Post-KH2, somewhat AU multichapter monstrosity. Will eventually contain Ansem/Riku, a horde of FF cameos, and a plot. Maybe.

Consequentially

i.

Happy endings sound really nice, in theory.

And for the first few days, when explanations were provided to disbelieving parents, and old friends were met and old hangouts revisited, and everything was beautifully normal and boring and familiar, it had seemed like things might actually work out.

Sora and Kairi were back to cheerful normality within a week, or at least they looked like they were. But Kairi hadn't really been gone, and Sora was Sora.

Thus far Riku's most noticeable achievement had been to summon his keyblade without thinking when a hand on his shoulder startled him awake, and come within a hairsbreadth of murdering his mother.

School was equally disastrous. He'd learned more than he'd ever wanted to about a lot of things, but none of them were much preparation for sitting in a classroom all day.

Things were not going well. Riku hadn't really expected them to.

Which explained why he slunk off to their island and sort of forgot to go home. If he couldn't wait in the world of darkness, he could… wait here, and keep an eye on everyone from a distance, and maybe someday he'd be fit for human society again. Just not now. Not yet.

He had a few precious days of solitude, during which he discovered that there were even fewer places to brood than he remembered, and you got really sick of fish every day when you were used to a new world's food every week.

Plus someone had woken up in some godforsaken corner of his brain – his heart – and wouldn't shut up. He should probably be more concerned that sometimes the bastard even made decent conversation, when he wasn't sneering at Riku for being too weak to face the rest of the world, or going off on inevitable darkness-related rants.

For example. Hiding from the Dark by sulking in the dark might not be the most logical course of action, you know.

"I thought you got killed by Ansem and his exploding gumball machine," snapped Riku. Now he was talking to himself and making light of a heroic sacrifice. His self-imposed exile was stubbornly refusing to have the effect he'd intended, damn it.

There was the predictable grumble at DiZ's true name. My benighted fool of a teacher destroyed only the darkness inside you. I remain.

"There's a difference between you and the darkness?" he asked flippantly. Which was unfair, because, well. Wanting to further the cause of science was at the very least no worse than just wanting to get the hell off the most boring island chain in the multiverse, and now and then he had seen sparks of the decent person the Seeker of Darkness had been once. Proud, ambitious, young and far too sure of himself, but not evil. After all this he knew An— Xehanort far better than he'd ever wanted to.

A chuckle. Really, now? I don't recall that we ever knew each other quite as well as I might have liked.

"You know what I meant, you terminally filthy-minded perv."

You're amusing as ever when you're angry, my--

"I'm not your anything," snarled Riku, clamping down on the other and glaring into the fire. "And I'm not talking to you. Shut up."

Riku might almost have been content with things, even the fish and the disturbingly non-crazy voice in his head, except that the others knew where he was, of course, and it was too much to hope that they would leave him alone. Sora or Kairi or Sora-and-Kairi would row over every day or three times a day to tell him to stop being an idiot and come home, and when that didn't work, they recruited as many other people as they could find, until it started to feel like annoying Riku had replaced blitzball as the archipelago's major spectator sport.

Not that there was much of anything to do on the islands, and the Amazing Reappearing Riku was bound to attract attention for a while, but this was beyond ridiculous.

Selphie and Tidus and Wakka showed up, inevitably, but so did a handful of other kids he barely remembered. A girl whose name he couldn't quite come up with proclaimed that she was still in love with him, to her companion's amusement. Tidus's father put in an appearance to yell at him to join the blitzball team. Principal Kramer dispatched someone with a rambling letter that threatened to have him arrested for truancy, as though the islands' entire police force wasn't two elderly men who never vacated their coffeeshop of choice.

He never saw his mother, but one morning there was a neatly wrapped box sitting on the pier, which turned out to be full of cookies and pastries and a note he refused to read. The box was from a bakery in town. She never had been much of a cook.

A week slipped by, then two. School proved more of a distraction than the Angry Silver-Haired Hermit. Eventually the novelty of his presence wore off, and everyone but Sora and Kairi seemed content to leave him to his own devices.

Which didn't help, because they were the only ones he couldn't ignore, and sometimes it wasn't just Sora and Kairi.

He wasn't exactly surprised when he woke up to Roxas standing over him with an expression somewhere between a glare and a pout that Sora had never worn in his life. "Would you give it up already, you ass? You're depressing Sora and you know how hard it is to make him anything but happy."

"I'm doing this because I care about him," Riku said lamely, hoping that Roxas didn't feel like resorting to violence, because there was no way he was beating up Sora's body, whoever happened to be in charge of it at the moment.

But the Nobody only shook his head scornfully. "Because you care about him. Maybe you should try being with your friends while you still have them."

He'd hoped they'd give up eventually. They didn't.

"Look," said Kairi, crossing her arms and frowning at him. "I don't know half of what happened while you two were off playing hero and I was stuck here, because you won't tell me and Sora's too caught up on the lions-and-pirates-and-did-I-mention-the-store-in-Radiant-Garden-that-makes-the-best-fudge-ever to be coherent. But I know you faced a lot more than I did, and I guess your average Heartless is a lot less scary than Ms. Trepe's algebra class, but hiding out here isn't going to change anything." She sighed, kicked a coconut and sent it sailing off down the beach. "Just come home, you big stupidhead."

Stupidhead, Riku pointed out, wasn't much of an insult.

Kairi grinned and shot back with a string of considerably more effective insults. "Larxene," she said sweetly, with a smile that wasn't her own, when Riku had managed to stop gaping and ask where she'd picked that up.

"Naminé," he said. It was… almost creepy, to see her smile that genuinely. "I thought you might understand."

"I understand hiding," she shot back. "I understand being afraid to face things that are stronger than you are. But it's been a long time since I was ever like that, and I don't know why anyone would want to act like that when they don't have to."

Then she was Kairi again, and no longer smiling. "I'm used to waiting. But it's really… pointless to have you right here but still acting like you're lost out there somewhere."

Riku stalked off to the other side of the island and tried not to be disappointed when she didn't chase after him.

They're right, you know, Xehanort said that night, because apparently everyone had to get in on these stupid motivational talks. Next thing he knew the King would put in a surprise reappearance to lecture him. You have more skill at self-deception than you should, if you still cannot admit that.

"Whatever you think you're going to get from me, it's not going to happen," said Riku around a mouthful of the latest parentally-provided sweets. So much for solitude and independence. "Can't you go find something else to do?"

Would that I could, Xehanort said wistfully.

Oh. Right. Better that he was stuck here, reduced to no more than an annoyance. Having to spend the rest of his life with tall, dark and loony bitching at him was more mercy than Riku deserved, even if he had gotten the short end of the stick when it came to voices in his head.

The voice in question fell silent for a while. Hopefully bored enough to end the conversation prematurely, but more likely thinking.

I'm merely attempting to find a way to phrase this that won't send you into paroxysms of adolescent fury. Understand that—

"No."

If you could accept the—

"Oh, hell, no."

…then submit to—

But there was an undercurrent of amusement and a definite lack of seriousness there, and Riku couldn't entirely hide his snort of laughter. Xehanort was… surprisingly hard to hate, when he wasn't being overtly evil. Which probably meant this was some sort of ploy designed to manipulate Riku into something, but still. Riku had kicked Xehanort's arrogant ass how many times now? If he was stuck with him, then talking to him wasn't going to hurt. Let him pretend to be repentant if he wanted to.

You will permit me to flirt with contrition, but refuse any offer of forgiveness for yourself, when you have so clearly undone whatever wrongs you committed in the past? Go back to those who care about you. Entertaining though your self-hatred was at first, it turns boring after a while.

"I'm damned if I'm going to do anything because you tell me to," said Riku, in a tone that was embarrassingly close to whiny.

Then remain here, said Xehanort. Escape the darkness only to spend the rest of your life reflecting on how much you loathe it. Linger on the edges of other people's lives without ever living your own for fear of what you once were.

The reversal was so painfully transparent it didn't deserve to be called manipulation. Xehanort sounded vaguely embarrassed with himself for resorting to it. But it was giving him an excuse, even if it was a really stupid one.

And the truth was that this was turning out to be even more of a disaster than sticking things out and trying for a happy ending had been.

"…Fine," said Riku. "In the morning. I'll stop being an idiot and go home and— figure out what I'm going to do now. Catch up with Sora in school, I guess, because there's no way I'm going to be a year behind him."

He stretched out on the sand to look up at the stars and the dark between them. "And, well, maybe I can head off to other worlds again without blowing mine up this time? Can't be that hard to invent space travel mostly from scratch."

When Xehanort laughed he sounded far more pleased with himself than he had a right to be, but Riku couldn't bring himself to complain.