Early Wednesday Morning, Destiny Island
Dreams were so strange. First, Kairi was in Hollow Bastion, running away from the oversized pair of carnivorous socks, and Maleficent was yelling about the one missing in her dryer, and how Kairi and the other princesses had to find it. She stepped onto one of those weird cage-traps all around the castle, and it lifted her up, around, past the rapids and stepping-stones and out on a beach.
When Kairi left the transport, it disappeared entirely. Something about this whole scene was achingly familiar, the way the sun was setting over the water and the waves were lapping up against her toes.
Somehow, it seemed like what she should be doing was to sit down right here and make a sand castle. And so she did.
The juggler, who had been in the scene all along even though he only just appeared in it at right that very moment, looked down at the sandcastle, and he nodded faintly before sitting down beside her, reaching for a pair of pebbles, sitting on the sand nearby.
"It's only half finished," he replied. "There's so very little left, isn't there, before it's complete?"
As he spoke, the pencil that had always been in his hand but hadn't been before was drawing faces on the pebbles. Dragons. Lovers.
"There's too much," Kairi said, shaking her head. "Hers and mine and yours. We're overlapping. We haven't even been properly introduced."
One of the dragons should go over here, on top of the castle. To guard it and keep it from wandering out alone.
"I'd become yours," came the reply, and he thoughtfully looked over the other pebble, the lover, before setting it at the edge of the moat. They weren't together yet, the dragon and the lover. Nearly, but still so very far away. They had to get past the third pebble. The one that was the same as the first. And then they had to cross the whole world that was in the sandcastle. It was white, all of it, with windows and mirrors and drawings on the walls.
"I'm not yours, you know. She doesn't want me to be. I wouldn't want to be."
"I know that," Kairi said, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. Her hair was catching the last rays of the sun and shimmering from pale blonde to vibrant red and back, depending on which way the light hit. "I can't be her. I can only ever be me. We're not one person just because she's come home again."
Something was wrong in that sentence, and Kairi couldn't place it.
"Aren't you?" The juggler looked at her, tilting his head curiously for a moment, before looking down at the sandcastle- it was a simple dome, now, with a moat and little cobbles leading up to it- and thoughtfully pointing at the stone that was one, was two, was so far away from the other, and right there. "She's gone home, but neither of us really can. I have to go back to the beginning, you know. But there's little point in that if I can't take her hand."
"Everything ends where it starts," Kairi said, lifting a shoulder, one that now had a simple white strap covering it and not the pink jumpsuit of a moment before. "That's why she came back. We couldn't go on like that. She had some of my pieces and I had some of hers. Neither of us were whole."
"And neither of us are complete," he replied, wiping the sand off of his hands and onto his heart, laying out in the open on his sleeve. "You took me with her, and here I am. I want her back. You promised."
He wasn't entirely certain who he was speaking to anymore, talking to someone in particular that wasn't necessarily who he was speaking to to begin with.
"I am complete," Kairi argued, hair shading to red again. "I'm so complete that I'm spilling over. I'm so complete that I leave little bits of Kairi oozing out of my feet when I walk. There isn't room for you, there's barely room enough for us as it is."
"Then make room," he pleaded, and he dropped his heart and reached for her hand again, as though perhaps he could take some of that excess and pull it away and keep it for himself. "Or share, to fill the empty spaces."
Share with him, share with herself, or never wake up and stay here in this dream.
"I don't think it works like that," Naminé said, pulling her hand back into her lap. Not meeting his eyes. "This is who we are now. We have to move forward, not back. It's only making things worse, to run in circles."
"Going back to the beginning would make another circle," he pointed out, his hand lingering for another moment, and then pulling back to gather up his heart again.
He fell silent. And then he looked up at her, tilting his head and frowning thoughtfully.
"Is this your dream, or is it mine?"
Naminé looked up sharply - and she was purely, only, Naminé for one perfect moment.
"I thought you knew?"
That was when Kairi woke up.
(OOC: preplayed with the awesomesauce importantman. NFI, NFB, but OOC = A-OK.)