into it. He hesitated before his hands made contact with the Things dust-skin. The Anti-Riku gazed at his hands curiously.

Sora withdrew his hands into his pockets and regarded the dark figure warily.

“Can you get me out of here?”

The Anti’s brows—well, the area of his skin where his brows would be—furrowed. It seemed to doubt the wisdom of this concept, or Sora was just projecting onto it. It placed its seamless hand on Sora’s shoulder, causing the skin beneath the brunet’s skin to arch and curl over itself, and steered Sora towards the bed. Here, Sora caught one of the lit fireflies beneath his visitor’s skin.

“No,” Sora stated firmly and removed the Anti-Riku’s hands from his shoulders. When the dark specter tried to repeat the motion, Sora caught and held the seamless fingers. He ignored the intimacy of the contact and presented his situation to the visitor.

“I’m not going to sleep—no, I’m not even going to try to sleep. For one, getting to sleep is damn near impossible for me without my medication to knock me out. I’m dependent on it by now. And second, I have night terrors that result in my waking up in a trembling, shrieking puddle of what can barely be called a human being. I’m not going to be able to sleep restfully, or even sleep at all, just because you think I should try. Do you understand?”

Sora thought he saw incorrectly, which was likely, he admitted. His doubt arose because he thought he saw the Anti mouth something uncomfortable to him.

You’re-better-than-you-know.

The Anti-Riku dropped its hands from Sora’s. Its perfect, dark head twitched, its lips curved, and it managed a clipped-sounding “No.”

Sora decided he’d been mistaken. He needed this thing to remain good, and not-Riku. For his own sake.

His typical hallucinations were frightening, bemusing, and a far cry from an ambiguous ebony imposter with glowing eyes. He wondered if this “visitor” had low comprehension, or was just nearly mute. And had been locked in a cage without human contact for, like, ever. But that was beside the point. It was an illusion and it could affect nothing in the physical world.

The Anti-Riku took that moment to snatch Sora’s cell phone from his pocket and crush it in its hands. He heard the electrical bits being crushed.

…Right.

-o-o-

The brunet tensed when the Anti-Riku’s hand rose towards his face. They had been standing resolutely in his bedroom since the broken phone, but Sora’s eyelids lowered when he felt the dark figure do nothing more than stroke his hair. The soft contact, or that sort of contact in general, was something he hadn’t experienced recently. Sora assured himself that no one else was here to see him take comfort in a hallucination, and let himself lean in to the Anti-Riku’s touch. The Anti-Riku moved so the brunet’s face rested upon Its shoulder and Sora sunk deep inside himself to watch the little firefly this dark thing had given him. The little creature was crawling harmlessly around in the dark of his stomach. Its glow was gentle, like candlelight, and though its rays did not extend far, it reassured Sora that the rest of the dark space was empty.

Beyond Sora’s notice but well within that of the Anti-Riku, Haimund padded silently into the bedroom. The feline stopped and sat on the cold, wooden floorboards to spectate upon the interaction.

Anti-Riku shifted slightly so as to better watch the cat without rousing Sora.

Haimund flattened his ears against his skull and leaned forward, presenting its sharp teeth to the intruder. Then, the cat’s silent, snarling expression changed to one of cool certainty, and it vomited a gray-furred kitten. The kitten’s tiny body met the floor in a curl from which its body did not wake. Its little form crumbled into a pile of gray dust, the same shade as its lush fur.

Haimund raised its head from the disappearing traces on the floor to meet Anti-Riku’s gaze. The feline’s eyes were sharp and hungry.

Me next.

The arm that Anti-Riku had around the brunet’s waist automatically pulled the warmer body closer. Its eyes never left the cat’s form until it vanished in the hallway.

Sora was nearly asleep.

-o-o-

Riku dropped the cardboard box onto the kitchen counter with a soft thud. His forehead was creased and his eyes pointed ahead of him without recognition. The glinting was still there, like the sparkly particles in snow globes, but it now seemed to be knitting something deeper back in the man’s skull.

This activity paused for a moment, and Riku’s narrowed eyes gravitated to the knife box on the island. He swiveled the box around so the slit side faced him.

He opened the cardboard box and began removing knives. He slid them neatly into their slots in the wooden box, but paused to inspect one in particular. This occurred in perfect time with the light jingle of a tiny collar-bound bell as a small, furry quadruped padded into the doorway.

Riku’s hand hovered near the knife box for a moment of deliberation, but he withdrew the knife and held it close to his chest. He angled his head around to leer at the cream-colored feline.

The knives were very sharp.

-o-o-

Sora had rallied and pulled himself from the Anti-Riku’s arms. With nothing else coming to mind, he set the dark figure to reading, as it was apparently impossible for him to get the hallucination to leave him alone. While the brunet tried to make some headway on his paper, the Anti-Riku sat on a chair by the nightstand, leafing through picture books it found somewhere in the house.

The Anti-Riku’s eyes scaled the letters on the page, words he would never exist long enough to pronounce. Its eyes were engaged by the images above the word-things, Its mist of a mind sparked. It looked at pictures of people interacting, and in some of them the people were touching lips. In some depictions, the action seemed to function as a persuasion.

The Anti-Riku’s glowing orbs readjusted to focus on the red digital numbers on the clock beside. The night was drawing on and the Anti-Riku was growing restless. He was vaguely aware his nails had lengthened and come to sharp points, and he felt urges to move, especially when thinking of Sora.

He didn’t understand.

He began tapping his fingers on the nightstand. The sound was an ahkahkahk that wasn’t quite the disturbing one from Dr. S’ office but was close enough to make Sora wince. He snapped at the visitor to stop it. Anti-Riku immediately withdrew his hand and lowered his head. It leaned forward in the way dogs do when they understand they have displeased a master.

Still, time was ticking on and the dark thing’s mind was worried by thoughts of the cat’s dust-meaning in the corner. The fine gray corpse was still there; It could see it, but Sora never noticed it.

Torn between Its fear of upsetting Sora, Its sense of foreboding, and the drives It did not understand, the Anti-Riku stood, dropped the book, and advanced on Sora. It pulled the paper-things from Sora’s lap, unfolded the brunet’s legs, and replaced Itself between them.

It imitated gestures in the books: first pulling Sora against him, then acting out the scene of mouth-touching.

His lips were soft on Sora’s, paradoxically like flesh and moth dust, and the contact made the fireflies in him collectively shock themselves in one massive surge.

The fireflies inside Anti-Riku’s abdomen all began a pleasant, low humming-glow. Their light was a pleasant, dusky tint. Sora’s arms encircled Anti-Riku’s shoulders and waist, and he taught the visitor new things with his lips. There was a soft uncertainty in the dark figure when Sora opened his mouth against his, but with a little repetition and coaxing, Anti-Riku began to follow this path until the movement of their lips was one slow, small, gentle wave after another.

The fireflies’ humming increased to a pleasant vibration in his stomach, and they began to murmur little things, quiet things, with their shy, tiny voices.

-x-x-

And in the next chapter, we’ll see where this is leading… In other news, Riku seems as off-kilter as Anti-Riku and Sora.

That was chapter two. I really appreciate reviews, especially from readers who put this story on alert or add it to their favorites list—your feedback helps me continue to write something worthy of your attention.

Next chapter: “Psychological Monsters”

As though we didn’t have enough already. XD

Please let me know how I’m doing. Until next time.