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Summary: Sora has been in a coma for months, and other than his mother, he only has one visitor. Riku visits as often as he can, and eventually he strikes up a friendship with one of Sora's caregivers, Kairi. As the two grow closer over the months, Riku reveals a secret: He believes he's found a way to share Sora's dreams.
Day 6 of AUgust: Hospital AU.
Initially I struggled with finding a plot for this one, but wanted it to be about Sora in a coma, since that fits the canon year he spends asleep. And then this plot REALLY ran away with me. (I was aiming for 1k, lol.) But fortunately my inability to sleep last night actually came with a burst of creativity and productivity!
This is also Day 4 of SoRiKai week, and I have FINALLY managed to work in the right prompt! Today's prompts were "First Kiss", which this fills, and "Snow," which could maybe be relevant to this fic if you squint at it a bit. This also fills the Day 1 prompt "Dreams."
Sora only ever has a few visitors. That’s not terribly surprising; it’s been several months. Coma patients who are otherwise stable generally have a flurry of visits early on, but it almost always tapers off.
His mother is there, once a week like clockwork. She stays for a couple hours, and talks to him like everything is fine. She holds his hand, and tells him everything going on in her life. Things happening with friends, the new café that she tried the other day, some new movie she’s sure he’ll want to see at some point.
Kairi actually loves it. She’s not sure she believes coma patients can actually hear when people speak to them. The science says probably not, but some patients who’ve regained consciousness say they did hear their loved ones, so she won’t write it off entirely. Regardless, it’s sweet that his mother keeps him a part of her life. Not just the big life event things, but the little things: how her flowers are doing in the unusually wet summer, or how much she hates the book her book club chose.
He has one other regular visitor. A young man, about the same age as Sora. The same age as Kairi too, then. He’s actually there more often than Sora’s mom; two times a week at the very least. Sometimes closer to four or five times, and that’s just when Kairi is on-shift. His visits aren’t on a regular schedule like Sora’s mom’s, so for all she knows he’s there on her days off or on other shifts.
He always looks terribly serious. He talks to Sora too, but quietly, leaning close to his ear, whispering things to him while clinging to his hand. Kairi can’t ever hear what he’s talking about. She’s never had a good opportunity to introduce herself, though she’s sure the mysterious young man must recognize her by now. Not that it matters; she’s just too curious for her own good.
A chance presents itself a couple weeks later, when the young man is there during Sora’s scheduled physical therapy. He’s sitting the way he usually does, elbows on Sora’s bed, one of Sora’s hands in his. He’s murmuring something close to Sora’s ear. He has a book in his lap; the title has something to do with dreams.
“Hi there,” she says, gently knocking on the open door.
The young man startles. “Oh. Hello.”
“My name is Kairi. I’m a physical therapy assistant in the hospital’s PT office. It’s time for Sora’s appointment.”
The young man glances down at Sora’s unconscious form, and then back to her, clearly skeptical.
Understandable. She quirks a half smile at him. “Yes, really. Someday Sora is going to wake up, and if we can try to make sure that he still has some strength and flexibility, it will make it better for him.”
“Oh. That makes sense. I, uh, appreciate that you’re taking care of him. Kairi, was it?”
“Yes. I see you here a lot. And you are?”
“Riku,” he answers. He gently lets go of Sora’s hand and reaches out toward her.
His handshake is pleasant: firm and warm, but not crushing.
“And how do you know Sora?” she asks. He certainly doesn’t have to answer her, but it’s the first excuse she’s had to talk to him.
“He’s my best friend.” There’s no hesitation in his voice. The fact that Sora has been unconscious for almost six months has no bearing on it.
“He’s lucky to have you,” she replies. She always tries to refer to patients in the present tense. Just because he can’t respond to them doesn’t make him a “was”.
Then she starts moving Sora through the exercise routine they’ve designed for him. Riku watches, but is quiet.
After that, Riku is there more often when she comes by for Sora’s appointments. They make some small talk, and then he talks about Sora.
“Is he athletic?” she asks, because Sora was in very good shape when she started his PT routine. There’s only so much her exercises can do to maintain it, but it’s better than letting everything atrophy.
“Yeah, I guess he was,” Riku answers. “I don’t know that we ever thought of it that way, but he was always running, climbing, swimming…”
Riku keeps talking, and Kairi learns about how competitive Sora can be, but how good-natured he is even when he doesn’t win at something.
When the appointment is over, she makes sure Sora is back in bed, attached to his IV and his monitors, with no twisted wires or kinked tubes.
Riku stands up as she finishes the checks. “You know, I really do appreciate that you’re taking such good care of him. I feel like it’s more than some people would do.”
“It is my job,” Kairi answers. “But I very genuinely mean it when I say that I want to make sure we do our best for him. And that I wish I’d known him when he was awake.”
“Would you like to go for coffee?” Riku asks.
Riku does take her out for coffee at the end of her shift. It’s with a bit of amusement that she realizes the café they’ve met at is the same one Sora’s mom was talking to him about a few weeks before. According to her, they have an amazing strawberry white mocha.
Kairi shrugs and orders the iced version of that, even if the recommendation was a bit secondhand. Riku orders something with dark chocolate and cinnamon, and Kairi thinks that the combination suits him somehow.
They find a table.
Riku asks a little about her, and she talks about her job in the PT clinic. She asks about him, and he tells her about the classes he’s going to be starting soon. He’s going back to school in the fall to study neuroscience.
She doesn’t ask if it’s because of Sora, a desire to learn what happened to him. Sora’s coma is one of the unexplained ones. No drugs, no physical trauma, no infection… just a young man who didn’t wake up, but kept breathing.
It becomes something of a standing date, Riku taking her out for coffee at the end of her shift. (Sometimes she takes him out instead.)
She toys with the cardboard sleeve on her cup. She’s switched from iced to hot with the changing weather, but Sora’s mom was right about how good the strawberry white mocha is.
Riku started his classes a few weeks ago, and he’s kept her updated on how they’re going. He’s lamenting how he can’t visit Sora as often, though he’s structured his schedule to allow him some early afternoons free.
“I’ve told him that I won’t be there quite as often. I know—I mean hope—that he understands, but I still hate it.” After a pause he asks: “Do you think he understands? Do you think someone in a coma can hear us?”
She hedges a bit. “I don’t know. But I know that he understands that you care about him.”
Riku gives her a small smile. “He’d better.”
Kairi promises to keep an eye on Sora even more than usual.
Sora is the only thing besides work and class that they talk about for a long time. Not unexpected; he is the reason she met Riku at all.
Though slowly, other topics make their way in.
“Do you believe Sora is dreaming?”
She feels her brow furrow. “I don’t know,” she admits. “There’s no evidence of REM sleep, and it doesn’t seem like his brain is going through normal sleep cycles, so he may not be. But I also know that people who have woken up from comas sometimes say that they did dream. So it’s possible.”
Riku loans her books. A couple about dreaming. A couple about weirder metaphysical things, like astral projection.
She reads them, since he asks her to, and she talks about them with him, though she isn’t sure why he wanted her to read them. It seems like a weird set of topics for a would-be neuroscientist to be interested in.
Or then again, maybe not. Dreams are a fascinating exploration of the psyche. Why people dream, and what those dreams mean are long-standing questions.
Sora is still a main topic of conversation. She’s starting to feel like she knows Sora almost as well as Riku does, with the number of stories she’s heard. It’s a nice feeling, because she thinks she would really like Sora. She hopes he’d like her, too.
It hits her, sometime on one of their coffee dates a bit later in the fall. Riku is clearly in love with Sora. She’s not sure why she never put it together before, considering. She doesn’t directly mention it. She’s pretty sure that Riku is fully aware, and therefore doesn’t need the reminder.
She doesn’t feel disappointed, even though she thinks she might be kind of falling in love with Riku. He’s so smart, so driven to help someone he loves, so easy to be with. The fact that he may be one of the most beautiful men she’s ever seen doesn’t hurt either. And honestly, she thinks she’s almost halfway in love with Sora, too. Or at least the version of Sora that Riku has spent months telling her about.
She still hopes she has a chance to meet him.
“Remember those books that I loaned you?”
“Sure,” she answers, taking a sip of her coffee. She tries to tune out the Christmas music being pumped at slightly-too-high volume through the café speakers.
“Remember that one about shared dreaming?”
“I do.” It had been an interesting read, about the phenomenon of multiple people having the same dreams as each other. She doesn’t know if she believes it, exactly, considering the fact that the evidence is mostly anecdotal. But it’s still an interesting topic.
“Is it something you would consider trying?”
She hesitates. She could go into the science, how individual’s recollections of an experience aren’t the same thing as verifiable fact… but Riku knows that. So she takes a sip of her coffee and says, “Maybe. Why?”
“I think I’ve… well, I want to say I know I’ve been sharing dreams with Sora.”
She pushes down the initial instinct to brush it off. “How do you know?”
“I just… I just do. I’m sorry, I’m a scientist, I hate that answer. But I just know that it’s real.”
It could be grief, she supposes. Having a loved one in a coma can be almost more difficult than having them die; they’re gone in every way that seems to matter, but there’s no closure to the loss. She opens her mouth to try and gently suggest something to that effect, but he cuts her off.
“I do know what it sounds like,” he says. “I do. That’s why I read all of those books, and did all that research. I wanted to know if it was even possible. There’s no proof that shared dreaming is real, but an awful lot of the anecdotes do match up.”
She nods. He isn’t wrong. Any of the cases could have been fabricated; even the ones with a veneer of scientific study could have been prone to tampering or collusion. But what if they hadn’t been? What if they were as genuine as the subjects felt?
“Okay,” she agrees. “If you and Sora share dreams, then what does that have to do with me?”
“It was easier, when I was spending more time with him. I’m still spending as much as I can, and most nights I manage it, but… he complains, a bit.” Riku laughs quietly, like he knows how ridiculous it sounds.
“Complains.” She can’t even quite make it a question.
“That he’s bored.” Riku laughs again. “It’s been nine months, and the dreams he and I share are the only interaction he has. Of course he’s bored.”
The idea that coma patients are aware of the passage of time, but cut off from stimuli in their environment is one that’s actually kept her up at night. She shudders. “How can I help?”
“That’s why I wanted to know if you would try sharing his dreams, too. Just to see if we can find one other person who he can talk to.”
But I don’t know him, she wants to say. But… she almost feels like that’s not completely true. “He doesn’t know me,” she says instead.
“He knows about you,” Riku answers. “I’ve told him about you.”
There’s something in the way he says that that pulls at her heart. “Okay,” she agrees. “I’ll try.”
“For me it’s easier if I spend time with him at the hospital first. Maybe it’s just an extra trigger so that he’s definitely the last thing on my mind when I fall asleep. But you could try that, if you want.”
Kairi spends the hour after she gets off of her shift in Sora’s room. It’s a bit weird not to be there in an official capacity, but she does what Riku does. She sits by his bed, and tentatively reaches out to hold his hand.
She tells him about her day, and how Riku wants her to try and ‘meet’ him, so that he’ll have someone else to talk to. When the lights dim, simulating a day-night cycle, she leaves and goes home.
And she dreams.
Sora is sitting there, dressed in a hospital gown, but seated on the side of his bed, looking at her.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” she says back. “This is probably a really silly question, but is this a dream, or like… a real dream?”
“A ‘shared’ dream, you mean? That’s always what Riku calls them when he shows up.”
“I think so.” She sits down next to him on the edge of the hospital cot. “I know Riku. He’s told me a lot about you.”
He grins at her, and his smile is like the sun. “You must be Kairi.”
“I am.”
She doesn’t expect him to pull her into a hug, but he does. “You’re the one who’s been taking care of me.”
It doesn’t happen every night. Sometimes her dreams are the usual kind: late for the final in a class she forgot she was taking, random zombie apocalypse, mundane family get-together made strange because it takes place in an airport for some reason.
But it happens often enough. And as skeptical as she may have been when Riku first mentioned it to her, she feels the same way now as he did then. She just knows that this is real.
She has gotten to meet the young man that she was so hoping to. And he is just as wonderful as Riku described. More so, because now she sees Sora’s genuine warmth and humor and infinite caring shine through. And that’s even with what he’s been through, basically trapped alone for, god, almost ten months now.
They talk about everything. Her job, the things Sora misses, the classes Riku is taking. She reads books and watches movies she thinks he’d like and then tells him the stories. It’s not the same as reading or seeing them directly, but it’s something.
They talk about Riku. Sora gives her a few retaliatory tidbits about Riku as a kid and as a teenager. Nothing malicious, just a few little stories to make up for how much Riku told them about each other.
And Sora thanks her. Because apparently their coffee dates were the first time that Riku started to have something almost normal in his life again.
“He was trying to spend all of his time asleep,” Sora confides. “I’m glad he couldn’t share my dreams if he took sleeping pills; they messed with his dreams too much. Because otherwise, I’m afraid that’s all he would have done.”
“I’m glad I could help,” she says.
“Riku told me you were the one taking care of me,” Sora says. “I don’t know if he realized that you were taking care of him, too.”
After the first time, Sora isn’t usually in anything like a hospital room.
This time, it’s some sort of fantasy setting. A forest too perfect to be real, with a flower-strewn… bier, is the only word that comes to mind. It’s not a comfortable word to be thinking of. Sora is lying down on it when she walks in, but sits up as energetically as ever when she approaches.
“This is pretty,” she says, gesturing around at the scenery.
“Kind of a joke,” he says. “I feel like Snow White or something. Sleeping, under a spell, can’t wake up…”
“I don’t see any dwarves. Sleeping Beauty?” she suggests.
He grins at her. “Aw, Kairi thinks I’m pretty.”
She punches him in the shoulder, though without any real force. Not that anything really hurts in these dreams.
“Hey baby, come here often?”
The terrible pick-up line comes from somewhere behind her, and she spins to find Riku walking through the trees.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Kairi says.
As often as Riku and Sora share dreams, and as often as Kairi has managed it with Sora, this is the first time all three of them have shared one.
“I was just telling Kairi that I’m like Snow White,” Sora says. “Though she suggested Sleeping Beauty. What do you think?”
Riku’s face sobers a bit. “I wish that this were as easy to solve as a fairy tale curse.”
“True love’s kiss?” Kairi muses.
“Riku would have taken care of that, if that was all it took.” Sora laughs.
Riku’s face turns bright red, pale skin betraying him.
“I bet he would have,” Kairi says, before he has a chance to protest or rush to explain.
“Always worth trying again…” Sora suggests.
Riku’s face turns even redder, apparently not even dream logic saving him. “Do you mean me or Kairi?” he grumbles, though the irritation sounds feigned.
“Why not both?” Sora says. “Cover all our bases, just in case.”
Kairi is sure it’s her turn to be bright red, because… what is she supposed to say to that, really? She’s pretty sure that both of them have just implied that she has some sort of true love status. And yeah, she’s pretty sure she loves them both, and quite a bit, but she’d resigned herself to that being a one-sided thing, a secret she wouldn’t tell, all of that.
And then they just say that? Even if they were just teasing…
“You’re thinking pretty loudly, for not saying any words,” Sora says.
“You want me to kiss you?” she asks bluntly.
“If you want to. Is that okay?”
“Is it… is it okay?” she repeats.
Riku sighs, and walks over to where Sora is seated, surrounded by flowers. His hands look gentle when he places them on Sora, one hand cradling the back of his head, the other on his cheek. Riku pulls him close, and presses their lips together. It’s Sora who grabs onto Riku’s hair, pulling him in even harder, and not letting him go for a very long string of seconds.
When Riku finally leans back, they both look at her.
“See,” Sora says. “It’s not that hard.”
She’s fully aware that she must look dumbstruck. “For the first time, I’m starting to think this is actually something summoned by my subconscious as wish fulfillment, I hope you know.”
“Then what would be the harm?” Riku asks, stepping back to give her room.
She can’t think of any. “Okay.”
She steps forward into the space next to Riku, and leans in for her own kiss with Sora.
Physical sensation is always a bit muted in these dreams. It’s there, but like it’s happening through several layers of fabric. Sora’s lips still feel warm and soft. This kiss is a bit gentler than the one he shared with Riku, though he still reaches up to hold her close. She’s grateful that her hands are braced on his shoulders, because otherwise she’d likely topple them both over.
When Sora finally tips his head back enough to break the kiss, she is just slightly disappointed that nothing changes. It doesn’t magically wake him up or anything.
“Thank you,” he whispers in the air between them.
“Sorry it didn’t break the spell,” she says.
“How long has it been?” Sora leans to the side, directing the question at Riku.
“It’ll be eleven months in two more days,” he answers without hesitating.
Sora hums. “Then one month and two days, and I think I’ll wake up.”
“You think you’ll wake up after exactly a year?” Kairi asks.
Sora nods. “I don’t know why. I think that things are just… getting put back together somehow. And then I’ll wake up.”
She hopes it’s true.
The next day is her day off, but she meets Riku for coffee anyway.
He seems a little shy, like he’s having a hard time meeting her eyes.
Finally she says, “So that wasn’t just a wish-fulfillment dream on my part, I take it.”
He laughs nervously. “Nope.” He takes a sip of his coffee, and his hand shakes a bit.
“I had guessed about the two of you, you know. In case that has you worried for some reason.”
He nods. “And you?”
“That I didn’t plan to mention.”
“Why not?”
She raises an eyebrow. “Please. Making a move on my best friend’s comatose boyfriend or making a move on you because your boyfriend is in a coma just sounds low.”
“When you put it like that…” he concedes. “But now that you know that it’s not?”
She licks her lips.
“May I kiss you?” he asks.
The squeak that leaves her throat is not particularly dignified.
“Sora did get his chance,” Riku says.
“You’re right about that,” she says. “It would only be fair.”
He leans across the small table and presses his lips against hers. They’re in public, so it stays a small, chaste peck. But she feels her blood thrum with it.
When he leans back to his side of the table, she grabs his hand. They hold hands for the rest of the evening.
The one-year anniversary of Sora’s coma is another day she isn’t scheduled to work. She tries to manage her hope. There’s no medical reason for Sora’s coma in the first place, much less a reason that it will miraculously end at exactly one year.
Even so, she’s too nervous to sleep deeply enough to share a dream the night before. She wakes several times an hour, tossing and turning. Finally she falls asleep sometime around dawn.
Her cell phone wakes her up, a call from Riku.
She answers it with shaking hands. “Riku?”
“He’s awake.”
She flies in the hospital doors, waving her badge at the nurse who stands up to stop her.
“Kairi? You aren’t working today...”
She doesn’t answer the woman, too intent on getting to Sora’s room.
Sora’s mom has her hand clamped around Sora’s shoulder, and Riku is holding his hand, while the nurse completes a blood draw.
Kairi grabs the doorframe to halt her momentum and hesitates for a split second.
Then Sora looks up at her. His eyes light up, and he grins. “Kairi!”
