The celebration was a simple affair. Leon had brought over some food while Aerith made tea. Yuffie brought one of her favorite snacks to share, but she was the only one who could actually eat them (they appeared to be a type of extremely hard bean). Even Cid dropped by to greet everyone, but couldn't stay for long; explaining that he was busy getting some files from Ansem the Wise's computer.

Riku's newly established routine continued with very few deviations for the next few weeks. He'd wake up and have breakfast, head on over to the Committee to see if they had any jobs for him, pass the time with said jobs or stay with Kairi and sometimes Naminé until noon, meet up with everyone for the Bailey Assignment, and then head home. Though actually, there was a shift in his routine once. At some point, Yuffie ended up catching a cold and couldn't participate in the Assignment for about a week. Riku found this out after being woken up by his Gummiphone at 4 in the morning, the notifications going off nonstop due to Yuffie sending him barely coherent messages consisting of "ughhgghgh," "rikuuuhelp meee," or "ifeel like.im stew." She had insisted he exchange numbers with everyone in the Committee, but since they mostly conducted their meetings in person, his Gummiphone notifications quickly turned into daily status report messages from Aerith and the barely coherent ones from Yuffie. Leon seemed to barely use the thing.

Eventually, Yuffie got better, and everything returned to how it had been. Until Riku heard several knocks on his door one night.


CONTINUE