Work Text:
When Kairi thinks back to the night that storm came to the islands, she doesn't remember much. Understandable, she thinks, given that it was a very stressful event for everyone involved, and she, for some reason, had been out on the play island in the thick of it when it hit. What she doesn't understand is the way the rest of her memories have been twisted around and distorted. She doesn't understand why trying to remember every other part of her life is like trying to look at film negatives in the dark; there are none of the details she knows should be there, and no light, as it were, to test them against.
She remembers the cruel twist to Riku's smile that he'd gotten, somehow; the weight behind his eyes that set her brain alight with danger, danger. Ridiculous, she'd thought at the time. It's only Riku, only Riku, just Riku. But she'd known something in him was different. She remembers fierce challenges (to her, to Tidus? The object of them escapes her) and sword fights and the sunshine yellow of a paopu fruit, but there is a haziness behind it. And she remembers when she'd wanted to leave Riku behind and take the raft (but with who, with who, she'd never have made it alone) and she remembers the giggled, "Just kidding!" But she's not been able to remember who she was giggling to, for all she tries.
And then there'd been that freak storm at the end of December break even though typhoon season was long over, and there'd been the crashing of waves and the opening of a door and she knew she'd been right about Riku all along. She remembers that thing behind his eyes swirling into dark, awful tendrils that reeked of standing water; she remembers, for the first (second) time in her life, the feeling of mortal fear. Then she doesn't know what she remembers. There are flashes of a voice that is familiar, despite not belonging to anyone she knows. There is the lock-click of something solid coming open, and a heartbeat, and a warm golden-white light. There is the thud of a closing door that rattles her bones. And then it is the very beginning of April break, and she's standing on the northeast shore of the main island, and she has just missed the last term of her third year of intermediate school. It's graduation day, the day her memories pick up, and she is grieving something she doesn't remember or understand, and she is alone.
She gets an extra week of the normally month long interterm. For making it to high school, they say. All the rising first years start a week late. She doesn't remember Riku doing this, but she doesn't question it, instead throwing herself into studying for the exit exams she's missed. She's been a good student her whole life, and it's not much trouble. She passes Algebra II and Biology easily; does well enough on Creole Language, Destiny Islands Literature, and Geography; and passes with full marks on the Mainland Language exam. She looks at this last score, an exam in a language that reminds her of stripping beds for tourists and washing up on a beach alone, and tastes ash in her mouth. Her mother kisses her on the cheek and puts flower garlands on her neck three weeks later than everyone else, and Kairi feels nothing at all.
She spends the last two weeks of vacation mostly alone. She wanders the main island, walking the long dirt roads next to the taro fields in the shade of the mountains, and visits the play island when time permits. The others have stopped going to the play island for some reason they can't name, other than a creeping dread whenever they land on its shore. Privately, she suspects it has something to do with the night of the storm, but there is no one there who she can ask or tell about the months she's spent away, so she just takes a rowboat there by herself whenever she needs to be alone.
She thinks of Riku (on transfer, she lies smoothly to their friends) stuck behind that door. She can't remember what or where it is through the static in her head, but she remembers feeling that same horrible weight that she'd felt in him before they'd left the islands, only a thousand times stronger, and she remembers his piercing light as he shut it firmly, looking through and smiling to the last inch. She doesn't know who he was looking to, because it wasn't her, and where another person should be in that memory there's only a large blurry space that she can't focus on unless, as she discovers, she wants a horrible migraine. But she knows there should be someone standing there.
She wonders where, exactly, Riku is. He might still be behind that awful white door. He might not. She has no way of knowing, and misses him all the more for it. They've been best friends since she arrived on Destiny Islands, nearly attached at the hip. She doesn't know how, exactly. They have very different personalities, and were they to try to make friends with each other today, she suspects it wouldn't work without some third element binding them together. But there is no third element, and they are already friends anyway. There is no changing the way she loves him and he loves her.
Love, though, has not managed to bring him back yet.
-
The first day of her first year of high school goes well enough. She walks through the school's pristine white outer gate in a brand new uniform she'd bought with her mother the week before. The girl's summer uniform is a button down blouse and tie with a blue plaid skirt, instead of the seifuku the younger students wear. Selphie had lit up when she'd seen Kairi that morning, saying she looked "so good, nee-chan!" Kairi had laughed, and brushed her hair behind her ear. It's getting longer, she notices vaguely, now brushing the back of her neck. She can almost tie it back.
She goes to the table set up in the middle of the yard to get her schedule. She has Mainland and Creole language, again, then precalculus and free hour. After her recess there is physical education, chemistry, and creative writing. She sighs. Normally, she'd compare schedules with Riku and—
And nobody else, because she always comes to the first day of classes with Riku alone. That, she remembers, is and has always been reserved for her best friend. But either way, he isn't here, so she walks through the inner gate, shoulders set, and tries to find her first class.
The high school is constructed much like the nearby intermediate school, a loop of open air hallways built around a large courtyard. It's divided rather like the intermediate school as well, with a humanities wing, a sciences wing, and an everything-else-we-couldn't-fit wing. The outer walls of the classrooms, she notices, have wide jalousie windows set behind enormous overhead doors, which are currently opened. She's not sure why she's never seen them before, considering that she's been to this building to wait for Riku countless times, but they make her feel something odd in the pit of her stomach that she can't explain. She walks toward the language rooms, trying to shake the feeling off, though she knows it will stay there just like every other time she's seen or thought or felt something she can't explain.
Mainland language is much like it was the year before. Kairi stands with the rest of the class from where she's sat to greet the teacher when he walks in, then bows, then sits. She breezes through the lecture, only half paying attention, and does most of the work in the partner assignment with Tidus. She is still self conscious of her accent, which she still hasn't managed to stop from slipping out when she's working at her auntie's bed and breakfast. Her mother always reassures her that it's fine, she speaks very good Mainlander anyway, but Kairi always feels a caving sensation in her chest that she faintly recognizes as shame. She hates having to speak it for an entire period, hates feeling the way the sounds make her tongue feel thick and numb as they fall from her mouth. When the bell rings, she shoves everything in her bag and stands so forcefully she knocks the chair back, barely listening to the teacher talk about their assignment as she goes.
Creole language is much better. As they're in high school, the teacher explains, they'll be focusing on more complex and archaic grammar, often used in old literary works. Kairi feels her excitement rising. Nobody on Destiny Islands really speaks the old language anymore, except for old grannies who only talk among themselves anyway, and she's wanted to learn more about it ever since she came here. Maybe, she thinks, it's because she didn't quite grow up with it sprinkled around the same way her peers did, but having to learn to speak a new language had fascinated her at the time. She doesn't quite enjoy being bilingual anymore, and she really doesn't like the snatches of some third language she no longer quite remembers that are still somehow in her head, but that first spark never quite died.
Halfway through the period, the teacher puts them in groups of three to work on a partner assignment about some pronoun and its conjugational form, which are only used in very formal address. Her groupmates, whom Kairi has never met, end up relying on her for most of this again, although it's not their fault. Through quick conversation they discover Kairi has heard it before while attending council and regional meetings with her mother, and actually understands how it's used, and they ask her to help them learn. She does, and she smiles the whole time.
Next passing period, she has to cross campus. She wades through a sea of third years, who all seem to be great friends who can't stop talking and are coming exactly in her direction, and messes up the knot on her tie in the process. She's late to math, but only by a minute or so, and the teacher is forgiving.
Precalculus is fine, though she doesn't find it easy, even on the first day. It's only been two weeks since she reviewed, but the functions have gotten messed up in her head with all the thinking she's been doing. Whatever's causing these memory problems, she thinks bitterly, had better go away by July exams.
Not much of note happens the rest of class, and by free hour, she's glad to be free of the unit circle. She starts toward the inner gate, where Riku should be, then freezes; Riku's not here, and she hasn't packed a lunch. A sudden, sharp grief overtakes her. She doesn't want to go to the usual spot alone on the main road alone, she doesn't want to explain to the food truck man that he's just studying somewhere else this term (especially when she knows that isn't true but still doesn't know what is), she doesn't want to try and finish an order of hirayachi by herself right before gym. Her eyes burn. She's hungry, though, and the part of her that hasn’t been mourning for the past month is determined to get over herself, so she marches through the inner gate, then the outer one, and finds the truck. She very resolutely refuses to cry when she walks up and the man says, "Kairi! Order for three, yeah?"
-
She comes back to the school and changes into her gym uniform. The blue shorts are the same as they were in the intermediate school, but the shirt is not. It's white and printed with "Destiny Islands Upper Secondary School Physical Education" in the same deep blue of the shorts. Rather a pretentious name for a high school phys ed department, she thinks, but who is she to say? When she comes out of the locker rooms, the coach is already there, so she sits on the dusty pavement of the outdoor lot and begins to stretch. She loses herself in the motion, and by the time she remembers where she is, leaning into another butterfly, the coach is already explaining what they'll be doing today, an endurance exercise of some kind. She's a tall, muscular woman with straight blue hair cut close under her ears, and Kairi feels a vague pang in her chest she doesn't understand. She sighs, very tired of the feeling of forgetting what she's forgotten, and goes towards the equipment racks to find a jump rope.
Phys ed, it turns out, makes it very easy to get out of her own head. She'd never really enjoyed it before, but she's stronger than she remembers being, and the whooshing of the jump rope and the burn of her muscles ground her. Here is where she has to jump, and here is where her body lands, and here is the burn in her wrists and chest. There is no darkness and no door, only the bend of her knees and the sun beating down on her. She loses count quickly, only paying attention to her breathing and the feeling of asphalt under her feet, and it's a long while before she finally trips over the rope, stumbling with the effort of keeping her balance. She sighs, stands back up, and quickly realizes she's gathered an audience. Everyone else, it seems, had quit long before her, and she's been entertaining them for some unknown length of time. Her chest immediately grows hot, and she starts to stammer out some half-baked excuse before her classmates erupt into cheers. In half a second she's surrounded by Wow, Kairi! and You're so strong and How did you last that long? Even the boys didn't go half as long as you. Even the coach smiles at her, and Kairi feels her heart about to beat out of her chest before a grin splits her own face. And it's nearing the end of class, since phys ed periods stop ten minutes early to allow them to shower, and as they hoist Kairi on their shoulders and carry her to the locker rooms, she feels rather like a queen.
She walks into chemistry still riding the high of impressing her classmates, and cheerily greets the wizened old man teaching the class as most everyone else shuffles in and barely bows. They're learning about unit conversion, which is easy enough for her, and she answers just enough questions to get on the man's good side without irritating her classmates. During the partner assignment, she works with the kind, if distant girl sitting to her right at their shared table, and they make small talk. What kinds of classes are you taking, how'd you do on exit exams, where do you live on the island, so on and so forth. When the bell rings, she waves the girl goodbye, and the girl seems to have relaxed a bit, because she waves back.
For last period, Kairi crosses campus again, going to creative writing. This is another thing she's never been particularly good at, and she's dreading it a bit as she walks into class and greets the teacher for the sixth time that day. She picks a seat near the back so she won't be seen if she ends up slacking off, and settles in to wait.
Their activity that day is individual, as it turns out, not partnered. They'll be writing haiku, a form of poetry Kairi enjoys but has always found difficult to replicate. The syllable structure is hard enough, but the teacher wants these to be more traditional, so she has to factor in kigo as well.
The teacher passes out a printed list, though, and it ends up being easier than she thinks. She considers the date, and looks at the section on summer words. It's not technically summer, not by either the traditional or civil calendars, but it's fast approaching, and she feels it's appropriate. She chooses one, and as she writes, the impression of brown skin and a broad smile enters her mind. She's surprised, though, that the half-memory doesn't hurt her, only brings a pleasant ache to her chest. Something, she thinks, like nostalgia.
She writes, and edits, and edits again, and is so lost in thought that she almost doesn't notice the final bell ringing. She sits up fully, a little dazed, and turns in her poem to the teacher as she leaves.
On her walk home, she takes the ocean road. It's longer, but she likes the view, and she knows hardly anyone else uses it after school, so she'll be by herself. She buys sliced mango sprinkled with salt and dried chili pepper from an older lady she faintly recognizes, and eats it as she thinks about the past month or so. Eventually, though, she gives up on parsing her memories, and just takes in the salty air, the view of the clouds in the distance. The ocean is at her left, and the afternoon sun is at her right, pleasantly warm. The breeze is coming half from off the water and half from directly in front of her, cooling her down a little more than she'd strictly enjoy, but she leans into the wind anyway. She bites into a slice of mango, and as the flavor blooms in her mouth, something simultaneously unfolds in her mind. A voice, a key, brown skin and a smile like a summer's day, and then something clicks together. There was a boy.
-
Paopu flowers bloom
Destiny comes close behind
Face the southern wind
-
School continues to be much like this: she gets up in the morning, greets Selphie, walks to school alone. Attends class, spends as much time as she can afford pressing on the soft spots in her memory, does as much work as she can alone, eats lunch alone. Walks home alone. She's made taking the ocean road a habit; it reminds her of that boy she can't remember, and something else. These impressions are even fainter—the barest flash of sandals and pale hair, the taste of something she's never eaten on her tongue—but she figures if it's something she can't quite remember, it's something related to Riku and that boy and those months she wasn't on the islands, so she should do her best to figure it out.
She's gotten better, though, at handling the parts of her day where she can't be alone. She finds herself looking forward to teaching her classmates obscure grammatical structures in Creole language, talking with that girl she sits next to in chemistry (who is named Luna), beating everyone but the coach to a pulp in phys ed. She likes the routine of it, the steadiness of knowing what will come tomorrow. She even likes creative writing; she's taken to the way she can express her feelings in more abstract ways, where she can't articulate them in plain language. She can't remember the things she's lost, and she can't entirely explain the sadness festering in her, so instead she writes about flowers in the waves and the curling of bright metal and standing in the noonday sun feeling nothing but grief, and she knocks every assignment out of the park.
But Kairi can only tolerate so much school, so much conversation where she acts like nothing is wrong, before she starts to feel sick. She starts going to the play island again, even though every time an auntie or granny catches her tying her boat back at the children’s dock they give her the scolding of a lifetime. She hates being looked at like that, like she’s done something unforgivable, but she needs the solitude. The only time she ever has enough presence of mind to try and remember what she’s forgotten is wrapped in the little island’s noise; not silent, never silent, but soft. Wind through the trees, waves lapping at the beach, sand shifting under her feet. The water, the land, and the sky. Riku and Kairi and something, something.
When she can’t get to the play island, whether for lack of time or abundance of nagging women and fishermen hauling in, she wanders the mountain roads on the interior of the main island. Occasionally, someone on a bicycle or donkey passes her, and a car even more rarely than that. It’s not quiet enough to really think, not how she needs to, but it’s relaxing, and that’s mostly enough. Walking the hills with no particular destination, though, she finds, gets boring rather quickly. She gets into the habit of bringing a small sketchpad and an old pencil with her and drawing the things she sees; soon, several pages are filled with little lizards, flowers, different plants and insects. She’d never had much of an inclination towards life drawing, nor had she often noticed the little plants and animals around her. She’d always preferred to draw big, fantastical things, like giants and enormous fairies and gentleman knights. Now, though, something in her shies away from fantasy; some other, more childish part of her protests, but she gets the sense she’s had enough for a lifetime. And, she thinks, there is nothing left for her to do but notice. So she draws ants and iguanas and morning glories, and plies her mother and aunt with her smudgy diagrams for them to gasp and marvel at, and prays they don’t think to ask her why she’s picked up such a strange hobby. She prays they don’t ask why she no longer stays out at all hours with her friends or tells them long, winding stories about princesses, that they don’t ask where their little girl has gone.
She dreams, too, strange dreams. Some of them are of her and the boy and Riku. Those always leave her feeling terribly empty, like the ever-present sense of forgetting something she’s always known crossed with the feeling that she’s half herself, that she’s been split in two. Most of them, though, are about being some strange thing other than herself, something she knows is great and terrible and winged. She flies over miles of endless sea, thermals buoying her when she relaxes enough to glide. And always, always, she dives towards the sea, waking just as her massive beak pierces the waves and the water bursts into lilies and paper cranes. These dreams leave her shaky and strangely exhilarated, like she’s standing just on the edge of some enormous cliff, or something is just about to slide into place in that empty space just right of her heart. She feels powerful, when she dreams of flying, saltwater air and heady scent of overripe fruit curling around the muscle of her wings; so powerful she almost hates waking up.
She feels the ache of what she’s missing less now, but in its place that feeling of tipping over the edge of a cliff grows and grows. That boy, the one whose face she can’t remember, the one whose face she’d know in a heartbeat—he’d had something. A light with a blade’s edge; something like the trail of a meteor, if you could reach out and touch it, split your soul on it. She feels something behind her heart like that light. She feels it all the time. It’s there, lodged firmly between her ribs, not yet ready to spin itself into her hands, but winding around itself in her chest all the same. She thinks of it and she thinks of a word she’d heard one or twice and liked the sound of: efflorescence. The crust of sea salt on brick and the unfurling of a flower, water and life. She thinks that’s the way it’d move in her hands.
But there’s nothing in her hands, and she’s not quite sure if that itch in her chest will ever stop growing long enough to settle itself into the shape of something she can touch, or if she’ll just be staring over the edge of that cliff forever.
-
August break comes raging hot, the sun somehow always at the highest point in the sky. It's humid and dry all at once, and the usual rains haven't come. Probably won't 'til September, the elders mutter. A sure sign of bad luck. Kairi, once again helping her aunt run her bed and breakfast, very much agrees.
The sunny weather has brought an unusual number of tourists, which she has to deal with at nearly all hours and in nearly all places. They don't go to the play island, because the locals won't take them, but they're everywhere else it's possible to be; more than once already she's nearly had to fight some horrid woman for fish or bags of rice at the market. On top of that, the weather is miserable, and the box fans Kairi sets up in every room of the house just aren't helping enough for her to stay quite sane. Even before working for her aunt, she’s already drained of any energy, to say nothing of the days she does put in a shift waitressing or washing clothes.
Even as she's constantly busy, though, her thoughts keep drifting to Riku and that boy she can't remember. She misses both of them terribly. There's still nothing of the boy besides his hands, his skin, his blinding smile, but she's sure he's important, and she wants him back. Riku's absence, similarly, inspires a feeling of enormous longing. She still doesn't know where he is, and it's been months. She writes letters to him every day, and puts them in a shoebox under her bed. If he ever gets back (no, Kairi, when he ever gets back, she reminds herself sternly), she'll make him read every one, and punch him when he calls her a sap. That's what he gets for leaving her behind on their little island, that's what he gets for making her deal with the heat and the tourists and the hole he left in her chest all by herself.
It's the middle of break when she wakes up one day, bone-tired yet still reeling from another dream about flying, the sound of her wingbeats in her ears. She feels the pounding in her chest she’s come to associate with that strange and quiet strength, the majesty and coiling muscle, but she’s not nearly as awake as she normally is afterwards. She swats at the mosquito net suspended above her futon and rolls, half stumbling, out of bed. She shuffles into her house shoes, tapping her toes into place against the wood floors, and gets a change of clothes for the day. The box fan's sputtering blows her hair into her eyes as she bends down to fold her sheets, and she groans and switches it off. For all the long eaves and high ceilings and breezeways in the house, it got hot too quickly to stand, and the fan is too old to help anyway. The back of her neck is always sticky and miserable.
She scoops her little metal basin off the floor and slides her bedroom door open, going to the little washroom next to the tap outside. This part of her morning routine, filling up her bowl and washing up, has always been relaxing to her, and is still. But the water isn't really the right temperature, and midway through she realizes she's forgotten everything. Her washrag, her toothbrush and hairbrush, her clothes; they're all still sitting neatly on the floor in her room. She fights the urge to cry at 8 in the morning, and walks very deliberately back inside and out again, this time with everything in hand.
When she walks into the kitchen, her mother isn't there, only a note asking Kairi to please come down to the bed and breakfast when she gets up, thank you. There's a small pot of miso soup warming on the stove next to some grilled fish and yams, and the remainder of a pitcher of jasmine tea on the counter, still cold and sweating condensation. She smiles, silently thanking her mother for getting up early and making breakfast, and goes about making her meal. She hums some slow tune she can't remember the name of as she ladles broth into her bowl, and finds that it's a normal lapse in memory, one that comes from the normal wear of life and not thinking about something for a while. A warm and open feeling blooms tentatively in her chest. Still humming, she sits down at the table to eat, and stares out the window at the ocean as she sips her tea.
After she washes her dishes and puts on her sandals, she takes a deep sucking breath, settles into her skin, and locks the door to her house. Something uncomfortable worms under her skin, disrupting the pleasant glow she'd been floating in. The keys jingle as she slips them into her pocket, a golden little sound that nearly makes her heart stop. Always doors and stupid keys, she thinks, and spits contemptuously at the ground. It's half past 8 and she doesn't have time for this anyway, she resolves, so she turns on her heel and starts down the hill to the sea.
When she gets to her aunt's bed and breakfast, her heart almost stops again. There are more people than she's seen in weeks in the diner, and overnight guest parking is full. She bites back a groan, but allows herself a moment to slump forward before straightening back up and throwing open the doors. Her aunt is as harried as always, and her eyes widen in relief when she sees Kairi, another bad sign. Kairi musters a weak smile.
"Oh, Kairi, thank goodness you're here. We have the whole second floor that needs making up, can you handle it for me?"
"Of course, auntie. Tell Mom I said hi, please, and call me if you need."
"Oh, thank you," her aunt smiles, "thank you my iris." Kairi's eyes widen; even after ten years she hasn't gotten used to that nickname.
(The first time Riku heard it, his face had peeled wide open in a grin.
"D'you know what it means, Kairi?" he'd asked her, needling just a little. She'd shaken her head no; nobody had ever said anything. They didn't mean any harm by it—it had probably just slipped their minds to explain—but it stung. It was another thing she was supposed to know, but didn't. His eyes turned a little soft, then. He'd always seen right into her head.
"Well," he'd continued, so earnestly in his high, quiet voice, "it means good news, because you came to them on a night where the stars were falling. That's good luck for babies, but even though you weren't a baby it counts for you too! So you gotta be our good luck charm, 'kay?"
When she started crying, he'd gasped and reached out just an inch, like he wanted to touch her but was scared to hurt her, but she'd turned her face up to him and she'd been beaming. She was lucky. She hadn't known they'd loved her that much.)
She ducks her head and waves a little before going to the back room to get an apron and then upstairs to make the beds, passing families coming down for breakfast along the way. Some of them are normal vacationers, but some of them are arguing in a way that makes her heart sink. The smiley ones hardly tip, though, she thinks to herself, and grins a little bitterly.
She gets a cart from the storage closet at the end of the hall by the landing and ties back her hair, silently thanking the stars and sea for whoever had the good sense to put clean bandanas in the apron pockets. The first door with no do not disturb sign is a little down the hall, so she tugs her cart towards it and fumbles in another apron pocket for a master key. When she opens the door, she sighs. Based on the way the linens are thrown around in just this room, she can already tell it's going to be a long day.
By midday, her thin membrane of rain-luck finally snaps, and the bad omens she's been hearing about for weeks finally turn their heads in her direction. She's in the middle of making up a particularly messy and frustrating room when her aunt calls her from downstairs, and she groans as she drops the half-folded towel she's holding, ignoring the three more still on the floor. She's gone through several rooms that were awful and their own right, and she's wanted nothing more than to go back home and have a good angry cry for the past two hours, but she's needed, so she runs down the stairs to the diner, where she is greeted by possibly the largest single family she has ever had to serve. She understands immediately, and waves off her aunt's apologetic expression even as yet another thing sours in her; there are other things to be done, more important things that require her aunt’s attention, so Kairi will be the one to laugh and be polite and help with the serving.
"Party of....twelve?" she asks in halting Mainlander, and the woman at the front smiles. Kairi doesn't like that smile, all niceties and teeth. Kairi doesn't like anything about this woman, who has that odd slightly pink undertone to her skin some of the mainlanders do, and is wearing strange clothes unsuited to the weather and very thick mascara. But she's at work, so she presses the feeling down and scoops up menus, leading them towards the back of the diner.
She has to pull together three tables to seat them, and by the time she finishes, she feels her patience wearing thin. Professionalism be damned, she's had a bad day already, and she can tell they're going to be horribly condescending. But she steels herself, and tries her hardest to listen as she takes their orders, their accents skittering across her brain like oil on water. She has to have two younger children repeat what they want twice, her focus is so shot, and one of who she assumes are the grandparents is giving her an evil glare, but she ignores it and takes their orders to the kitchen. Mercifully, she's out of their earshot, so she takes the chance to switch back to Creole to shout the orders at the chefs over the noise of frying meat and knives on wood.
As she waits for their meals to cook, she takes the orders of a few more people who amble in. They, thankfully, are islanders—three fishermen—and she brings them jasmine tea and takes the chance to make conversation about how the bonito catches are doing. The fish are thinning out, they tell her, but they'll do just fine in the market until autumn when they return again. She smiles, and tells them in return about how Riku used to bring her and her mother the best fish from his father's first catch in the spring, and they'd have a big dinner together. Her eyes sting, and something hot rolls down her face, but they don't mention it, which she is infinitely grateful for. They only nod, and laugh about how they miss that terrible boy, and she understands just what they mean.
(The big table does not tip. Her theory about smiling tourists and gratuity remains intact. She sighs as she buses their plates.)
-
The diner eventually winds down, and by mid-afternoon Kairi's aunt shooes her out for the day. She doesn't really want to leave when she could stay and help, but her aunt is uncompromising, her mother is glaring from the kitchen, and she feels like a wrung out rag, so the protest she puts up is more token than anything else. She accepts two grudging kisses on the cheek and grouses at them all the way out the door.
On her way out, she pokes a little at the weeds growing through the cracks in the parking lot. She hates how hot asphalt gets, and how it feels under her feet, but all the main roads had been paved since she was a little girl. It had come in the fine print of some trade and tourism agreement with the Mainland nobody really wanted but everybody needed. She admits to herself that during the rainy season, having hard paved roads is a blessing, but she still can't deal with them. The way they cut the earth from the sky feels unnatural. She deeply admires the tenacity of the plants that manage break them apart; how strong must they be to survive conditions they weren't made for in the least, let alone change them?
As she walks back up the hill to her house, the lazy coils of tired frustration begin to work themselves into genuine nervous energy. She frowns. She really doesn't feel like braving traffic on one of the mountain roads, but she feels like dealing with the fishwives harrying her for going to the play island even less, so it seems she's going for a walk. She stops by the house, shuddering faintly when the lock clicks open, and digs through her stack of books for her sketchbook and a pencil before leaving again.
The roads are blessedly empty, but her thoughts are more jittery than usual, and even hiking the tallest mountain and being completely alone isn't helping. She's stopped at times to draw some little butterfly flitting between flowers, or vines curling around a tree, but they haven't helped either. What she needs is something to get her to think deeply but not at all, something to absorb her attention. She needs to figure out who that boy is. Her breath starts coming too quickly. She needs—she needs—
Something breaks deep inside her, and for the first time in months, she cries. She wails, she screams over what she used to have and doesn't anymore. She cries a river over the stupid boy she can't remember, another over the life she bad before the islands, and two more over just Riku. She misses him so badly! It's like a star in her chest, licking and burning at her lungs. She needs to see him, right now, but she can't. She needs to run or she'll explode. This she can do.
Still holding her sketchbook and pencil in one hand, she starts sprinting down the mountainside, zigzagging around spots where the dust is worn smooth. She runs up another hill, her lungs burning, and still keeps going. She's gotten very strong since coming back, stronger than she's ever been. She passes people who yell at her to slow down, that she'll hurt herself. She half doesn't hear, half doesn't care. She runs so long she forgets how long she's been running over the buzzing in her head. They don't understand, she thinks furiously, they don't know what you're running to and they never will.
She makes it nearly the whole circuit of the island before she finally trips, crashing down a slope towards the sea. She hits the hard dirt, unforgiving as always, bounces before rolling several feet, and starts crying again. There are stars in her eyes and her whole body aches. She looks down and sees a slow trickle of blood from her knee already mixing with the dust.
Kairi drags herself to the edge of the road, dripping tears and blood the whole time. She's already calming, though; even through how awful she feels she can fell her injuries are minor. There are no broken bones or sprains, just a dull, heavy ache. She looks down across the island, down onto the roads and the houses and the endless sea, converging to a bank of clouds bigger than any she's seen for months. She watches them scud across the horizon line for several silent minutes. Maybe those are the rains that haven't come. There is dirt in her palms, her feet. An ant marches across her fingers, right over the broken skin.
A flash of something bright catches her eye from on the main road, winding around the base of the hill below her, and for half a lovely second she thinks it's an enormous white bird flying low to the ground. She remembers, vaguely—like most things these days—hearing about bird spirits from some elder when she first came to the islands. (The mainlanders, they said, think the great sea birds are unlucky, because they can seem a sign of land where there is none. But those birds have never meant land. They do not deceive.) They were supposed to be protective, especially to children, and though Kairi is no child, something in her hopes she's seen an honorable sea spirit. She's hurting in more ways than one. She wants dearly to be held by something old and wise and told everything will be alright.
It's only after she sees it again that she realizes it's the reflective silver of one of those fancy cars from the rental shop, the ones only tourists use. Despite the absurdity of the whole thing, she curses, and nearly starts bawling again. It's not the spirit of a great white seabird, noble and healing. She only wishes it were.