The first sign that something is maybe not-quite-right in the world is that you’re sort of having trouble hearing the birds outside your window over the sound of a foghorn.

Except it’s not a foghorn.

It’s a Monday morning, and you’re lying in bed and staring up at your roof. Why? Firstly, because it’s above your face, and therefore the most logical thing to stare at in the morning. Secondly, because you can’t hear yourself breathe over the sound of snores beside you, and your brain is too busy going Good morning, Riku, let’s have some quiet time before things go to hell to muster up the energy to stare at anything that isn’t white and grainy at the moment.

This, however, does not go as planned. Because on your roof is your fan, and all of a sudden yours eyes have lighted upon sign two that you’re probably in Deep-Shit-my-God: the fan. Or, more accurately, the pair of baggy black cut-offs lying tangled in the fan.

For the record, and just to make things perfectly clear: those cut-offs aren’t yours.

Hello, world. Your name is Riku, and you’re pretty sure you’re right about to die of heart failure.

It strikes you that you’ve seen this exact tableau in a porno somewhere, which, in retrospect, is not the wisest thought in the world, because it brings you to sign three that your mother will probably soon be wearing your balls for earbobs:

You’re naked.

You’re naked and your belly feels crusty and gross.

You’re naked, your belly feels crusty and gross, and there’s a leg curled up around your waist as if in tango, except you’re not doing the tango, you’re sleeping. In your bed. There should not be a leg shoved up against your prick at this hour of the morning. At any hour of the morning.

For a moment, you wonder if in fact the leg actually belongs to a body, and spend a good minute trying to decide whether it’d be better or worse if it didn’t. On the one hand, you’d have a dismembered limb on your bed. On the other hand, you’d have just had sex with the owner of said limb, and would be currently awaiting death at the hands of one weeping mother who, just last Thursday, bought you a wooden toy sword and a stuffed animal you’d seen in the window of Toys R Us and then spent a whole afternoon sobbing things like my baby hates me when you awkwardly point out that I’m seventeen, Mom, I haven’t played with dolls since…oh wait, no, I never played with dolls, that was Sora.

And with that, you reach sign four that your life is about to go spiraling down the shit hole, taking what’s left of your chastity with it:

The owner of the leg currently splayed against your tummy?

Heh. Hehe. He he he oh God.

For a moment, you contemplate taking a header out the window. Hanging yourself with your bed sheets. Drowning in the toilet.

Because the boy lying half atop you and sort of harrumphing through his teeth so loudly you’d bet your keyblade the noise has woken your mother up and she’s currently lying in wait on the other side of the bedroom door ready to skewer you through with a kitchen knife?

That’s Sora.

Sora.

Sora, your best friend. Sora, the savior of the known universe. Sora, whom you’ve maybe sort of been in love with since you were old enough to toddle; whom you lead on a cat-and-mouse chase across a dozen worlds for the space of a whole video game; whom you hated and loved and despised and adored with every atom of your soul for one year, until he beat you half to death and you realized once and for all that this kid was going to own your very being for the rest of your natural lives.

Sora is lying in your bed, naked as the day he was born, covered in half-crusted fluids of questionable origin, and currently making enough noise to wake the living dead.

And you’re sort of unsure how he got there.

Let’s backtrack.

*

“-harder, bitch, my grandma could do a better job of this!-“

*

On second thought, let’s not.

Anyway, you’re mostly sure how this all happened. When a man loves a man, and all. It’s the before that confuses you.

You can remember going fishing yesterday. You can remember Sora showing up in the middle and plopping down beside you with his own rod. You can remember laughing yourself silly when – after two straight hours of every fish within six kilometers bypassing his bait for yours – he threw a tantrum and tried to Firaga the lot of them. You can remember pulling him onto the Paopu Island for some relaxation (read: sunbathing) and finding faces in the clouds. You can remember staring up at the oddly shaped fruits hanging above you and thinking Maybe I could-

Then things get a little fuzzy.

Because all you can remember after that is a sweet taste in your mouth and an odd haziness in your brain and hands half-pulling you to your house for a wild night of passionate love-making and oh shit, there’s no way your mother didn’t hear, the two of you split the headboard!

Now, you’re a pretty smart guy. Not to brag, but you missed three semesters worth of high school and still managed to graduate at the top of your class. In fact, you might even call yourself a genius. Not that you really would, because you’re almost as humble as you are gorgeous, and just between you and me, that’s pretty effin’ humble.

The point is, you’re a pretty smart guy, and you can put two and two together. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened. Two boys sitting on Paopu Island, sunbathing and playing sword games below the fruit tree? All this followed by loss of memory, level-headedness, and underwear? Che. A child could figure this out.

Obviously, Sora knocked you unconscious and dragged you back to your place where he proceeded to have his wicked way with you under the glow of a half moon and your Mickey Mouse night light.

…that was a joke, by the way. Humor is the first refuge of the desperate, you always say, and right now you’re pretty fucking desperate. Because if you’re right – and you’re always right (okay, almost always) – you got intoxicated off of Paopu fruit and had drunken sex with your best friend who is possibly in love with your other best friend (oh God, where’s that noose?), and if your life is flashing before your eyes at the moment, you can’t help but feel justified.

That's what half of your mind is screaming at the moment. It's what it should be screaming at the moment.  You've just potentially damaged your oldest and dearest friendship. You might have just driven an indomitable wedge between yourself and the boy you care about more than anything.

But-

Really? More than anything?

You sort of wish you’d at least been clear-headed enough to remember it.

It's a selfish thought. A horrible thought. You can no more help it than you can help breathing.

Slowly, you turn onto your side, letting the leg around your waist tighten around you like a safety blanket. You can feel ragged heat seeping from the place his flesh meets yours. You can smell sour breath and sweat and something you're pretty sure is come.

You don't care. You wouldn't care if he smelled like a dog. Because for the first time in forever, you let yourself look at him. Really look at him.

He’s beautiful.

You’ve always known he was.

You trail your fingers up his side, softly so as not to wake him. It’s soft. His shoulders are so smooth, his belly so flat. You could spend hours whispering the pads of your fingers up his abdomen, down the curve where hip meets leg, up one muscled thigh and between calloused toes. You’ve dreamed of it.

In your dreams, you spend every day mapping his body with all the care and tenderness you possess. It’s not much. You’re not very good at keeping things whole and unbroken and devoid of bruises and tears. But in your dreams, you’re the perfect lover. In your dreams, you make him writhe.

In your dreams, you make him happier than he could ever, ever be with anyone else, until the end of time.

But this is reality, and there’s a best friend in your bed who most assuredly is not meant to be there, and he’s going to wake up and accuse you of rape and various other foul misdeeds, and dashing yourself upon the rocks is starting to sound like a pretty good solution.

Except: Sora.

The foghorn has shifted into something that sounds a bit more like a honking car, and you’re vaguely aware of the fact that were he not lying naked in your bed and covered in disreputable fluids, you’d probably be laughing your ass off at him.

Unfortunately, naked he is, and laughing you are most assuredly not. Your mouth is stretching, yes, but there is no mockery in it. There’s only a soft sort of amusement and tenderness, and your heart slows its mad, terrified rhythm even as your limbs tense and relax in disjointed rhythm.

He’s so fucking perfect.

Which, of course, means that he’s as flawed as the next person, but-

But.

But it doesn’t matter. Not when it’s Sora. You think you could stand waking up to an eternity of foghorns, if only they were Sora’s.

Except you’re obviously not going to, because this has all been one huge mistake. A big misunderstanding. Sora’s gonna wake up, and he’s going to fucking freak. He’s gonna start yelling at you, and then you’re gonna start yelling at him, and you’ll probably end up destroying your whole room by the time you manage to explain that this was so not your fault.

It’ll be awkward for pretty much an entire century, but sooner or later you’ll both get over it. He forgave you for betraying him and playing a part in the near-destruction of the known-galaxy. Of course he’ll forgive you a bit of butt sex.

The question, as always, however, is: how long is it going to take you to forgive yourself?

And, more importantly, aren’t you supposed to be feeling a little guilty over this?

I mean, you do. Really. Very guilty.

Except: Sora.

Sora is lying half-atop you and he’s snoring into your ear and if he turned his head just twenty degrees you’d be staring right into his sleeping face, and you kind of want to cry, but it’s not in guilt. No.

It’s joy you feel, and that makes you feel guiltier than what you did last night.

God, you wish you could remember it all. It’s not fair. Your first time with the boy you’ve been in love with since before you know what love was, and all you can remember is tightness in your belly and a strange headiness obscuring everything else. Your life is a black abyss.

Except not, because: Sora.

You want to laugh, but you’re scared that might wake him. Oh, it doesn’t matter if you can’t remember. I mean, it does; it matters a whole lot. But you’ll take what you can get. After everything you’ve done and all the people you’ve hurt, this is more than you can hope for. This is more than you’ve ever hoped for.

Right now, you have Sora – Sora! – lying in your bed. He’s nestled against you. His skin is pressed against yours, his hands are folded against yours, and even if you never get to experience this again, it’ll have been enough. One perfect memory against the grisly montage that is your life.

It’s so much more than enough.

You’re so lost in your thoughts you don’t even notice his eyes have opened until your mind registers the blue.

It’s sort of funny. There’s dried come on your tummy, the sheets are glued painfully to your thighs, fucking Sora is staring straight at you while naked in your bed, and all you can think is if acceleration is 9.81 m/s squared and my room is 3.2 meters above the ground, how many milliseconds will it take me to splatter across the pavement?

So, really, you do the only thing you can think of to do.

“This is a dream,” you say.

Sora grins. “Morning, Riku.”

“You’ll wake up in a bit.”

“What time is it?”

“A bit after eight. Not that it matters, because you’re still asleep.”

“Mmm,” Sora moans. “Nah. Butt wouldn’t hurt if I was asleep. Plus, I always do you in my dreams. You’re a jerk.”

Uh.

Wait.

What?

“Wait,” you say. “What?”

Let it never be said that you are ineloquent.

“Ow,” Sora says, about eight hours late. He rolls further onto his side, one hand disappearing behind him. “Seriously, Riku, you’re really bad at this. I think I’m bleeding.”

“You’re bleeding?” you ask nervously. Then: “Wait, what?”

He looks at you like you’re a little crazy. “What do you mean, what? You heard me, didn’t you? ‘Cause I’ll repeat myself, you know. Riku, you’re really, really bad at se-“

You shove your hands over his mouth and blink at him. Because what?

“Look,” you say, then pause, because that’s about as far as your brain got before it crash landed on a desert island.

“Last night,” you continue finally. “We had…sex?”

Sora stares at you for a minute in something resembling confusion before he nods. There is a distinct level of duh in the gesture.

“And…you’re not mad at me?”

He’s definitely looking at you like you’re crazy now. “Uh uh.”

Oh.

Oh.

“Oh,” you say. “Alright. Okay. That’s cool. Heh. Hah. Hahahaha.” Then: “Oh my God.”

Sora squirms unhappily. “Hey,” he says, pushing your hands away. “What’s that supposed to mean? D-don’t think that you can take it back now, stupid Riku! You’re the one who confessed to me! Don’t act like you regret it after you practically split me in half! You made me bleed! My first time was a mess, idiot, and if you don’t take responsibility, I’ll-“

“Okay,” you say. It comes out a bit giddy. “Sure. Fine. I’ll take responsibility. We’ll get married tomorrow.”

Sora blanches. “Oh God, you do regret it.”

“No!” you interrupt in a voice about five decibels higher than a male voice has any right to be. “No,” you repeat, struggling for calm. You kind of want to laugh. And then you want to cry. And once you’ve done all that, you want to take that worried face between your hands and kiss the living daylights out of it.

“Not at all,” you say, grinning brighter than you can ever remember grinning. Your face is going to ache for the next week. “No. In fact, I’m thinking we should do it again. If I suck that badly, we should practice. C’mon. Hands and knees.”

“Riku!” Sora groans, but-

But.

Sora – your best friend, your confidante, the boy you’ve loved since probably before you were born – is in your arms. And he’s okay with that.

He’s okay with that.

This is so much more than you deserve, but you think you can find it in yourself to deal.