Pairing: Riku/Sora (brief mention of Sephiroth/Cloud)
Summary: (Oneshot PWP. Post KH2. Fluffy RxS yaoi.) Sora has some questions for Riku about the birds and the bees.
Warning: Fluff. Boy-sex. Yay.

The first of several Riku/Sora oneshots in my head, though this is the only lemon. Dunno if the others'll ever get written, but hey, at least I got one…

. I n s p i r e d . C u r i o s i t y .

Written by
Hades' Phoenix
to satisfy the fangirl cravings
of her friend and yaoi crack supplier,
Mad Violinist.

Because she lurves her. :)

xxx

Sora decided he rather liked Riku's bedroom. It was relatively spacious and the walls were a creamy color that looked warm against the solitary light of the desk lamp, and the furniture was of dark wood that was masculine and simple without losing a sense of style. Everything was neat and ordered in a way that Sora's own bedroom—messy, cluttered, and generally chaotic—could never be.

The best part, though, was the window. It was rectangular like any other window in any other room, but the sill was just wide enough for two not-quite-adults to sit comfortably beside one another with their legs dangling against the side of the house, watching the apex of the sun finally slip below the edge of the ocean.

Sora absently flicked at a tiny black flying thing that had landed on his bare shin just below the hem of his dark shorts, for although it was just past sunset the air was still warm and heavy from the weight of the tropical sun. He leaned forward a little on his hands, braced against the wood of the sill, until his shoulders slumped and the crown-shaped pendant of his necklace clinked quietly against its chain. Riku was a comfortable and familiar warmth at his side in the growing darkness.

"It's all your fault, you know," he said suddenly, a note of amusement in his voice, and felt Riku stiffen.

"What is?"

"You said Santa Claus didn't exist." Sora did not need to turn around to know that Riku's expression would one of mild bemusement.

"He doesn't."

"Does too. We met him, Donald and Goofy and me."

"And I," Riku corrected automatically. "And when did this happen?"

"Remember, when I told you about Halloween Town?"

"Yeah, it was about Halloween. Santa doesn't exist."

Sora tilted his head to look at Riku challengingly. "Why not?"

"It just doesn't make sense," the older boy snorted derisively. "Some fat guy spends a whole year, every year, making presents for all these kids and somehow manages to deliver them all in one night? Come on."

"Kinda like a mouse becoming a king of, well, everything?" Sora rebutted with a grin. Riku canted him a dry glance.

"Totally different."

"Nuh uh."

"Yes it is, you three-year-old."

Sora stuck out his tongue.

"Idiot."

"Prick."

They grinned at each other, and a comfortable silence settled over them.

But now Sora's mind was fondly mulling over Halloween Town, which made him think of that kick-ass vampire outfit his clothes had morphed into (and that had been a weird feeling, a little ticklish and a lot awkward as his clothes felt like snakes wriggling into new shapes), and that train of thought derailed when it came upon a minor dilemma.

"Ne, Riku, I wonder what you'd be in Halloween Town."

"What?"

"Like a zombie or a mummy or something. I think you were a ninja one year."

"Well, yeah, ninjas are way cooler than pirates," Riku scoffed, remembering a young Sora in too-big pantaloons and a bandanna slipping over his eyes.

"You broke your foot trying to side-kick a streetlamp," Sora offered with a bright smile. "Besides, pirates are so much harder to kill than ninjas."

"You ever fought any ninjas?" the older boy asked archly.

"No, but I fought a whole crew of flesh-eating zombie-pirates that wanted to eat me."

"So how do you know pirates are harder to kill if you've never fought a ninja?"

"Does Marluxia count?" Sora asked thoughtfully. He thumped the heels of his bare feet against the side of the house.

Riku leaned back on his hands as much as the windowsill would allow and raised a slender brow. "His scythe was pink."

"He was an assassin," Sora argued. "That's kinda like a ninja."

"His element was flower."

"He nearly overthrew Organization XIII," the brunette pointed out, and Riku had to acknowledge the truth of the statement. "I mean, no, he wasn't as scary as Sephiroth or someone, but he was really mean."

Riku snorted softly, thinking that in the end none of the Nobodies had really been anything approaching kind and altruistic, no matter how they acted; except maybe Axel—Riku could not forget that the Flame Dancer had given his life for Sora, even if his whole non-life before that had been spent trying to replace Sora.

Sora hummed contentedly under his breath as he idly poked at Riku's ribs.

"Oi, what the hell was that for?" The silver-haired boy caught the invasive hands and pinned them to the sill.

Sora grinned again. "Ri-ku, lemme go!"

"No, you'll poke me again."

"So? I'm your best friend, and as such I have exclusive poking rights."

Riku looked amused. "Since when?"

"Since you told me Santa doesn't exist and I proved you wrong," the brunette quipped.

"How could you've proved me wrong if you were the only one that saw him?"

"Donald and Goofy did too!" Sora mock-pouted, sticking out his tongue once more. Riku laughed aloud and tried not to think about how much he had missed this.

"I think you were just distracted by thinking about Kairi," he sing-songed teasingly, rewarded with a brilliant flush spreading over his friend's nose and cheeks.

"No, I was looking for you," Sora stressed, fighting away his embarrassment and pulling his hands from Riku's so he could bump their shoulders together. His grin became a more solemn little smile as he said quietly, "And, you know. I'm glad I did."

Riku looked down at his hands and imagined that he could still smell the Darkness fouling his skin.

"…Me too," he said after a long minute, and leaned a bit more firmly against the smaller boy at his side.

He would be seventeen soon and though she had not said anything, Sora wondered if Kairi, now that she had been mentioned, liked him like that. They had never so much as kissed and had never even tried. At least he had not been as distracted as Sephiroth, since he had been mentioned too, and speaking of whom—

"Ne, Riku," Sora said slowly, and Riku recognized the 'I'm-going-to-ask-you-a-humiliating-question-again' voice. He braced himself for nuclear fallout, but figured that nothing could be worse than when they had been twelve and thirteen and Riku was convinced he had known everything since he was now a teenager, and Sora had asked him what the difference between boys and girls was. Or maybe the time Sora had asked if the acronym for sadism-and-masochism had been another type of candy, like M or when they had managed to find a certain book in Riku's parents' bedroom called Kama-something and learned a few things about the flexibility of the human body.

So he forced himself to remain calm when he heard, "How do two guys have sex?"

"Sora," he said slowly, "sometimes I'm terrified by the way your mind works."

"What? I'm serious."

"That's what's so scary."

Sora had long ago grown immune to Riku's sarcastic asides. ""I was wondering because I was thinking about Sephiroth, and then you mentioned Kairi and I was so not distracted but Sephiroth was because him and Cloud were in the Coliseum baths—"

"He and Cloud," Riku corrected without thought, then said blankly, "So what if he and Cloud were in the baths? The Greeks weren't exactly self-conscious. And yeah, it's kind of strange to take a bath with someone you keep trying to kill, but…" Then again, Riku had seen a lot of strange things before coming back to Destiny Islands mere months ago. If Cloud, whom he had never met but heard plenty about, liked that sort of thing, then who was he to judge?

"But he had Cloud pinned against the wall, and at first I thought he was trying to strangle him or something, but, uh…he wasn't," Sora finished lamely, putting a hand behind his head in his chagrin.

"And you were fourteen?" Riku had heard many stories about this Cloud and Sephiroth's inhuman fighting abilities, but at that moment if he had still been able to use the Darkness no amount of Heartless or long silver hair would have been able to stop him.

"Well, I didn't figure it out 'til later," Sora muttered defensively, kicking with his heels again. The warm night air was pleasant against his bare shins. "And then I kinda forgot about it."

Still Riku brooded.

"So?"

Riku looked at the brunette quizzically. "So, what?"

"How do two guys have sex?"

"How should I know?"

"Are you saying you don't?"

Oh, Sora had gotten good at this game. At one point he would have simply given up and begged Riku to tell him, who would then taunt and tease until he finally took mercy on the younger boy.

"No, I'm saying that I didn't exactly have the chance to stop and find out for myself." He stopped. Blinked. "That didn't come out right."

Sora was laughing.

"But seriously," the brunette said when he caught his breath, "guys don't have…what girls do. How can—how is it possible?"

Riku's first reaction was to pass the question off as a crude joke and forget about it, but the gauntlet had been thrown and the challenge declared. Besides, a part of him was wondering the same thing, now that so much attention had been brought to it.

He could guess the basics. He was seventeen, after all, nearly eighteen, and it always seemed that whether one wanted it or not a general knowledge of sex seemed to come with the age. For instance, he understood the definition of the word vore even though he had never seen or done it and for the life of him could not imagine where he might have picked up that little bit of knowledge. (Unless it had been from Saix; the man was certainly sadistic enough to get his rocks off on flesh-consuming violence.)

"Well," he started, and shifted a little uncomfortably. "I think it involves one guy's dick in the other's…ass."

Sora stared at him, feet no longer tapping a staccato beat on the side of the house, and then his face screwed up in an expression of disgust. "Ew, Riku! That's gross!"

Riku agreed wholeheartedly.

"Wouldn't that hurt? Or be like…really uncomfortable?"

The older boy mentally rifled through the meager understanding he had of the subject.

"No, they use some sort of lubrication. And if it really hurt that much then people wouldn't do it, right?" he guessed logically, feeling like he was floundering in the dark. Figuratively speaking, of course.

"I guess," Sora said doubtfully. "Cloud didn't seem to mind all that much."

Riku's thoughts turned vengeful on Sora's behalf at the reminder of the man he had never met. So vengeful and dark they had become, as a matter of fact, that he nearly missed what the other did next.

"…Uh, Sora?"

Sora pulled away from Riku with a contemplative expression, twisting his body so that he was still leaning forward on his hands.

"What?"

"…You just kissed me." Perhaps Riku's calm was best explained by the fact that his brain was absolutely floored.

"Yeah."

There was an awkward pause.

"Well, I wanted to know what it was like," Sora explained simply.

"…And?" Riku managed after a moment.

"You're all salty and your lips are chapped."

"We were at the beach today," was the sour reply.

"Where you tossed me in," Sora muttered. He had been forced to change his clothes before they became too stiff to move in, and so wore his old faded blue shorts and a loose white shirt, but not before he had managed to grab Riku's ankle as he toppled over the dock to pull his assailant down with him into the ocean. Kairi had nearly hurt herself laughing.

Riku tilted his head so that his too-long bangs hid his face and his small smile.

"Well, maybe we should try again." Because it was not really fair if only Sora was doing all the wondering, and besides, it only gave one-sided results. A proper experiment had to consider all possible influential factors to produce reliable data, after all. Riku shifted so that he was straddling the windowsill, one leg pressed against the outside of the house and the opposite socked foot resting flat on his bedroom floor, facing Sora.

"I've never done this before," the brunette commented.

"You just did."

Sora crossed his arms and gave Riku a mild glare. "You know what I mean, Riku."

"What, you think I went around kissing all the Heartless and Nobodies?"

Both spared a moment to ponder over, and then gag, at that particular mental image.

"Just don't make fun of me," Sora said with only a little nervousness, and Riku felt a pang of shame somewhere in his chest that the other boy felt he even had to say so at all.

Riku murmured seriously, "Not anymore, Sora. I won't do anything to betray your trust again."

With a quiet little sigh Sora moved so that he mirrored Riku's position, their bony knees touching, and slung one arm loosely behind Riku's neck to pull him closer and press their foreheads and noses together. He closed his eyes and gave a slight, lopsided smile.

"I know."

When they were kids Riku had thought he was the best, that he had to be. Nowadays, he wondered how he could have missed the cheerful but quiet strength in the other boy and what good he could have possibly done to deserve such unconditional friendship and faith.

Then Sora's hands were on either side of his face and Sora's lips were pressing against his so carefully and so gently that Riku unconsciously leaned forward, and when Sora pulled away the older boy buried his face in the brunette's neck and rested his hands on narrow hips.

"Riku?"

He decided Sora smelled just the way he should—like shampoo and salt-water and warm sand. He did not answer, content to stay where he was and remember the half-forgotten scent of days when the scariest monster they could imagine was the one under the bed.

Soon, thin but lean arms wrapped themselves loosely about his shoulders and a sharp chin rested lightly on top of his head. Riku could feel Sora's slow, steady breathing and the strong pulse beneath the skin his lips nearly touched, and with piqued curiosity he ran his tongue over the hollow of Sora's throat.

The other boy, for his part, nearly had a conniption and could not suppress his soprano squawk of surprise. Riku sat back and snickered at Sora's embarrassed expression.

"What was that for?"

He shrugged. "Seemed like a good idea at the time."

Well, Sora mused, it had not been entirely unpleasant. Just…weird. What kind of person went around licking other people? It took him a moment to come to the conclusion that if Riku wanted to lick him again, then maybe it was not so weird after all.

Of course, that implied he wanted Riku to do it again. Did he?

Being a person of impulse rather than careful calculation, Sora slid off the windowsill to stand on the thick white carpet and hold out his hands to Riku, who watched him with no little confusion.

"Sora, what—"

"C'mere."

Riku slowly got to his feet, curling his sock-covered toes into the carpet and taking his hands from his jean pockets to grasp Sora's. He was tugged forward until he was standing very close to the other boy, and realized belatedly that Sora was now tall enough for his nose to reach Riku's chin. Then he forgot the revelation when the brunette tilted his head and kissed him again.

It was sloppy and neither was really sure what to do, but the warmth and the closeness of their breaths were rather nice and Riku certainly would not mind it if they never moved away. Weapon-calloused hands came to rest on thin hips, and soon they were pressed chest-to-chest.

But he remembered the reaction he got when he used his tongue last time, so Riku parted his lips and ran it lightly over Sora's lips. He felt the other tense at the unexpected step, but then Sora opened his mouth a little and tentatively returned it, and suddenly Riku was much more aware of the other boy's weight against him.

Sora tasted like…Sora. There was a slight hint of the chocolate cake he and Riku had filched from the kitchen earlier that evening when Riku's mother had looked away, but otherwise nothing except what Riku could only describe as distinctly Sora (despite the fact he had never kissed anyone else and so had no real basis for comparison).

Encouraged, Sora's sun-browned fingers slid over denim-covered hips and beneath the sleeveless shirt to brush over surprisingly warm, soft skin just below Riku's ribs. He felt Riku shiver against him and grinned into their kiss, earning a retaliatory poke in his own hipbone.

His fingers slid over lean muscle, pausing near the small of Riku's back and kneading the skin like a purring cat, then skipping lightly over the hard bumps of vertebrae to splay over the scapulae. Riku pressed more closely and Sora could feel his warmth through their shirts, and it reminded him of the time he had fallen from their little boat far from the island and had had to be fished back out. The long sail back to the beach had left him cold and shaking miserably before long, and Kairi held the tiller while Riku used a large beach towel to wrap them together and share heat. They had huddled in the bottom of the boat, Sora wedging himself as tightly as he could against Riku to try and chase away the chills.

In a flash of sudden inspiration, Sora pulled away sharply and swiftly yanked the black shirt up and over Riku's head, leaving the taller boy looking somewhat blindsided in nothing more than jeans and socks.

"Uh, Sora?"

Sora had seen his best friend in varying states of undress over the years—they used to bathe together as kids, after all—and had never thought twice about it. Current context, however, was giving him a whole new perspective, and Sora blushed when his brain caught up.

"Um," he started, intelligence deflated by his awkwardness, "you were warm?"

Riku tilted his head.

"Seemed like a good idea at the time," he shrugged, and was distracted by the sight of a long, thin scar that meandered lazily along Riku's left side. The battle with Xemnas, Sora remembered, had left Riku with a limp that had not disappeared until nearly a month after they had returned to the Islands, but he had not realized the hit had been severe enough to leave such a mark. Stepping forward again, he touched the scar lightly with one hand and draped the other arm over Riku's shoulder, pressing their cheeks together.

Riku tried not to flinch when gentle fingers trailed over his side, but reminded himself that this was Sora, the person he had taken the wound for. He was not ashamed of it, because if it was on his own skin then Sora had to suffer that much less, but merely unused to having other people so close without murderous intent. The silver crown necklace was cool against his flesh.

"This isn't fair, you know," he said, quietly amused, into the soft hair just over Sora's ear as his hands worked themselves under white cloth.

"M'kay," the brunette hummed agreeably, evidently content to stay where he was, but Riku took it upon himself to even out the playing field.

Gently pushing Sora to arms' length he tugged the plain white shirt, streaked with dirt from an impromptu wrestling match in the garden earlier that evening, over a spiky brown head and let it drop to the floor next to his own shirt. Sora's trademark necklace jingled cheerily as it fell back against a chest that was thin but strong and browned from the sun, his shoulders a little darker than the rest of him, and the traces of baby fat he once had were gone.

When they were once more skin-to-skin and practicing their lip technique, Riku decided that perhaps Sora's spontaneous ideas had some merit after all.

His touch wandering again, Sora's fingertips began testing to see what made Riku shiver, or twitch, and really it was just like fighting a battle and judging an opponent's reactions where no one actually lost in the end.

"Sora, that tickles," Riku murmured, voice lower than usual, and the note of petulance the brunette could swear he heard just made him smile. He dug his fingertips more firmly against bony ribs and Riku squirmed with a bark of shocked laughter that quickly turned into a predatory growl.

"That was not cool," and the older boy bodily picked up Sora and dumped him in a grinning heap on the bed, but when he tried to reach Sora's own ribs a brief tussle ensued.

"I win," Sora declared proudly, breathing a little more heavily than usual, sitting on Riku's waist and pinning his shoulders to the mattress.

"You cheated," Riku pretended to sulk, huffing to blow the silver hair from his eyes.

"Did not."

"Did too. You used an underhanded trick to catch me off guard."

"Didn't you once tell me to exploit every weakness of the opposition?" Sora retorted impudently, lifting his hands to move dangerously close to Riku's ribs again.

Riku looked at him oddly. "Do you remember everything I've ever said?"

The brunette's brows pulled together into a small frown. "Of course not. It's not like I can remember almost seventeen years' worth of conversation. Well, more like fifteen or sixteen, since we didn't actually started talking until we were like one or two."

"That's not what I meant. I mean…" Riku struggled to find the words, seemingly unaware that another boy was still sitting firmly on top of him. "I mean, just little things. Like the weakness thing. And Santa Claus. And…I don't even know what else."

"Well, duh," Sora said in the tone that told Riku he was being pretty stupid. "You're my best friend."

It was such a simple and straightforward statement that Riku stared at him, at his small nose and dark lashes and the few bruises on his sharp shins (because even being a Keyblade Master he was still clumsy at times), and wondered how someone that had cut out his own heart to save a friend and sacrificed more than that for another—someone that had seen betrayal and death and, quite literally, the tar-like blackness that lived in people's souls—could still believe in such simple and profound truths.

Riku sat up, forcing Sora to sit back on his thighs, and pulled the smaller boy into an embrace that nearly left them both suffocated.

"You're extraordinary," he whispered and knew without looking that Sora would be flushing and smiling goofily. But even if Sora would believe anything Riku said except that, the older boy knew that it was probably one of the few things he had ever been truly right about.

"Nah," Sora said quietly, threading his fingers through long silver hair. "I think you've got me confused with someone else."

Riku shook his head and leaned back far enough to be able to look Sora in the eye. "No," he rebutted softly, "if you really were anyone else, I'd have socked you by now."

Sora grinned and kissed him and managed to push Riku back down onto the bed, settling himself in such a way that there was no space between them from chest to pelvis. He was braced on his elbows on either side of Riku's head, and careful not to pull on the other's long hair.

Riku was thankful that his father was still at work—he worked the night shift at the local hospital—and his mother was abed by now. With the summer-night air and the warm dim glow of his desk lamp, between his freshly laundered bed and Sora's pleasantly warm weight, he thought that even news of Organization XIII's resurrection could not pull him away. After so long in the Darkness the heat of Sora's skinny body was an intense and almost-familiar lifeline, grounding him in the now instead of the then and what could have been, and he held the brunette all the more tightly to himself.

"You're squishing me," Sora mouthed against him with a small laugh wracking his frame, and Riku instantly loosened his hold.

"Sorry." Then he said with a sly smile, "If you weren't so short—"

Furtive hands danced over his abdomen to cut him off, his muscles tightening at the delicate touch as he gasped in surprise.

"You brat," he growled fervently, and teeth clicked and tongues that had become bolder by now slid wetly against one another. Sora tried to wriggle closer, to crawl inside Riku's too-pale skin (it was kind of strange, how someone could be so deathly white when their childhood had been spent playing on the beaches of a tropical island; Sora himself was like the little sandpipers that stalked the tiny crabs, all brown and gangly and devilishly quick with eyes like the pretty wet stones Kairi liked to keep). But despite Riku's pallor he was warm and their delicious-wet kiss was no longer quite so exploratory or tentative, but something wild that burned shivers down Sora's spine.

The brunette was no stranger to these particular sensations—he was a teenage boy, after all, and had often woken up with heavy breath and his body reacting like that to whatever dream-fantasy his imagination had played with. But those dream-fantasies had never had any sort of focus or been able to capture the same intensity that now made his lips tingle and his skin crawl with pleasure from the rough hands that held his hips with such strength. He wondered in a distant part of his mind if this was what Cloud felt.

Then Riku's fingers tightened over the sharp bones and Sora's legs tensed, pulling their bodies closer and

oh

Both boys paused to look at each other, breathing harsher than normal. Sora's pupils were dilated, making the blue of his eyes a thin ring of ocean, and Riku's were narrowed with determined concentration.

Head tilting, Sora rocked his hips again—and he hissed softly as Riku hid his face against Sora's neck, exhaling shakily.

"Maybe we should stop," he whispered against the brunette's skin, though his fingertips were tracing the hollow of the hipbones they rested on and the tightness of his jeans was beginning to hurt.

The nails of Sora's left hand gently ran over Riku's spine, the other hand sliding through silver hair. He wondered why Riku had expressed that sentiment. Was he afraid? Did he think Sora was afraid?

(But afraid of what, exactly? They were boys. It was not like they had discussed what they were going to do once they actually started doing something.)

Besides, why should he be scared? He trusted Riku implicitly. He knew Riku would never hurt him purposefully. And when Sora thought what it might be like to try doing this with someone else, like Kairi or Selphie—or, considering the circumstances of how he and Riku had gotten even this far, Tidus or Wakka—his nose got all scrunched up and he made a mental 'blech' sound.

(Maybe it was just that Riku had no cooties.)

"Do you wanna stop?"

Riku looked at Sora's darkened eyes and the willing body straddling his own, and decided it was the other's turn to ask a stupid question.

"Well, no, but—"

A second sentence was given an early death when Riku was pulled back into a kiss, feeling a muttered, "Good," against his lips and wryly musing that perhaps it was not so surprising that someone as angry and forceful as Roxas had come from Sora. His hands slid around thin hips to the top of slightly-too-large blue shorts, slipping beneath to pull Sora closer as nimble little fingers worked on his jeans.

"Damn it, Riku," Sora pouted, "why do these have two buttons?"

It took the older boy a moment to register the other's words, and he shrugged loosely. "Mum bought them. I didn't think much about it."

Sora snickered breathlessly and blew a raspberry against Riku's long neck, earning a twitch and another long kiss, before he managed to get the last button undone. The zipper made a quiet whisper as it was tugged down gently (Sora winced when he remembered the time he had gotten himself stuck in the zipper as a little kid, he had been so eager to get back outside to play), and Riku made a soft sound against his lips that Sora decided he liked. When Riku's hands, still beneath his shorts, pulled him forward abruptly he broke the kiss and let out a long groan that made him flush in embarrassment, and something else.

Riku had heard Sora make a variety of noises—like the screeching he had used to irritate the snot out of Riku whenever he felt ignored, though the strangest had been the impromptu imitation of a howler monkey—but the low guttural moan made his grip tighten, and he leaned forward enough to taste the sunned little throat that had been exposed with his tongue and his teeth. Sora made that lovely noise again and shifted rhythmically, instinctively, until Riku's own chest-deep sounds turned into a predatory snarl. He moved so quickly that Sora, normally the faster of the two, was taken completely by surprise and blinked dazedly up at sea-green eyes leaning over him that promised rather naughty things in the very near future. His necklace tinkled and tumbled off his chest onto the plain white comforter.

"Oi, Riku—"

The rest of his words were lost in a kiss that stole the breath from his lungs and left him idly wondering if anyone had ever asphyxiated this way. If such a thing were possible it would be a particularly pleasant way to die, especially if Riku kept doing that with his tongue, and had Riku really never kissed anyone before?

When he felt the frustrated fumbling at the zipper of his shorts, he could not stop the smile that spread into the kiss.

"Payback's a bitch."

Riku had to stop for a moment to lean his forehead against Sora's shoulder and laugh, wondering how Sora's naïveté in something as less-than-innocent as this could make something that seemed so scary and taboo so…fun. It made the tight knot of nervousness (and damn that question of whatifwhatifwhatif) that had been steadily building in the bottom of his stomach relax into a loose tangle of a few threads.

But eventually the older boy got the stubborn little bit of metal down and made to pull the shorts off before he paused, and glanced at Sora.

"Are you sure…?"

There was a flutter of anxiety in Sora's stomach, but he knew it was because he and Riku were venturing so far into unknown waters that their feet no longer touched the sandy floor. But after the Darkness and the hurt and still coming out alive, Sora was confident that even if he and Riku decided this (what was it, exactly? An experiment? Mere curiosity?) was not what they hoped it could be, then they could just take a step back into the warm familiar shallows. And were not friends supposed to help you learn and all that philosophical shit Leon liked to mutter about?

"Who better than a best friend," Sora murmured aloud, pulling Riku up and wrapping himself like a boy-shaped burrito around the other.

Riku thought about it for a moment, decided he was pretty much powerless in the face of Sora's near-eternal optimism anyway, and agreed. He tugged Sora's shorts and boxers down long thin legs and sharp shins, the brunette lifting his hips slightly to make it easier, and then helped Riku wriggle out of his (who put two buttons on jeans, anyway? Was it for extra protection or something?) denims and socks. Then, being boys, they glanced at each other.

"I win," Riku smirked and Sora stuck out his tongue.

"Not by that much," he protested, which in actuality was true, but Riku was the kind of person who took an edge on another person and turned it into a cliff. "Besides, you're older and taller than me."

But Riku was not thinking about teasing Sora as about other things. The smaller boy was lying on his back, propped up on his elbows and watching Riku with those big blue eyes. He was not effeminate so much as just boyishly cute, the sort of cute that made girls coo over him like happy pigeons until he sought refuge behind the more intimidating Riku, with an open heart-shaped face that was now a little red under the older boy's heavy gaze.

"Uh, Riku?"

Lips gradually twisting into a lascivious smile, Riku slowly moved on his hands and knees over Sora's feet and then his legs, past his abdomen and up his chest until their noses were gently pressed together.

He would not deny that he would do anything for Sora, and that for a while the affection for his best friend had turned into a dark obsession whose last vestiges still lingered in his over-protectiveness; but the bit of him that remembered what shadows tasted like and even now still heard the vague whispers of nightmares was somehow thrilled by the idea that no one else had ever seen Sora like this.

A kind of ache Sora had not known existed made his body extraordinarily aware of the one that hovered over him, just close enough where if he would move upwards a hair's breadth then they would touch and the ache would turn into burning white heat that centered low in his abdomen. It was like holding one's hand close to a fire, where one could sense the light and the warmth but not quite feel it.

Then Riku was settling between his legs and pressing so impossibly close, and Sora moaned without embarrassment this time into his mouth. Sans thought he wrapped his arms and legs around the other boy again, the living heat giving him a sense of protection even if he really did not need it. Riku may have been physically stronger but he was also more fragile, after all.

Braced on his hands, shoulder blades protruding as he and Sora kissed wetly, openly, Riku twisted his hips until their groins came together and Sora's spine arched as he cried out softly, tossing his head backwards and Riku letting the other's throat take his own moan. His hips continued moving and Sora's blunt nails dug into the skin of his back and shoulders, Sora's strong legs locked tightly about his waist, Sora's roughened voice whispered RikuRikuRiku like a saving mantra.

But they were new at this and too quickly Riku realized that if he did not stop then they would both be too far gone, and with Sora's reluctance and his own body's protest he forced himself to sit back just far enough for him to regain some semblance of reason.

"S-Sora," he murmured and hazy eyes turned to him, a familiar pout already settling on kiss-bruised lips. "Y-you said…do you want…"

Damn it all he had always been the most eloquent of the younger kids, but now he could think only of soft groans and sweat-salty skin and—

Sora was on the verge of simply reclaiming his former position atop Riku before he understood what Riku's stammered and husky words meant.

"Do you?" he countered.

Riku huffed in breathless laughter and rolled his eyes. "Sora…"

The brunette bit his lip, and the other had to resist the temptation of biting it himself. Cloud really had seemed to enjoy it, and Riku had been right when he said that if people did not enjoy it then they would not do it, and if it meant being even closer, physically, to Riku…

Well, he did not regret going this far.

"Okay, but…how?"

Riku looked frustrated and was probably regretting having not just finished what they were doing, but it had been Sora's idea in the first place and they had always had an unspoken rule that whoever made up the adventure was the Dungeon Master until the very end. Then his eyes visibly brightened with pleasure and he leaned over to the bedside table to reach into a drawer and pull out a fat little plastic container.

"What's that?" Sora asked despite himself, straining to see the label properly, whose curiosity had gotten him into the most interesting positions over the years.

"Vaseline," Riku replied distractedly. "I keep it because my lips always get chapped, which you were so kind to bitch about."

"I didn't bitch."

Riku hummed noncommittally before pausing, an expression of bemusement crossing his face. He had a vague idea of what to do, but really, it just seemed so weird.

But Sora was looking at him with impatience and lust and concern warring for dominance over his features, sweat making strands of earth-brown hair stick to his forehead, and he lay in a boneless sprawl with his legs on either side of Riku without knowledge of the reddened teeth marks that were printed on his skin.

"Are you—"

Sora lifted himself up and put a hand over Riku's mouth with irritation. "Riku, I know you just don't want to hurt me, but I'm not going to break. Seriously. So quit asking, or I'll tell everyone that you don't wear underwear"

When it was put that way, hardly anyone was going to argue. Riku licked Sora's palm, and when he pulled away with a scrunched-up face the brunette found himself pinned back down to the bed with the taller boy using his height as an advantage. Hesitantly, Riku shifted his weight so that he could lean on one elbow and moved the other hand down Sora's chest, feeling the subtle play of lean muscle, inwardly surprised at the difference between Sora's browned skin and his own wan flesh. He found that lightly scraping his nails over Sora's stomach made him gasp sharply, and ghosting his fingertips over the hollow of those bony hips did not elicit any sound but instead made the brunette shiver.

Then, after a brief pause, long fingers stroked feather-light over hardened flesh. Sora made a low keening noise, head tilting back and hands fisting into the white blankets, and the sound slid like warm honey through Riku's stomach to pool golden between his own legs.

A part of him wanted to see how long he could keep Sora twisting on his back like that, how strong Sora's voice could become when he lost the conscious control—

But there would be other moments and times to do so.

Popping the lid from the container, Riku scooped some of the stickiness onto his fingers and, very slowly, pressed them inside Sora.

The other boy inhaled sharply, not expecting the sudden intrusion, before his brows pulled together into a little frown and he wriggled thoughtfully.

"…Does it hurt?" Riku asked softly, voice cracking slightly. His groin was starting to ache.

Sora wriggled again. "Uh, no, it just…geez, how did Cloud do it?"

Mention of the fighter (who must have scarred Sora at fourteen years of age, even if he had been too innocent to understand what was actually happening) made Riku's eyes narrow, and he leaned over Sora's body rather awkwardly to press his lips roughly against Sora's. The smaller boy groaned into the other's mouth, feeling his muscles inexplicably tighten (with…excitement?) at the possessive harshness, and when he felt a second finger slip inside him he reflexively tensed his jaw, accidentally biting Riku's lip.

"Ow," Riku hissed, absently licking his abused lip.

"Sorry," Sora replied with a mischievous smile and an utter lack of repentance.

There was a moment in which Sora nearly forgot to breathe, when Riku pulled away for a moment to fumble with the jar; then he did forget to breathe when something much larger than fingers pushed against him.

His first instinct was to lash out with fists, the second to recoil—but Riku's cheek was pressed against his, breath heavy, and a hand hot with sweat and rather gross from that greasy Vaseline found his to interlace their fingers. Sora turned his head, and there was nervousness and insecurity behind his best friend's lust-darkened eyes. The brunette nearly laughed aloud at himself, but instead only smiled. He trusted Riku with all and sundry; why should this be any different?

There was some pain, but mostly it was just uncomfortable and foreign. For a moment Sora thought he would choke at the strange sensation, but Riku did not move any farther, arms shaking a bit as he struggled to hold himself still, and slowly Sora felt himself relax.

"S-Sora…?"

His hips were tilted upwards at an odd angle, Riku's forehead pressed against his. Of their own accord his thighs were pressed along the older boy's sides, whipcord muscle standing out beneath browned skin, arms strained against the comforter. More than when Riku had huddled with him in the bottom of a boat to keep him from freezing, more than all the times they had wrestled and shoved each other into the nearest trash can, even more than when Riku would steal into Sora's house and spirit him away in the middle of the night to watch the stars from the dock and make up ever-more-wild stories about the constellations, Sora felt like he and Riku saw nothing but each other. They were as close as they had ever been, not just physically but in other ways, too, that could not be put into words but Sora could feel in the heart that was pounding against his own.

So he slowly loosened his unconsciously desperate hold on the blankets and cupped his hands around Riku's face, pulling him into the same soft touch that had gotten them where they were now. Riku thought the bittersweet pain in his chest could break him into more pieces than the Darkness had ever been able to.

Sora was the first one to move, shifting his pelvis in such a way that Riku made a soft, strangled noise into the other's lips that earned a breathless snicker and another shift.

"Fuck," he whispered and a million obvious comebacks ran through Sora's head, but then Riku

hmm

touched something deep inside him that made his back arch and his blunt nails run over Riku's scapulae, over the lean sinew tensing and releasing rhythmically and leave faint red lines over the pale skin, and he forgot the witty retorts before they had fully formed.

Riku was once again thankful his parents were either gone or asleep when the mild discomfort in Sora's expression turned to ecstasy, for though the brunette was surprisingly quiet—quieter than he usually was, in any case—anyone nearby would have been hard-pressed to mistake their mutual sounds. When the icy fire in his groin threatened to turn his vision into black-on-white stars he forced himself to pause, gritting his teeth both at himself and at Sora's frustrated growls. It was difficult, because Sora

oh

was all heat and light and passion, and even months after returning to Destiny Islands he often woke in the night feeling nothing, nothing and the cold, and craving (this) the warmth—

—then he moved again, and redistributed his weight so that he could lift a hand to touch Sora with butterfly-breaths and long strokes; suddenly Sora was

ah

scream-whispering RikuRikuRiku again into the hollow of his throat as his body tightened spasmodically around Riku, and Riku was all SoraSoraSora and for a moment he thought he had died, lost his sight once more behind black silk, fallen into heart-pounding blood-rushing pieces towards the brightest corner of Kingdom Hearts.

"…You're squishing me again."

Riku's derisive snort was more a huff of wearied unconcern against Sora's shoulder. He had fallen to his elbows and lay unmoving on Sora's skinny chest, too tired to even make fun of Sora's equally weak attempt at teasing. (Which was silly, really, because they were both Keyblade Masters—a little physical activity should not have made their bodies feel so deliciously satiated and, in Sora's words, noodly.)

"And you're all sweaty, too."

Riku did not bother lifting his head to snap back, instead raising a half-hearted hand to smack Sora upside the head blindly. Long practice had given him excellent aim.

Sora squirmed a bit under him, making Riku realize that physically they were still joined. "And you're—"

Finally Riku shut him up with a long, lazy kiss, eventually pulling away to lie on his side and fix his eyes on Sora, who mirrored his position with a visible wince.

"Are you all right?" he asked softly, angry at how quickly he had taken the chance to use Sora, to hurt him—

Sora returned the favor and smacked him. "I can feel you brooding. Quit it."

"But—"

"I'm fine." Sora put a hand on Riku's shoulder and pushed him flat on his back, maneuvering himself to lay halfway over Riku's chest and generally move about restlessly until he had gotten the comforter over the both of them and worked themselves into a cocoon. After a moment of stillness, he dipped a hand under the covers to brush over his own stomach and lick the white fluid from his fingers.

"Sora, that's disgusting!" Riku half-exclaimed. Sora raised a brow in a way that had been patently stolen from the older boy.

"How's it any grosser than what we've already done?"

"…More gross. All right, fine." He seized Sora's hand and pulled a finger into his mouth, working his tongue against the skin, not noticing that the brunette's eyes had gone very wide. He made a face. "Tastes like…I don't know. Thick, soured cream with salt. Holy, the aftertaste is even worse."

Sora started snickering helplessly into Riku's collarbone. Irritated, Riku groped awkwardly over the edge of the bed and came up with Sora's cotton shorts; ignoring the protests, he forcefully scrubbed the semen from Sora's stomach and tossed the soiled clothing in the vague direction of the door.

"Riku, what am I supposed to wear tomorrow if my shorts are covered in…that?" Sora whined.

"You can borrow some of my clothes. Not like you haven't before."

Like the time they had gone swimming at the beach and Riku had hid all of Sora's clothes. Only Kairi's kindness and her towel had kept the neighborhood from seeing the dangly bits that separated him from the female half of the species. On another occasion, after Riku's ninth birthday party had ended in a particularly enthusiastic battle of cake and milk, Sora had gone the rest of the day tripping over the hem of Riku's larger clothing.

Riku wondered if everything had irrevocably changed, or if Sora had decided to forget what happened. His tension must have been obvious, because Sora twisted his head like the little sandpipers did to look up at him.

"Riku?"

"What?" he replied, then winced—it had come out more harshly than he had intended.

Sora blinked (his eyes are so blue) and he slowly pulled away, discomfort settling between them like an unwelcome house guest.

"Are you…angry?"

"…No," Riku murmured. He looked away. "Just…what now? I don't think most guys have…have sex with their best friends."

He could feel the panic settling in, but then Sora was wrapping his arms around him with a wry expression. "Yeah, well, most guys haven't ever seen a Heartless."

Well, if that was going to be their gauge for normalcy, then they had been pretty much screwed years ago.

Sora squirmed some more, feeling a dull ache at the base of his spine but nothing more acute or even approaching unbearable. In fact, considering what he and Riku had done for it to be there, it was pretty much negligible. As Phil had once said, no pain, no gain; and besides, without the worry of Heartless or assassins hunting them down, they would have plenty of time to work on their technique (assuming Riku agreed, of course, but he had always been the one urging Sora to keep practicing and become better).

I guess that answers my questions.

"I was right, you know," Sora said suddenly after a long interlude of silence. Riku cracked open an eye, having figured that any emotional insecurity on his part could be dealt with in the morning.

"What?"

"I was right. About Santa Claus."

"…Whatever."

"If I can prove it to you, what will I get?"

"A kick in the ass," Riku muttered without vitriol, desperately wanting to be in that cozy state of hazy dream-waking. He was sated, pressed against the only person in the world he had gone through hell and back for, and a pleasant breeze was coming in through the open window…and still Sora spoke.

"Pirates are way better than ninjas," was the muffled statement.

Riku groaned, and was not sure if he wanted to kill or kiss this Cloud person that had so inspired Sora's curiosity.