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And now we're grown up orphans
that never knew their names
Created on 2006-08-23 00:06:28 (#10974472), last updated 2006-10-16
0 comments received, 24 comments posted
Basic Account [Gift]
1 Journal Entry, 0 Tags, 0 Memories, 0 Virtual Gifts, 6 Userpics
Basic Info| Name: | Kairi |
|---|
BioCharacter Name: Kairi
Series: Kingdom Hearts series
Age: 16
Physical Description:
Before she was adopted, Kairi wore her chestnut-red hair short in jagged layers, a bit longer in the front than the back. Her pale skin and thin body did not make her look unhealthy; she was lithe and active and strong for a child. Her big blue eyes were almost electric, bright and mischievous, and she wore predominantly chunky accessories; she was never seen without a few big black and yellow bracelets, a blue armband and matching belt, and a black choker she was very fond of. She also wore a small, delicate locket that seemed strangely refined for the rest of her attire. Kairi had a tendency to wear small pastel skirts with shorts underneath and little tanks that were usually white and black.
These days, Kairi's hair is a bit longer and more ladylike, at the suggestion of her adoptive parents. It falls just past her shoulders and frames her face nicely, bangs pushed off to the right and falling into her eyes. She stands at 5'5" and her thin frame has filled out some; though she is still slight she has retained some vestiges of the atheletic look of her youth. Though her chunky accessories from her days at the orphanage have basically disappeared, she still wears her locket and a few smaller bracelets of purple and white. When she outgrew her blue armband, she cut it up and made a bracelet out of it as well.
Of all the dresses her adoptive parents have provided her, Kairi actually prefers her school uniform, though she does take a few liberties with it. Her collar is always undone, the sleeves rolled up to her shoulders, her shirt untucked and almost always a bit wrinkled, her tie loose and almost haphazard, her blue plaid skirt unpressed and consistantly rumpled. She carries a school bag and keeps a variety of miscellaneous stuff that may or may not relate to school inside the bag. However, she isn't too fond of her clunky black school shoes, and wears her favorite pair of shoes whenever she can. Kairi pulled out the white lacings on the pinkish-lavender sneakers and replaced them with black laces, which she ties in a rather unconventional way around her ankles.
Her adoptive parents dislike her rather unladylike appearance and buy her dress after dress, not really realizing Kairi prefers shorter skirts with shorts underneath and sleeveless shirts--clothes she can move easily in, clothes she can be active in. When she has to wear a dress, Kairi tends to wear a certain pink dress her adoptive parents bought her over a year ago. The dress used to be longer on her, but once she'd grown taller, it only came to about mid-thigh. It has three zippers on the front, only one of which is actually funtional, and Kairi herself added a black hood to it one day on a whim. With the dress she wears a black belt with an extra sidepiece on each side, a small black pouch on her left side serving as a surrogate school bag, since her dress has no pockets either.
Personality:
Kairi has a bit of a rebellious streak in her. Having grown up in an orphanage in the Drag, a lot of the rules and rituals of aristocratic life kind of go right over her head. She doesn't like being told what to do, and will often refuse to do something asked of her until she understands why she has to do it and then agrees she ought to do it. While she's not contrary, Kairi does tend to paint herself as such because so much of what the socialite society asks of her strikes her as stupid or unneccessary. She likes to run around and play outside; she enjoys learning but doesn't really like wasting all her time inside at school. A quick learner, she tends to absorb what's being taught her quickly and then spend the rest of her time perfecting her paper airplane technique.
Despite all her small rebellions, Kairi is inherently good-natured and likes to see people happy. She tends to trust people before they actually gain her trust, and she loves the people she cares about fiercely and almost blindly. Kind-hearted and sweet, Kairi is essentially good, a strange thing to find in a city such as Azhun. She hates to see people hurt and will help a complete stranger in need if it seems like she can. Generally happy and loving, Kairi is hardly ever sad, though there are moments when something spurs memories of her childhood and her pretty smile falters--she knows she has a lot to be grateful for, but there is something she finds herself rather bitter about whenever she thinks on it.
Strengths:
Kairi's big heart is her greatest strength. She loves without reserve and would do anything to see her loved ones happy and safe. Physically, Kairi is decently agile and strong, for a rich girl. She doesn't like fighting and probably wouldn't win in a fight, but if she felt the need to fight for something, she would with all her might. There is no halfway point with Kairi; she either works tirelessly or isn't working at all. She learns fast and loves a challenge, and has been known to roofmonkey from time to time.
Weaknesses:
Kairi isn't perfect. Her heart is strong but even she gets tired. In her early teens she discovered she didn't have the ability or the time to help everyone she came across, a fact that still upsets her a bit more than it should. It's rather easy to make Kairi feel guilty and she's been guilted into doing things she really shouldn't do. Her immense compassion can get her into trouble as well, and it's rare someone has to actually appeal to her sense of guilt to get her to do what they want. While not weak, Kairi certainly isn't physically impressive in any aspect; she has average speed, strength, and agility, nothing deplorable but nothing special, either.
History:
The details of Kairi's conception and birth are unknown to her. She arrived at the orphanage in April of 1859 at the age of two. A month later, on the 21st of May, she met another orphan, a boy named Sora. Alone and missing her mother, Kairi was sitting in the corner of the lunchroom and Sora ventured over to sit next to her, offering her a slice of bread. Almost awed at the unwarranted gift, Kairi took the bread and mused, "It's my birthday." Sora immediately seized upon this information and took it upon himself to notify the entire orphanage that it was Kairi's birthday and she was now three years old. The adults running the place, lacking an actual date for Kairi's birth, figured it was as good as any and penciled it in on her file, officializing a child's fancy and reinforcing it in the years to come.
That day, Sora took her on a tour of the orphanage and while they were playing in the yard outside, he uncovered a golden pendant and chain behind a trash can and presented it to Kairi as a birthday present. She'd worn it ever since. A few years later, when she was seven, Kairi inspected the pendant and realized it was actually a locket which was apparently jammed closed. She and Sora endeavored to pop it open, but when cleaning out the grooves between the two halves, Sora discovered a very small keyhole--the locket wasn't jammed closed; it was locked shut.
Sora declared he would find a way to pick the lock and was obsessed with keys ever since. He learned how to pick bigger locks first, practicing on the locks around the orphanage and developing skeleton keys that would work on multiple doors. After Sora discovered he could unlock the door to the kitchen's pantry, he and Kairi began a Robin Hood game of snatching food from behind the door and passing it out to the kids of the orphanage. Figuring out how to open the locket became a kind of game in itself; a test, a challenge, and one Sora did not want to fail. Once he was good enough to pick one lock, he'd move on to another, harder one, and Kairi played the game too, eager to watch Sora open yet another door. The locket became a passing fancy, a pretense, the reason to "practice" opening locks when really the game was actually to see how many doors Sora could open. They never even tried to open the locket; once it was unlocked, the reason to open doors would be gone, and neither of them wanted that.
Kairi was twelve the August her adoptive parents came to the orphanage and showed an interest in her. She and Sora were best friends and hardly went anywhere without each other. They climbed trees, picked locks, told stories to the younger kids, played Robin Hood and pirates and ninjas and bandits, and they sparred with each other (Sora always won). Kairi was almost sad that she might get adopted, because it would mean leaving Sora behind. They'd long promised each other that if one got adopted before the other, they'd make sure to come back and visit. The day the adults announced Kairi was to be adopted, she and Sora picked the lock to the roof and sat up there, making plans and promises about how everything was going to be from now on. Sora told her he thought he'd be able to pick the lock on her locket, but instead of opening it then, he promised that the first time she came back to visit him, he'd do it then. "Just in case you don't want to come back otherwise," he'd joked.
Within a week she was adopted and moved out of the orphanage to Uptown. Shortly afterward, her new parents enrolled her in a year-round finishing school and sent her to a different city for the boarding schoolyear beginning that September. For vacations, her new family would typically go up and visit her, though she did travel back to Azhun several times. That year she requested to go visit Sora at the orphanage almost constantly, but her parents always found other things that she needed to do first and then it was time to go back to school again.
Kairi hated finishing school as much as a sweet-tempered poor child suddenly thrust into the lap of luxury could. They told her what to do and how to do it; how to sit, how to eat, what to eat, what to say and to whom... Being "finished", to Kairi, seemed more like being reduced to being a zombie.
There were only one wonderful thing about finishing school, how much she learned there. Not the etiquette or the formalities or the ways to dance and eat and talk--all that stuff could go to hell in a handbasket and stay for the parade. But Kairi learned at school, learned like she'd never learned in the orphanage. Math was so much fun, like taking numbers and throwing them into a tumbler until they annihilated each other and only one was left. History was a little dry and boring, until she realized it was all nothing but true stories that weren't told very well. After that realization, she paid very close attention to history so she'd have lots of fantastic tales for Sora when she visited him. Physics was interesting to a point; it was like applied math, where the victorious number actually meant something like speed or weight. The other sciences were okay, but Kairi was really more interested in the things created using science than the science itself.
But the best subject was Language and Literature. It always made her think of Sora. She learned how to write better, and she read the most fantastic stories, stories she hadn't even fathomed. Stories about regular people like her, stories about struggles and woes and triumphs and family and friends... And then there were all the novels she found in the library and the bookstores, novels about things like magic. Novels about other worlds and brave heros and dark villians, of pirates and mermaids and genies, of talking dragons and princely beasts, flying boys and faeries, rabbits with waistcoats and card soldiers, stories of jungles and oceans and deserts and stars. And every story she ate up ferociously and remembered for Sora, in hopes that someday she'd be able to tell him everything.
But she never got a chance to tell Sora about the wonderful new worlds she'd read about. One school year became two, and her adoptive parents preferred to visit her at school on vacations, or always found things to keep her busy when she returned to Azhun for three weeks at a time. They loved her and wanted the best for her, and they honestly believed it was best for her to forget the Drag and the orphanage, to forget her past and forget about Sora. They'd sent her to finishing school to teach her to be an aristocratic lady, so she could successfully begin her new life as a member of the upper crust of society. When Kairi asked to come home for vacation, she was usually met with an excuse, and when Kairi was in Azhun and asked to visit the orphanage, she was always met with an excuse. Or a distant, "Maybe next time."
Two years became three. Kairi had basically stopped mailing letters to her adoptive parents for them to forward to the orphanage--Sora...just never wrote back. Though maybe he just couldn't afford the stamps. Or maybe he was sending them to the wrong address. Or maybe he'd gotten adopted and the orphanage wasn't forwarding his mail to his new home.
...Or maybe Sora just didn't want to be her friend anymore. It hurt, made her sad, and by her third year of finishing school, Kairi had started trying to just forget him. But she couldn't, especially when there was a chance that Sora wasn't ignoring her, hadn't forgotten her. If Sora had been adopted and the letters were never sent to him from the orphanage, she couldn't forget him. If Sora had been writing back all this time but he'd been sending them to the wrong address, she couldn't forget him. If the explanation was anything other than Sora getting her letters and pointedly not answering them, she could not forget him.
At some point she'd begun making a copy of each letter to save in a big blue binder, in case her letters never reached him. That way when she found him again someday, she could present him with the binder and show him all the letters she'd written him over the years. She'd stopped sending them to her adoptive parents to forward to the orphanage, but she didn't stop writing them. Her letters to Sora became almost like a diary, a detailed account of her life, and when she didn't have the energy to make a copy of each letter, the letters began to inhabit her binder rather than envelopes. At least if she didn't send them, she wouldn't hope for a response. The letters she actually sent dwindled from once a week to once a year, on his birthday. A simple letter:
Happy Birthday, Sora.
~Kairi
She bought him a birthday present every year. Every year, it was a book; a wonderful book she'd never read before, a book she wouldn't let herself read. Each of those books was a story for Sora, not for her, and she could only read them after he had. Because she wasn't sure of the trustworthiness of the postal service, she never mailed him the books, and so there was a very special place on her bookshelf where crisp new novels were planted, never opened and never read, just waiting for the chance to change hands. One book became two, and two became three, and three became four, and it finally turned out that she was sixteen and had graduated from her four years of finishing school without ever getting word from Sora, and without ever getting the chance to visit the orphanage.
She returned to Azhun for good in August of 1873, and the first thing she did was make a trip to the orphanage, books in hand. Her adoptive parents, of course, didn't know she'd made the trip; she did it during the day, sneaking out her balcony window and climbing down the nearby tree in her rumpled school outfit and her faded sneakers to make the long trip across the city on foot. She found the orphanage just as she remembered it, if you didn't count the new door and the latest faded paint job. But the orphanage had no news of Sora. They'd released him when he'd turned fifteen, left him to fend for himself on the streets of the Drag. When she asked what they'd done with all the letters she'd sent since then, they replied simply that they'd never received any letters. Ever.
Distraught, Kairi left her address and phone number for them to give to Sora if he ever came around again. And then she returned home, worried about Sora and outraged at her adoptive parents. She wasn't stupid; if the orphanage had never received any letters from her...it could only mean her parents had never sent them. But to confront them about it would mean confessing she'd sneaked out. And so for the moment she bit her tongue; Sora had probably forgotten all about her. It'd been four years...and she'd never come to visit, and as far as he knew she'd never sent word. Had Sora ever sent her letters? Her adoptive parents wouldn't have given them to her even if he had. And surely they wouldn't have kept them around for her to find. They were long gone.
Unaware of Kairi's sudden sense of betrayal, her adoptive parents enrolled her in a preperatory school offered by Azhun's university to see if she was ready to attend college. The thing that intrigued Kairi the most wasn't the potential to attend university, however; it was the legendary summer vacation. School began in early September and Kairi is already excelling in her classes. After the first week of driving Kairi to and from school every day, her adoptive parents agreed to let her walk every day. It was in a northern sector of the city and she'd be safe walking in the morning and afternoon, surely. Kairi took to staying later and later at the campus, reading in the library and trying to figure out how exactly to confront her adoptive parents about her lost letters.
Rather unsettled and confused by Kairi's sudden distance--she'd always been close to them, written them a letter every week and spoken to them over the phone for at least a little while almost every day, and now she was barely sparing them a hello--her adoptive parents decided she must be going through that phase that teenagers go through, where they want to be free and independent of their families. Deciding it was best to give Kairi her space, they allowed her to stay late at the library with hardly a bat of an eye. Her finishing school friends had all dispersed back to wherever they'd come from, and Kairi was adjusting to preperatory school, to living at home, making new friends and growing into a polished young woman. They knew it was a hard time for Kairi, and they tried their best to be understanding.
Kairi wasn't really doing much of anything in the library, much less adjusting or making friends or becoming a polished lady. She'd always been a bit quiet around strangers, and it was extroverted people like Sora who opened her up and made her friendly. Without a friend at her side, she tended to just be quiet and listen to others talk as she folded paper airplanes out of her notebook paper and switched her shoes while no one was looking. In the library, all she did was read, wonderful stories she could lose herself in as she read, stories that stirred her imagination and made her smile...until she remembered the boy who first taught her about the wonder of a story. She'd find him. She'd find him and give him his books and his binder, tell him the whole story about the lost letters...and hope he'd forgive her.
Series: Kingdom Hearts series
Age: 16
Physical Description:
Before she was adopted, Kairi wore her chestnut-red hair short in jagged layers, a bit longer in the front than the back. Her pale skin and thin body did not make her look unhealthy; she was lithe and active and strong for a child. Her big blue eyes were almost electric, bright and mischievous, and she wore predominantly chunky accessories; she was never seen without a few big black and yellow bracelets, a blue armband and matching belt, and a black choker she was very fond of. She also wore a small, delicate locket that seemed strangely refined for the rest of her attire. Kairi had a tendency to wear small pastel skirts with shorts underneath and little tanks that were usually white and black.
These days, Kairi's hair is a bit longer and more ladylike, at the suggestion of her adoptive parents. It falls just past her shoulders and frames her face nicely, bangs pushed off to the right and falling into her eyes. She stands at 5'5" and her thin frame has filled out some; though she is still slight she has retained some vestiges of the atheletic look of her youth. Though her chunky accessories from her days at the orphanage have basically disappeared, she still wears her locket and a few smaller bracelets of purple and white. When she outgrew her blue armband, she cut it up and made a bracelet out of it as well.
Of all the dresses her adoptive parents have provided her, Kairi actually prefers her school uniform, though she does take a few liberties with it. Her collar is always undone, the sleeves rolled up to her shoulders, her shirt untucked and almost always a bit wrinkled, her tie loose and almost haphazard, her blue plaid skirt unpressed and consistantly rumpled. She carries a school bag and keeps a variety of miscellaneous stuff that may or may not relate to school inside the bag. However, she isn't too fond of her clunky black school shoes, and wears her favorite pair of shoes whenever she can. Kairi pulled out the white lacings on the pinkish-lavender sneakers and replaced them with black laces, which she ties in a rather unconventional way around her ankles.
Her adoptive parents dislike her rather unladylike appearance and buy her dress after dress, not really realizing Kairi prefers shorter skirts with shorts underneath and sleeveless shirts--clothes she can move easily in, clothes she can be active in. When she has to wear a dress, Kairi tends to wear a certain pink dress her adoptive parents bought her over a year ago. The dress used to be longer on her, but once she'd grown taller, it only came to about mid-thigh. It has three zippers on the front, only one of which is actually funtional, and Kairi herself added a black hood to it one day on a whim. With the dress she wears a black belt with an extra sidepiece on each side, a small black pouch on her left side serving as a surrogate school bag, since her dress has no pockets either.
Personality:
Kairi has a bit of a rebellious streak in her. Having grown up in an orphanage in the Drag, a lot of the rules and rituals of aristocratic life kind of go right over her head. She doesn't like being told what to do, and will often refuse to do something asked of her until she understands why she has to do it and then agrees she ought to do it. While she's not contrary, Kairi does tend to paint herself as such because so much of what the socialite society asks of her strikes her as stupid or unneccessary. She likes to run around and play outside; she enjoys learning but doesn't really like wasting all her time inside at school. A quick learner, she tends to absorb what's being taught her quickly and then spend the rest of her time perfecting her paper airplane technique.
Despite all her small rebellions, Kairi is inherently good-natured and likes to see people happy. She tends to trust people before they actually gain her trust, and she loves the people she cares about fiercely and almost blindly. Kind-hearted and sweet, Kairi is essentially good, a strange thing to find in a city such as Azhun. She hates to see people hurt and will help a complete stranger in need if it seems like she can. Generally happy and loving, Kairi is hardly ever sad, though there are moments when something spurs memories of her childhood and her pretty smile falters--she knows she has a lot to be grateful for, but there is something she finds herself rather bitter about whenever she thinks on it.
Strengths:
Kairi's big heart is her greatest strength. She loves without reserve and would do anything to see her loved ones happy and safe. Physically, Kairi is decently agile and strong, for a rich girl. She doesn't like fighting and probably wouldn't win in a fight, but if she felt the need to fight for something, she would with all her might. There is no halfway point with Kairi; she either works tirelessly or isn't working at all. She learns fast and loves a challenge, and has been known to roofmonkey from time to time.
Weaknesses:
Kairi isn't perfect. Her heart is strong but even she gets tired. In her early teens she discovered she didn't have the ability or the time to help everyone she came across, a fact that still upsets her a bit more than it should. It's rather easy to make Kairi feel guilty and she's been guilted into doing things she really shouldn't do. Her immense compassion can get her into trouble as well, and it's rare someone has to actually appeal to her sense of guilt to get her to do what they want. While not weak, Kairi certainly isn't physically impressive in any aspect; she has average speed, strength, and agility, nothing deplorable but nothing special, either.
History:
The details of Kairi's conception and birth are unknown to her. She arrived at the orphanage in April of 1859 at the age of two. A month later, on the 21st of May, she met another orphan, a boy named Sora. Alone and missing her mother, Kairi was sitting in the corner of the lunchroom and Sora ventured over to sit next to her, offering her a slice of bread. Almost awed at the unwarranted gift, Kairi took the bread and mused, "It's my birthday." Sora immediately seized upon this information and took it upon himself to notify the entire orphanage that it was Kairi's birthday and she was now three years old. The adults running the place, lacking an actual date for Kairi's birth, figured it was as good as any and penciled it in on her file, officializing a child's fancy and reinforcing it in the years to come.
That day, Sora took her on a tour of the orphanage and while they were playing in the yard outside, he uncovered a golden pendant and chain behind a trash can and presented it to Kairi as a birthday present. She'd worn it ever since. A few years later, when she was seven, Kairi inspected the pendant and realized it was actually a locket which was apparently jammed closed. She and Sora endeavored to pop it open, but when cleaning out the grooves between the two halves, Sora discovered a very small keyhole--the locket wasn't jammed closed; it was locked shut.
Sora declared he would find a way to pick the lock and was obsessed with keys ever since. He learned how to pick bigger locks first, practicing on the locks around the orphanage and developing skeleton keys that would work on multiple doors. After Sora discovered he could unlock the door to the kitchen's pantry, he and Kairi began a Robin Hood game of snatching food from behind the door and passing it out to the kids of the orphanage. Figuring out how to open the locket became a kind of game in itself; a test, a challenge, and one Sora did not want to fail. Once he was good enough to pick one lock, he'd move on to another, harder one, and Kairi played the game too, eager to watch Sora open yet another door. The locket became a passing fancy, a pretense, the reason to "practice" opening locks when really the game was actually to see how many doors Sora could open. They never even tried to open the locket; once it was unlocked, the reason to open doors would be gone, and neither of them wanted that.
Kairi was twelve the August her adoptive parents came to the orphanage and showed an interest in her. She and Sora were best friends and hardly went anywhere without each other. They climbed trees, picked locks, told stories to the younger kids, played Robin Hood and pirates and ninjas and bandits, and they sparred with each other (Sora always won). Kairi was almost sad that she might get adopted, because it would mean leaving Sora behind. They'd long promised each other that if one got adopted before the other, they'd make sure to come back and visit. The day the adults announced Kairi was to be adopted, she and Sora picked the lock to the roof and sat up there, making plans and promises about how everything was going to be from now on. Sora told her he thought he'd be able to pick the lock on her locket, but instead of opening it then, he promised that the first time she came back to visit him, he'd do it then. "Just in case you don't want to come back otherwise," he'd joked.
Within a week she was adopted and moved out of the orphanage to Uptown. Shortly afterward, her new parents enrolled her in a year-round finishing school and sent her to a different city for the boarding schoolyear beginning that September. For vacations, her new family would typically go up and visit her, though she did travel back to Azhun several times. That year she requested to go visit Sora at the orphanage almost constantly, but her parents always found other things that she needed to do first and then it was time to go back to school again.
Kairi hated finishing school as much as a sweet-tempered poor child suddenly thrust into the lap of luxury could. They told her what to do and how to do it; how to sit, how to eat, what to eat, what to say and to whom... Being "finished", to Kairi, seemed more like being reduced to being a zombie.
There were only one wonderful thing about finishing school, how much she learned there. Not the etiquette or the formalities or the ways to dance and eat and talk--all that stuff could go to hell in a handbasket and stay for the parade. But Kairi learned at school, learned like she'd never learned in the orphanage. Math was so much fun, like taking numbers and throwing them into a tumbler until they annihilated each other and only one was left. History was a little dry and boring, until she realized it was all nothing but true stories that weren't told very well. After that realization, she paid very close attention to history so she'd have lots of fantastic tales for Sora when she visited him. Physics was interesting to a point; it was like applied math, where the victorious number actually meant something like speed or weight. The other sciences were okay, but Kairi was really more interested in the things created using science than the science itself.
But the best subject was Language and Literature. It always made her think of Sora. She learned how to write better, and she read the most fantastic stories, stories she hadn't even fathomed. Stories about regular people like her, stories about struggles and woes and triumphs and family and friends... And then there were all the novels she found in the library and the bookstores, novels about things like magic. Novels about other worlds and brave heros and dark villians, of pirates and mermaids and genies, of talking dragons and princely beasts, flying boys and faeries, rabbits with waistcoats and card soldiers, stories of jungles and oceans and deserts and stars. And every story she ate up ferociously and remembered for Sora, in hopes that someday she'd be able to tell him everything.
But she never got a chance to tell Sora about the wonderful new worlds she'd read about. One school year became two, and her adoptive parents preferred to visit her at school on vacations, or always found things to keep her busy when she returned to Azhun for three weeks at a time. They loved her and wanted the best for her, and they honestly believed it was best for her to forget the Drag and the orphanage, to forget her past and forget about Sora. They'd sent her to finishing school to teach her to be an aristocratic lady, so she could successfully begin her new life as a member of the upper crust of society. When Kairi asked to come home for vacation, she was usually met with an excuse, and when Kairi was in Azhun and asked to visit the orphanage, she was always met with an excuse. Or a distant, "Maybe next time."
Two years became three. Kairi had basically stopped mailing letters to her adoptive parents for them to forward to the orphanage--Sora...just never wrote back. Though maybe he just couldn't afford the stamps. Or maybe he was sending them to the wrong address. Or maybe he'd gotten adopted and the orphanage wasn't forwarding his mail to his new home.
...Or maybe Sora just didn't want to be her friend anymore. It hurt, made her sad, and by her third year of finishing school, Kairi had started trying to just forget him. But she couldn't, especially when there was a chance that Sora wasn't ignoring her, hadn't forgotten her. If Sora had been adopted and the letters were never sent to him from the orphanage, she couldn't forget him. If Sora had been writing back all this time but he'd been sending them to the wrong address, she couldn't forget him. If the explanation was anything other than Sora getting her letters and pointedly not answering them, she could not forget him.
At some point she'd begun making a copy of each letter to save in a big blue binder, in case her letters never reached him. That way when she found him again someday, she could present him with the binder and show him all the letters she'd written him over the years. She'd stopped sending them to her adoptive parents to forward to the orphanage, but she didn't stop writing them. Her letters to Sora became almost like a diary, a detailed account of her life, and when she didn't have the energy to make a copy of each letter, the letters began to inhabit her binder rather than envelopes. At least if she didn't send them, she wouldn't hope for a response. The letters she actually sent dwindled from once a week to once a year, on his birthday. A simple letter:
Happy Birthday, Sora.
She bought him a birthday present every year. Every year, it was a book; a wonderful book she'd never read before, a book she wouldn't let herself read. Each of those books was a story for Sora, not for her, and she could only read them after he had. Because she wasn't sure of the trustworthiness of the postal service, she never mailed him the books, and so there was a very special place on her bookshelf where crisp new novels were planted, never opened and never read, just waiting for the chance to change hands. One book became two, and two became three, and three became four, and it finally turned out that she was sixteen and had graduated from her four years of finishing school without ever getting word from Sora, and without ever getting the chance to visit the orphanage.
She returned to Azhun for good in August of 1873, and the first thing she did was make a trip to the orphanage, books in hand. Her adoptive parents, of course, didn't know she'd made the trip; she did it during the day, sneaking out her balcony window and climbing down the nearby tree in her rumpled school outfit and her faded sneakers to make the long trip across the city on foot. She found the orphanage just as she remembered it, if you didn't count the new door and the latest faded paint job. But the orphanage had no news of Sora. They'd released him when he'd turned fifteen, left him to fend for himself on the streets of the Drag. When she asked what they'd done with all the letters she'd sent since then, they replied simply that they'd never received any letters. Ever.
Distraught, Kairi left her address and phone number for them to give to Sora if he ever came around again. And then she returned home, worried about Sora and outraged at her adoptive parents. She wasn't stupid; if the orphanage had never received any letters from her...it could only mean her parents had never sent them. But to confront them about it would mean confessing she'd sneaked out. And so for the moment she bit her tongue; Sora had probably forgotten all about her. It'd been four years...and she'd never come to visit, and as far as he knew she'd never sent word. Had Sora ever sent her letters? Her adoptive parents wouldn't have given them to her even if he had. And surely they wouldn't have kept them around for her to find. They were long gone.
Unaware of Kairi's sudden sense of betrayal, her adoptive parents enrolled her in a preperatory school offered by Azhun's university to see if she was ready to attend college. The thing that intrigued Kairi the most wasn't the potential to attend university, however; it was the legendary summer vacation. School began in early September and Kairi is already excelling in her classes. After the first week of driving Kairi to and from school every day, her adoptive parents agreed to let her walk every day. It was in a northern sector of the city and she'd be safe walking in the morning and afternoon, surely. Kairi took to staying later and later at the campus, reading in the library and trying to figure out how exactly to confront her adoptive parents about her lost letters.
Rather unsettled and confused by Kairi's sudden distance--she'd always been close to them, written them a letter every week and spoken to them over the phone for at least a little while almost every day, and now she was barely sparing them a hello--her adoptive parents decided she must be going through that phase that teenagers go through, where they want to be free and independent of their families. Deciding it was best to give Kairi her space, they allowed her to stay late at the library with hardly a bat of an eye. Her finishing school friends had all dispersed back to wherever they'd come from, and Kairi was adjusting to preperatory school, to living at home, making new friends and growing into a polished young woman. They knew it was a hard time for Kairi, and they tried their best to be understanding.
Kairi wasn't really doing much of anything in the library, much less adjusting or making friends or becoming a polished lady. She'd always been a bit quiet around strangers, and it was extroverted people like Sora who opened her up and made her friendly. Without a friend at her side, she tended to just be quiet and listen to others talk as she folded paper airplanes out of her notebook paper and switched her shoes while no one was looking. In the library, all she did was read, wonderful stories she could lose herself in as she read, stories that stirred her imagination and made her smile...until she remembered the boy who first taught her about the wonder of a story. She'd find him. She'd find him and give him his books and his binder, tell him the whole story about the lost letters...and hope he'd forgive her.
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