[team one] (work on my big bang fic)

[knittenkitten]

Soriku, excerpt from a larger WIP that ends abruptly (this references a bunch of stuff that already happened and is kinda incomprehensible but hey I need to write it haha), I need to write Steph a heartfelt thank you note for her profound role in so many of my fics this year via shiritori, G [965 words]

Tangled chains were a way of life for Sora.  They probably were for anybody who had a necklace that they slept with (did that include superheroes, like the ones he'd seen his first night in town?).

Unfortunately, this morning, they were tangled with his hair, too.  And tangled hair was also a way of life for Sora, especially when he was away from the ocean.

This left him with a big, head-pulling mess that was probably responsible for waking him up.  Last night must have left him tossing and turning in his sleep, though he couldn't remember having any dreams.

Sora ran his fingers frantically through his hair trying to work out the knot, but it quickly became apparent that wasn't going to be enough.  He gave the necklace a firm tug and out with it came a surprisingly large chunk of hair.

"Ouch!"

"You... okay up there?"  Riku had once again risen earlier than Sora had, perhaps this time less than an hour ago, and he had been browsing the Internet so quietly that he took Sora by surprise.

Or was that the crush?  The gay one.  On his best friend; his roommate.

Sora gulped that aside, then tore the remaining hairs out of the chain with feigned panache.   Really, he was just ripping the knot several times in a row and shaking the hairs loose until there were no more.  (On the bed counts as gone, after all.)

"Yeah, no thanks to past you."

He sometimes regretted that Riku didn't have a matching necklace, actually... though it wasn't like Sora could remember the night when Riku had given it to him, anyway.  Besides, by the time the thought had occurred to him, it had felt too strange, somehow, to return the favor.  Sora understood why now, and that understanding, too, felt strange.

"Sorry for giving you a gift, I guess.  I'm surprised you still wear that at all, let alone to bed."

"Well, it's important to me!  Even if it makes me want to pull my hair out sometimes."

He caught Riku turning toward the wall and clenching the side of his desk with his fist out of the corner of his eye, just as that incomprehensible "too strange to say" feeling that was now entirely comprehensible hit his gut.

Whoops.

Sora waited for the flush to wear off ("not fixable with cold drink!", the voice in his head reminded him, which was stupid, because there was no such thing readily available.  Be useful for once, brain!) before stepping down.

Riku was just kind of staring blankly at the drawer below his laptop, his hand clutching the desk's edge firmly.

"Wow, am I actually more awake than you are?  I can hardly believe it."

"Somethin' like that," Riku muttered, rubbing some invisible demon off his neck, then abruptly getting up from his seat and shoving it under the desk.  "I'm gonna go take a shower."

And Riku was off, towel and shower basket and all.

Sora couldn't help but wonder what was troubling Riku sometimes, but he also knew better than to ask for the "blank staring" type of "troubled".

Was it the gay thing?

Well, they'd talked about that last night, so even if it had been in the past, it couldn't be that anymore.

Was it classes starting?

Sora... actually just remembered that was today himself, no thanks to waking up before his alarm, and he couldn't manage nearly that much anxious energy for a day that would certainly be full of syllabuses.  Syllabi?  Whatever.  If Sora wasn't that worried about it, then he couldn't imagine Riku would be.

Sora frowned, then checked the clock.  He still had a couple hours until their first classes—they were entirely different, but they'd carefully planned it so that Riku always had his first class at the same time as or before Sora's.  It was the kind of thing he really appreciated Riku for, come to think of it.

Though he hoped Riku wouldn't wake him up with a paper airplane every morning.

He felt himself smiling like a goof, so Sora tried his best to neutralize it as he took a cue from Riku and got his shower stuff together, too.  He probably looked even more like a huge dork that way as he walked down the dorm hallway, but he'd rather look like a serious dork than a happy dork.

Sora had to admit that didn't make a lot of sense, so he hid it by soothing the ouch of the back of his scalp with his palm.  Wow, that sure made him feel how this was a lot of stuff to have to carry in a public hallway.  This year was going to be tough.

After he unlocked the bathroom door, Sora noticed that only one shower was running, and that Riku's basket was in front of it.

Well, that felt a little different now, but he didn't have time to process that.  Sora read on the college's message board that when somebody else was already in there (but only one person) was said to be your best chance at an instantly warm shower in this building, and Sora hated cold showers.

As soon as Sora started his shower, he heard the one next to him abruptly turn off.  He shouldn't have been surprised Riku was not one to dawdle in the shower, though he now felt compelled to rush himself a bit.

Just... not too much.

The thought of running onto somebody else on the way in was mortifying enough, let alone Riku on his way out.

Luckily, neither thing happened, thanks to his timing, and he was able to take his shower in peace.

Sora quickly got dressed and ran back to the room.

He started packing his backpack.

Tagging oath_breaker!