Chapter Text
San Fransokyo
His fingers tap on the counter.
Tap, tap, tap. Little finger to index finger. The bell atop the door jingles, sharp, as the coffee machine re-boils itself. Sora can smell the sweet jam from the Victoria sponge in the counter to his left. The lucky cat atop the counter brings its paw down, almost waving, as the customer in the corner scrapes his chair back and makes to leave. The man who enters the café at the same moment holds the door open, and Sora lifts himself from his bored posture and takes a look at his next customer.
He suppresses the gasp as the man walks over to the counter, one hand already in his pocket to retrieve his wallet. Something in Sora’s heart bursts free, a thick rope of light, gold and strong and tugging in the direction of the silver-haired man who stands in front of him and looks up at the specials board without a second glance at him.
Sora’s never seen him before in his life.
“Riku?”
Where it comes from, he doesn’t know, but the man flicks his gaze down to Sora and analyses for the briefest period, trying to figure out who the brunet is. Silver eyebrows, perfectly shaped, furrow down as he frowns.
“Do I know you?”
Sora straightens up properly, his palms sweating from a sudden nervousness. He doesn’t know him, this tall man before him, so how did he know his name?
“I- no, you don’t.”
Eyes narrow to match the brows, and the silveret lowers his wallet slightly as he looks at Sora with a confused expression behind his eyes. The thing in Sora’s chest pulls, tugging so hard that Sora feels as though he is about to have a heart attack, and surely the other man he knows and does not know can feel it too?
Someone else enters the café, breaking the tense silence between Sora and his customer as the cold San Fransokyo breeze filters into the room. It snaps Sora back to the present, releasing a bated breath as he plasters the brightest smile he can muster and sends it Riku’s way.
“Oh, my mistake! What can I get for you?”
The abrupt change in his demeanour and expression is enough to throw Riku off, and he opens his wallet as the bell to the door chimes again. The unwillingness to hold up a queue beats his desire to know who the hell Sora is, and his voice is curt when he responds.
“Hazelnut macchiato.” A pause. “Please.”
Sora refrains from cocking his head to the side: he was not expecting someone as intimidating as the man opposite him to go for something so sweet. But he complies, serves the drink to go without actually checking if that’s what Riku wants, and within minutes Riku leaves the café and disappears into the darkness of the metropolis, likely never to be seen again.
Sora’s smile for the next customer is a little watery, but he can’t pinpoint why. At least he had avoided a fuss, and saved himself from embarrassment.
Lucky Cat Café indeed.
That night, Sora boards the busy tram eagerly, desperate to get out of the rain. It still amazes him that, even past ten in the evening, the public services are still so busy. San Fransokyo never sleeps, and the neon lights of the city shine bright through the fogged up windows of the tram. It is damp and cold, but Sora finds a seat and collapses into it, trapping his scarf beneath his knees but not caring enough to move it.
Whatever that feeling in the café had been, it has all but disappeared now. The golden rope that twisted and tugged him in the direction of the strange silver-haired man has disappeared now, as though cut off at the source. The soft glow no longer fills his heart with warmth, and Sora sort of misses it as he pulls his coat tighter around his body. The only warmth is artificial, from the off-yellow glow of the lamps in the tram. Sora wracks his brain for a trace of that warmth again, tries to understand how in the world he had known that man’s name.
The tram goes down one of the roller-coaster hills at a high speed, and Sora feels like he is falling.
Unbidden, a memory surfaces.
Agrabah
Sora has not eaten for five days when he caves.
Madame, as she insists she be called, all but croons and crows when Sora pushes aside the heavy drapery that acts as a door and walks in, defeated but proud. Her title is hard on his tongue, a foreign word that stands out in Agrabah, but which clearly denotes the services her establishment offers.
Sora forces down the bile that rises as she hands him new clothing with a saccharine smile, triumphant. He will make her money, she says, and he knows it. Life on the streets has taught him that well enough. Might as well get paid for it, he thinks bitterly, as she strips his tunic from him and sends him into a bathing room that stinks of oils and perfumes.
She sends her best man in to help him, and Sora finds himself sinking lower into the bathtub in awe when the most beautiful man he has ever seen struts in with a towel and a brush meant to scrub the top layer of his grimy skin off.
Sora has always stood out a little in Agrabah, with his thin freckled arms and his long, deep chocolate hair: it gave him too much of a feminine appearance, something which counted against him in comparison to the other boys his age. Whereas his fellow street rats could sometimes find work as labourers, many people had simply passed over Sora, thinking him weak or unreliable.
But Madame’s best man? Sora’s jaw nearly drops, because beauty doesn’t even cut it. Long silver hair is pushed back from a pale face with a patterned kerchief, and the man is tall but lean. He moves like a cat, lithe and graceful, but Sora doesn’t doubt he has claws.
Their eyes meet, and for a moment something like recognition is ignited in aqua eyes before it disappears. Sora feels something like regret well up inexplicably in his chest, but before he can think on it too much the other man throws the brush at Sora. It lands in the tub with a splash, painfully landing right on Sora’s crotch: he wonders if that was on purpose.
The towel is deposited on a chair, and before Sora can even pick his jaw up the silver haired man is gone, flitting from the room behind the drapes into the adjoining corridor.
And so begins the last two months of Sora’s life in Agrabah.
Sora’s alcohol consumption rises from zero to more than one bottle a day, more if the shifts are long. He starts off as a simple server for the front rooms, but it isn’t long before one of the bedrooms frees up and Madame lifts the drapes for him with a sugary smile that hides the threat behind it. The one bottle turns into two, but it is never enough to dull the edge, not really, and Sora bemoans the fact that he’s so on guard that he can’t get drunk.
He gets one day free of every ten, generously as Madame reminds him, and Sora spends it as deep in the city as he can. Agrabah has always been familiar to him, for as far back as he remembers. He has always known the darkest alleys and the oldest passageways, even ones that have been in disuse for hundreds of years. He has memories of running down alleyways with a boy he has never met before in his life, of twisted shadows chasing him and threatening to drown him. He knows the location of the lost Cave of Wonders, despite never having left the city boundaries. They are memories he does not understand, but he does not delve into them too deeply either: lost memories are useless to him here. He ignores them in the way he ignores how he recognises Madame’s best, Riku, and the pulsing painful thread that urges him to seek out the silveret’s presence.
When he returns to the brothel the evening of the first day away from it, Sora nearly cries as he ducks under the drapes and is immediately hit with a wall of heat and oil and musk. It is empty in the front, a quiet day to be sure, and Sora can almost appreciate the bar area for what it is.
It is draped in elaborate red fabrics, patterned in nearly every possible style and hemmed with silk of nearly every colour. The candles stand inside rose-tinted lanterns, giving the room a soft and intimate glow. Riku stands behind the cedar-wood bar top, deep aqua eyes on Sora.
Sora swallows thickly, but guesses that he might as well approach him. As he gets closer to the bar, Riku diverts his gaze to below the counter. Before Sora can protest, the older man removes two wine glasses and fills them with a red wine, pushing one slowly towards Sora.
He can’t help it: he breaks down.
“I- I didn’t want this. I didn’t choose this, this hell-hole.”
Riku tries to smile, but it comes out as more of a grimace.
“What is it they say? Hell is not a place, it’s a state of mind and body?”
“I thought I could handle it.”
Riku says nothing, merely leans against the bar top with unreadable eyes. Nothing he says can soothe Sora’s pain, and Sora merely appreciates the company as he tries to pull the scattered fragments of his breaking mind together.
They continue like that for the next few weeks. Riku rarely speaks to Sora, and the brunet feels as though there is a well-built wall around Riku’s entire self, a cruel and dizzyingly high wall of brick and mortar that cannot be scaled. Nothing cracks his calm and cool exterior, and nothing elicits any flicker of emotion in his clear eyes. Sora would find it despairing, if not for the fact that Riku alone is the only one who will sit and listen to Sora chattering and jabbering on when he feels like coming out of his shell.
And then one night it changes.
Sora is in his room, last client gone for the evening, when Riku stumbles through the drapery and leans hard against Sora’s bedpost. Sora sits up, frantic, wondering what is wrong with his not-quite-friend when Riku turns those aqua eyes on Sora and he sees they are full of despair.
“Riku, are you-“
“You don’t even recognise me, do you?”
Sora withdraws the hand that he had begun to reach for Riku with, confusion plain on his face.
“Should I?”
Riku scoffs. He is clearly drunk, but Sora questions if Madame is aware of that fact.
“No. You never do. I’m always the only one.” Riku’s voice is bitter, and his gaze turns down towards the bottle of wine that dangles by the neck between two of his fingers. He takes a desperate gulp before throwing the bottle onto the floor, uncaring of the looming stain on the rug, and leans down to roughly take Sora’s face in his hands.
As his lips come into contact with Sora’s, that strange link between them blooms to life. Sora gasps at the intensity of it, and it gives Riku the opportunity to deepen the kiss as Sora’s hands reach up to grab at Riku’s bare chest.
It lasts no more than ten seconds, before Riku pulls back and looks at Sora’s face expectantly. His eyes are wide, his lips red and his cheeks flushed, but there is no recognition still, and Riku pushes him away harshly. Sora feels that golden bond disappear with all the force of a door slamming closed on it, and its loss makes him feel empty inside.
“Every time.” Riku shakes his head, and Sora is confused beyond any mortal belief to see what looks like tears in Riku’s eyes. Sora has no time to comment on it before Riku flees the room, tearing the drape halfway on his way out. Sora remains there on the bed, stunned, before something inside of him breaks and bursts into tears.
It’s a profound sense of loss and grief that Sora cannot place the source of, humiliation and sadness and longing that he has never felt for Riku in the whole two months of his time at the brothel. It feels as though it is someone else’s grief that tears through him, and he longs for the warmth of that bond.
Even with Agrabah’s dusty heat, and the oppressive humid air of the brothel, Sora feels as though he’ll never be warm again.
The panic sets in, primal and raw and ferocious, and Sora finds himself packing a knapsack before he can even comprehend what he is doing. He takes little, and certainly does not have the foresight to pack water or food before he flees the brothel in a whirl of brown and blue. Faintly, he feels as though he hears Riku shouting after him, but Sora is long outside the city gates before anyone could catch up to him. He does not even register the dusty air, or the yellow sky.
Mercifully, the sandstorm gets him long before thirst does.
He approaches the palm tree slowly, one yellow star-shaped fruit held carefully in his hands. The sky is a lush blue, not a cloud marring it, and the ocean is nearly breath-taking because of it. Everything seems as though it has a filter imposed over it: the sky is too blue, the sand too yellow, the trees too green. It is vivid but beautiful, and Sora clears his throat as he comes within earshot of the teenager sitting on the tree trunk.
“I can hear you, y’know.” The voice is lazy, with a cocky edge to it, and Sora could roll his eyes. Fondly, of course. The teen turns his head, soft silver hair brushing against the nape of his neck as he looks over his shoulder at Sora. His grin is warm, slightly cheeky, and Sora holds his breath as he wonders when his friend got so beautiful. The whole scene is beautiful: Riku, half sprawled across the tree trunk, eyes bright with an infectious grin, as the ocean laps behind him and the sun shines off his hair.
Sora tries to memorise every detail of the scene before him, determined to never ever let it disappear from his memory.
San Fransokyo
Sora emerges from his reverie violently, surging forward with a loud gasp and slamming his hand onto the stop button next to the seat opposite. His breathing is hard, as though he has been trapped underwater for too long, but Sora can’t hear it over the medley of what the fuck raging through his head.
The tram comes to a gentle stop, and Sora tears out the door into the freezing rain and gulps in air like a drowning man. It is frigid, seeping into his bones and his lungs, but it grounds him. It distracts him from foreign memories of suffocating in a boiling desert, and the one nostalgic memory of a beach he does not recognise.
That’s it, he thinks. He’s fucking lost it.
He’s clearly snapped. Why else would he be having really vivid daydreams that include a customer from his café? Perhaps he needs to go to one of those Baymax machines in the corner of every health store: even a fucking hug from a robotic balloon would make him feel less insane right now.
The rain has soaked through his coat and his scarf, but Sora allows the cold to seep into him. In the morning, he might regret not waiting until the tram had climbed the monstrously steep hill he now has to walk up, but for now he stands there on the street corner as people bustle around him.
When he finally makes it home, after nearly crawling up the hill on all-fours, his cat is sitting outside his door expectantly. Sora stumbles into his apartment, one hand reaching out for the light switch, and slams the door behind him.
Somehow, Sora manages to sleep.
Somehow, he manages to get up the next morning, let the cat out, and head to the café before the clock hits five.
Somehow, he manages to force the strange day that was yesterday completely out of his mind, until it is a vague issue pressing on his consciousness but not overbearing. He hums, a light tune from a Disney Town ride (he’s never been to Disney Town, but he ignores that too), putting the muffins out just before seven and following them up with cupcakes and three types of bagels.
He refills the drinks, dozens of flavours of Taj juice, and distantly hears the bell ring as he pushes the first set of sandwiches into the fridge. Sora turns, a sweet and welcoming smile on his face, ready to face his first customer of the day.
And nearly faints at the sight of Riku.