Lost Heaven, Part One: Awakening

So…every now and then I’m gonna have an ((Another Side, Another Story)) chapter with Riku’s POV. Just wanted to tell ya so you wouldn’t be confused or anything while reading… I’m not quite sure if they’re going to be as long as Sora’s chapters, though. And be warned…Riku’s chapters will contain some holes. I want it like that…

WARNINGS: naughty language, Axel, etc…

((Another Side, Another Story))
The One You’ll Never Forget…

Large, sky blue eyes. Beautiful, disheveled brown hair. The face that haunted my nightmares glared at me from across the cafeteria. But this…this was impossible. It couldn’t be him. He was…

He fell into conversation with Roxas and looked away from me, allowing me the chance to escape from his hypnotic eyes before he could look back at me again. I shook my head and stared at the table, trying my hardest to block out the sounds of the cafeteria around me, which was extremely difficult with Axel making a commotion about something that wasn’t nearly as important as he seemed to think it was.

I didn’t have to wait long, though. The bell rang and, in a unisonous screech of chair legs against marble, the hundred or so students in the room stood from their seats and left. I was the only one left sitting. Everyone around us had stood and gone, leaving me alone with Axel. I sighed. Great. Alone with Axel.

The flamboyant red-head plopped down into a seat and propped his chin on his fist, his grass green eyes surveying my face. I tried to divert my eyes to something else, but they always returned to his face.

“Sooo…what’s botherin’ ya, Ri-chan?”

I cringed. He was the only one I ever let call me that. He knew that and abused the privilege everyday without shame.

“It’s nothing, Axel. Don’t worry about it.” I pushed myself up from the table and swung my bag over my shoulder, headed toward the door to leave.

I heard the inevitable scrape of Axel standing and his footsteps as he hurried to catch up with me. He walked at my side in silence, but I knew that he was just itching to pry some more. That’s just how he was. Loud, obnoxious, and very, very nosy.

“He looks just like you know who, doesn’t he?” He nudged my side playfully with his elbow but I shoved him off with a shrug.

He sighed, and I knew he was pouting but I refused to look at him. I kept my eyes locked on the empty hallway in front of us. The other students had already made it to class and were set to listen to their teacher’s rambling. Thankfully, more like unthankfully at the moment, Axel and I had a free class and were left to our own devices for the next hour.

We stopped at our lockers and I pulled a book out of my bag, settling down as comfortably as I could on the ground so I could maybe finish reading it. But Axel had other plans. He laid on his back with his head almost lying in my lap, his eyes boring into my face and cutting off all concentration I thought I had had.

I growled quietly and closed my book with a quiet snap, glaring at him. He smirked up at me and reached up to brush a lock of my hair behind an ear, his fingers trailing gently across my cheek. I jerked my head away from him and rolled my eyes.

“Don’t do that.”

He chuckled. “Don’t do what?” He pushed himself up and leaned forward so I was trapped between him and the lockers behind me and nibbled gently at my ear. “This?”

I growled again and shoved him away. “Yes that. Don’t touch me!”

He put his hand against his chest and pouted at me in mock hurt. “That hurts, Riku. Right here.” He pointed to his heart and added tears to his voice. “And here I thought I was your best friend and all, but noooo. You shove me aside like I was last night’s dinner.”

His last words sent me over the edge. I lunged at him and tackled him to the ground so I was straddling his lap. He laughed heartily and shook his head.

“Oh sorry. Did I say that out loud? I meant date.”

“Asshole,” I growled.

“Only for you.” He gave me his trademark smirk as I climbed off him and returned to my spot in front of my locker.

I grabbed my book and flipped it back open to the page I had marked, but I had even less concentration now than I had had before. Axel kept staring at me and a pair of crystal clear blue eyes refused to stop floating through my mind. Giving in, I sighed and closed my book, resting the back of my head against the locker with my eyes closed.

“You know that little brunet in our class?”

“Know him?” He laughed. “I’ve already had wet dreams about him. And you know you have too. Well…seeing that you’ve seen him na…”

I punched him in the stomach and shook my head. I was able to deal with most of Axel’s annoying and perverted comments, but there were sometimes when I had to draw the line. That had been one of those times. And could I have picked a hornier best friend if I had been trying? Probably not… Aside from our friendship and a good fuck, nothing mattered to him. Hell, he used to get both in one easy to carry pack-age, but things had changed.

“His friend looks like someone you haven’t seen in years.”

He smiled from somewhere off in his own little land. “Just wait. He’ll give into me one day. No one can resist me for too long.”

I rolled my eyes. “Roxas has nerves of steal. He’ll either give in or kill you. I can’t believe you’re willing to take the risks.”

He shrugged and smiled crookedly. “What is death but the beginning of a new life? What is life but the beginning of a new death?”

o-o-o-o-o

Axel and I parted ways as the bell to end fourth hour echoed in the empty halls, followed by twenty different classroom doors being thrown open. He left me with an Axel-like smirk and quirky little wave, his rather unAxel-like words ringing in my ears.

“What is death but the beginning of a new life? What is life but the beginning of a new death?”

No matter what he did, he always managed to find new ways to surprise me. But what did it all mean? While the words answered the question I had given him, I felt that they had a deeper meaning than what they showed on the surface. There was something else lingering just below the surface…something that danced around just out of my grasp.

The words circled through my head throughout my fifth hour psychology class. I wrote and rewrote them in my notebook until they blended in with the random notes I took when I managed to catch something the teacher said. I barely heard the bell ring at the end of class. I gathered my things and went to my locker to get my books for chemistry. Axel ambushed me before I had a chance to leave the hallway unseen.

“Gonna tell me yet?”

I rolled my eyes. “I did tell you, Axel.”

He shook his head. “Asking me if I’ve seen ‘that little brunet in our class’ does not constitute as telling me what you were staring at and/or thinking about during lunch.”

“You are insatiable,” I groaned.

“And you’re only delaying the inevitable,” he replied in a sing-song voice with a wide smirk and danced off to lead the way to chemistry.

I sighed and shrugged, resigning to my fate. At least I had a good teacher for chemistry, or so I heard. Supposedly, Mister Shauver was almost like a kid himself and was able to get along with pretty much everyone.

Axel lead the way to the classroom, keeping a fair distance away from everyone around us like he always did.

We passed Naminé in the hall. She looked at us with wide eyes and quickly ducked into the closest bathroom. I don’t know what it was, but there was just something about her that was…strange. Well, that’s a given, but there was something more. She was very soothing. Axel always joked that it was a spell that she cast on everyone around her, and I wasn’t sure if it was meant to be a pun or not.

The classroom was just around the corner from where our lockers were. I was surprised to see that we were the first ones into the classroom. The teacher hadn’t even arrived yet. Axel smirked, grabbing me by the elbow, and dragged me to the end table in the back row of seats.

Slowly but surely, the rest of the students started to come into the room. I was surprised when the bell rang and there were only about eight other students in the classroom. I had always thought that chemistry was a fun class that everyone enjoyed, but I guess I had been mistaken.

The others in the class talked quietly amongst themselves, ignoring Axel and I. As depressing as it may sound, it felt great to be ignored. We had either been pulled into annoying conversations or stared at by passersby all day long. It was great to just sit and stare off into space until I had to start paying attention.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last all that long.

A few minutes after the bell had rang for everyone to be in class, the door opened and I was overcome with…something. I can’t really put a name on what it was, but it felt like an electric shockwave shot through my body, igniting my senses from my head to my toes. My sense of smell was stronger and the colors of the room around me brightened until it looked like I was staring into a painting.

I closed my eyes and blinked a couple of times to try to get it to go away, but it stayed. It wouldn’t stop. I opened my eyes again and the first thing they landed on was my angel from the cafeteria. He was frozen in the doorway, staring at Axel and I like he would much rather die than have to sit through a class with the two of us. His unease was suffocating.

Roxas nudged him in the back and he stumbled into the room and to their seats, which of course, had to be right beside the two of us. Sora plopped down into the seat next to me and tried to look collected by locking his eyes on the board. Roxas tried to talk to him, but he ignored him without trying to hide it. I could feel his discomfort just as easily as if it were my own.

Like the “shock” that surged through my body when he’d first stepped into the classroom, there aren’t words strong enough to explain how I felt while I was sitting next to Sora. An intense anger coursed through me. For no reason at all, I wanted to reach out and hurt him, to break him in some way to make him pay for what he had done to me.

I refused to let us touch. Even the smallest of brushes against his body would have sent me over the edge. I was right-handed while he wrote with his left, so I moved closer to Axel to get away from him. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and sighed heavily, moving a little to the left. I tried to contact him and tell him why, but I knew that he already knew.

Sora’s scent was intoxicating. I would have expected him to smell like something sweet, but instead he smelled like the ocean. In mere seconds, I was drowning in it…drowning in him. My eyes were glazed and I couldn’t concentrate on anything that was happening around me. And what made it worse was that I could sense him sitting beside me the entire time. His mind was in extreme emotional turmoil and his breathing was shallow in his chest. Instead of calming my own raging emotions, feeling him there only made my anger toward him increase tenfold.

To my displeasure, Shauver announced that we had a lab to do today when he finally decided to waltz into the classroom. And, to make things even worse, we were paired off by rows, meaning that Axel and I had to work with Sora and Roxas. Great. Just great. Axel was probably going to end up “accidentally” molesting Roxas at some point in time and I was going to be left with Sora, who was radiating “I hate you, Riku” waves as I we sat there.

Shauver addressed Sora briefly and then we were set free to work on the labs. Sora and Roxas quickly grabbed their books and moved to a lab station.

“Let’s get this over with,” I heard Roxas muttered

Axel chuckled. Roxas turned to glare at us with such intensity that it could have killed us. Thankfully it didn’t because that would have sucked.

“You two could do something useful instead of acting like complete assholes.”

“Watch your language, Roxas!” the teacher muttered dryly, like he was used to scolding the blonde for his foul mouth.

Axel chuckled. I not only felt the tension that flooded through Roxas, I saw it. It flashed in his eyes and across his face.

“Come on, Sora. I’ll get the chemicals if you clean the flasks.”

Roxas walked off and Sora checked his lab book before grabbing the flasks we were going to be needing for the lab. He cleaned them thoroughly and with utmost care. By the time he was rinsing them with distilled water, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer.

“You know your stuff…”

I heard him growled under his breath and it set me off. I moved so I was standing right behind him and laughed in his ear. He jumped and the flask he had been holding shattered across the lab station.

“Sora!” the teacher shouted. “Watch what you’re doing!”

“Sorry,” he muttered and turned to glare at me.

I shrugged it off with a grin. “Having some problems? You should let me handle that before you break any-thing else.”

“Fuck you!” he growled.

“Sora…” the teacher warned.

The cocky smile was wiped from my face as Sora turned on his heel and stormed out of the classroom, his emotions raging like a vicious hurricane. It wasn’t long before Roxas went out after him and me and Axel were left alone to work on the lab. We did a fairly decent job. But I couldn’t get my thoughts to stop circling.

That hadn’t been me. I don’t know what had possessed me to show myself to Sora like that, but it hadn’t been me. But he thought that it had been me and now he hated me even more for it. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t in the classroom with us anymore. I could feel that hatred as plain as day. And it hurt. The lab could have been the perfect time to try and make friends with him, but instead I’d gone and fucked things up.

Well…it wasn’t like I was good at doing much of anything else.

The bell seemed to echo deafeningly off the walls of the classroom turned prison as it signaled the end of the double hour class. I jumped up from my seat and all but mauled Axel over in my rush to get to the door. He sighed and made sure to block my way until he had shoved the rest of his books into his bag and was ready to leave. It felt like forever while I stood there waiting for him, but it had only been a couple of seconds as we were still the first ones out of the classroom.

I quickly lost myself in the crowded hallway, losing track of Axel as he silently disappeared to run off to his next class. I returned to my locker to get my books for my next class and then headed off alone, my thoughts circling about everything I had felt in the last three hours of my life.

o-o-o-o-o

I awoke from a nightmare with a choked scream. I shot up in my bed and my eyes wildly surveyed my room. Tears poured down my face. I gasped down several breaths to try and collect myself, but it didn’t help. The last vision from my dream refused to leave my mind.

It wasn’t the first time I had had that dream, or at least one that resembled it, but now that I knew that he was really alive it made it seem all the more frightening. I had never believed in bad omens or dreams that told the future, but I couldn’t be so sure about this one. Everything in the dream felt real. I felt the fear that coursed through my dream-self’s body as he was carried away from him, felt the pain as the lance pierced through my stomach…felt the coldness as darkness stole over my senses and finally overcame me completely. My dreams were always lucid, but these were more. They were so realistic that it was becoming harder and harder for me to plan the future when my dreams predicted such a tragic end to my life.

Shaking my head, I pushed myself out of bed, checking my clock over my shoulder as I did. It was only midnight. I ran a hand back through my hair to push it out of my face while I searched my room for some decent clothes. I grabbed a pair of blue jeans and a plain T-shirt and pulled them on before crossing my room to my window and shoving it open. The cool nighttime air filled my room and the gentle breeze played with my bangs as I crawled out on to my roof, making sure to close the window behind me.

I crawled across the grainy shingles and slid down the gutter to the ground. I made sure to hide in the shadows as I made my way across the back lawn to the fence that I leapt without a problem. When I was safely outside the boundaries of my house I broke into a run. I don’t know how or why, but I knew exactly where I wanted to go and how to get there.

I slowed to a stop outside a plain house. It looked exactly like the two on either side of it, give or take a few chips in the tan paint here and there. My breathing was shallow as my eyes gravitated to an open window on the second story. That was where I wanted to go.

I surveyed the lower level of the house and the lawn around me for something I could use to get to the window but there was nothing other than a gutter. But it would have to do. Sighing, I grabbed on to the flimsy metal and slowly made my way up the side of the house, praying with every movement that the whole gutter system wouldn’t suddenly break under my weight and send me and the rest of the pipes careening toward the hard ground.

Thankfully it didn’t and I made it to the roof with barely even a scratch. Once there I crawled across the shingles like I had at home toward the window. The wind blew gently and I was overcome with that scent…like the ocean on a beautiful, sunny day. An iron anvil crashed into the pit of my stomach and I had to stop crawling for a moment so I could regain control over myself and my emotions.

It was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have come. I was intruding on him and his privacy by doing this. But I couldn’t hold myself back. I wanted to see him. And something in the pit of my stomach was crying out that I wanted to kill him and make my face the last thing that he would ever see.

The window was in front of me now. I took a single, deep breath and silently slid into the room, not daring to breathe until my feet were planted on solid ground. Sighing quietly, I shook my head and let my eyes roam around the room around me. Band posters adorned the walls here and there. A desk sat in a corner with books I recognized from school sitting over to the side. A bookshelf that was crammed with books, DVDs, and a stereo stood on the opposite side of the room, a dresser with a small television on top sitting next to it. The last thing I let my eyes touch was the bed.

He was there. Sleeping, of course, but his unconscious state only seemed to make the demon in my head screech with sadistic laughter. It would have been so easy to just kill him, to steal his life away from him without a second thought, but the first coherent thought that drifted through my head made me stop.

‘He looks so peaceful while he’s sleeping…always has. Nothing ever changes, right, Sora?’

Always has. I smiled tenderly and cocked my head to the side slightly. Yes, he really had always been the most peaceful while he was sleeping. It was always his one and only escape from the hardships he had to deal with everyday, his only escape from the pain. Tears welled in my eyes and I reached out and gently ran a hand through his hair. It was soft as silk, just like I remembered it…

I sighed. Like the strange urges that I had gotten to hurt him earlier in the day, there was no way to de-scribe how I felt. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end and every pore of my skin felt like it was tingling with electricity. And there was so much confusion flitting through my mind. I wanted to reach out and hold him safely in my arms. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to kiss him tenderly and wipe away his tears. I wanted to make him feel the pain he’d made me feel.

A quiet moan pulled me from my thoughts and I looked upon his face in fear as he muttered something and shifted in the bed. I didn’t wait long enough to know whether he woke or not. I was out the window and running back down the street toward my own house in the blink of an eye. I only dared to take a deep breath when I was safely back in my room, where I collapsed on to my bed with my face buried into my pillow.

“You’ll only hurt him, you know?”

I tensed and looked up from my pillow to see Axel sitting at my desk, his arms crossed over his chest and sad frown on his face. I scowled at him and rolled on to my back so I could stare at the ceiling.

“What do you know?”

He laughed and I heard the quiet squeak of my chair as he stood. His bare feet didn’t make any sound across my floor. I thought that he had left, until his wild shock of red hair appeared in my sight again and he sat on the edge of my bed.

“You’re drawn to him because he’s the one that Father’s spent all his time trying to get you to forget. But he’s the one that you’ll never forget.”

I furrowed my brow and pushed myself up so I was sitting with my back against my wall. “What do you mean?”

He sighed and shrugged. “Sora is to you what Roxas is to me. And now that you’ve found him again, there’s no escaping it. You know this.”

I shook my head and closed my eyes to take a moment to sort out what he had just said. Sora really was the one I’ll never be able to forget. Whether I was dead or alive, I would always remember Sora and his bright smiling face.

I sighed and opened my mouth to say something, but when I opened my eyes, Axel was already gone.

“Bastard,” I muttered under my breath.

I was answered by a quiet laugh that seemed to be carried on the breeze.

Sighing, I curled into a ball on my bed and closed my eyes, letting sleep take me over. It seemed that, no matter how confusing they were, the only place I would be able to find answers was in my dreams.

TBC…
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A/N: Bleh…so there’s Riku’s POV on everything. Kinda creepy/stalker-ish that he broke into Sora’s room to watch him sleep and quite possibly kill him, but Sora didn’t know about it so it’s all gravy, ne? Hehe… Hopefully this chapter helped answer some questions ya’ll might have had about Riku… If not, then I’m sorry…

And I just love Axel. ::hugs him:: He’s goofy but can be serious when you need him to be. And I know that some things are probably confusing, but there’s a reason for it so yeah…it’s not all for nothing…

THANKS YOUS!!!

Laura: I'm sorry that it took so long for me to update!!! ::cries:: I've had the chapter done but just couldn't find the motivation to get online and post it. I hope it's good enough to make up for the wait, though. I dunno if there are any hyphen mistakes in this chapter. If there are, I'm sorry that I didn't catch them. Thank you soo much for your reviews and feedback! It's very much appreciated!...

Sookisa: Thank you for your comments. I'm glad that you enjoy my writing...

And that's it, so until next chapter, adieu...