kingdom hearts -- trapped in a silent fiction
title: trapped in a silent fiction
wordcount: 7457
rating: PG-13
synopsis: If only she had power over her own memories.
She has no real purpose in the world, other than to right her wrongs.
Loneliness has become her constant companion, and regret weighs heavily on her mind, lingering like a malignant shadow in her dreams and waking nightmares alike. As she sits and sketches seemingly tirelessly in one spiral-bound book after another, sorrow is what she breathes, and remorse is what flows from her fingertips, colouring the paper beneath her hands with each stroke of her pencil.
During the rare moments when Riku stops by to check up on her, he paces around her chamber and comments on the vibrancy of her drawings, running black-gloved hands over every picture, fingertips trailing on the surface of each creamy sheet like skittering spider-legs. “You have a way of bringing them to life,” he tells her; she only nods and offers him a wan smile, understanding that this is his way of expressing his kindness. “It’s almost as though there is something more in your work, something which I have never seen before in any image.”
What she does not tell him is that there is a secret behind the vivid colours and careful crosshatches. Remorse, she finds, is the most potent of pigments, and rises when she least expects it: it appears when she presses a goldenrod crayon to thick white paper, when she concentrates on the intricate details of a stairwell, painstakingly shading in each and every carving and step. Remorse is an emotion she is all-too-familiar with, despite DiZ repeatedly stressing that she is nothing but a Nobody, a shell of a person, incapable of experiencing any feelings. Remorse, she has learnt, is a more powerful forcing factor than any threat and any harsh blow, and is what convinces her to keep working on ensuring that Sora wakes from his slumber.
It is afternoon in Twilight Town, or so the grandfather clock someplace in the mansion dictates.
*
She remembers the first time she meets Xemnas.
He strikes fear in her the same way that the unknown strikes fear on the unwary, the timid of heart. She cannot help but shiver under his unblinking scrutiny, and despite the shadow of an indolent smile which twists his lips into a faint curve, she cannot help but be drawn to his eyes, to the calm, hollow indifference in the depths of his empty gaze.
For hours on end, the Superior of the In-Between only regards her with thoughtful silence over black-gloved fingers laced together, expression unreadable; at first, she bears his curiosity like a weight on her narrow shoulders, never quite daring to directly meet his stare. Once she is unable to bear the silence and forces herself to look up, she is astonished to find the man jotting down notes on the pristine white tablecloth, once-unsullied fabric now marred with his inky scrawls. On a whim, on daring impulse, she leans forwards in her seat, and considers her words carefully before voicing them, unsure of whatever reply may or may not come.
“What do you hope to achieve by observing me like this?” Naminé is only slightly surprised by the boldness in her voice, the fearlessness which she wishes she actually possesses making her question seem all the more blandly forthright; Xemnas pauses momentarily in his scrawling and only blinks at her, resting his chin upon a hand.
“Perhaps we have more in common than most might expect, you and I,” he responds silkily, tapping his temple with the end of his pen. When she frowns with incomprehension, he smiles, a frighteningly alien expression which does not quite fit the contours of his face.
“You are a witch whose powers lie within the dominion of manipulating memories.” The words he utters are crisp and clear, stated with cool, detached efficiency. “And I, on the other hand, am a Nobody of a shell, missing most of my own memories. Draw your conclusions.”
Whilst she puzzles over the elaborateness of his words, the Superior rises to his feet and gives her a final, appraising glance, a smirk ghosting across his features. “Think about it,” he purrs.
And think about it she does; over a year later, she pensively draws the sigil of the Nobodies upon the sketchpad on her lap, an inverted heart with clean holes punched from its corners, spiked thorns jutting out from where its tapering point should have been. Like the imperfect, inverted insignia, she realises, Xemnas was every bit as incomplete, missing not only his heart, but the hollow gaps of buried memories, lost, perhaps, to the world.
*
He does not unnerve her like the rest of the senior Organisation members, but all the same, she is all-too-aware of the danger which lurks within the depths of his lazy drawl, of the sly, cunning glint in his fierce golden eye and the smugly knowing smile he wears every time he speaks.
The Freeshooter is quite unlike the others, and instead of intimidating the living daylights out of her, he engages in endless hours of casual banter - studiously ignoring a fuming Vexen who occasionally stumps by to throw volleys of snide comments at his face. He talks about the weather, about how she finds the place, weaves her countless stories on how he and Saïx got their scars.
She doesn’t know what to believe and what to take with a liberal pinch of salt.
When she doesn’t feel like talking, when she meets his lighthearted chatter with stony silence, he takes her outside - shouting down Xaldin’s grumbled objections and Vexen’s sneering remarks - and shows her how to judge trajectory angles and teaches her the rudiments of physics. He teaches her the basis behind spacetime, behind the Doppler Effect, heaps random, albeit rather useless trivia upon her everytime they cross paths.
But most of all, he shows her the wide, open emptiness of the Dark City, the flickering neon signs and wavering fluorescent lights, the sibilant whisper of lesser Nobodies flitting through the inverse world like wraiths. He shows her the world outside her window, which beats gently against the frosted panes of glass she presses her nose to, aching to break free of her gilded bird-cage; he shows her the starless night skies, the pallid shadow of a moon hanging low in the cloudless void. He shows her distant buildings and flickering screens, screens which seem to project flashes of alien memories into her mind when she focuses long and hard enough, until the streetlamps blur into a haze of pinpricked brightness, burning hot at the back of her eyelids.
“All this’ll be yours someday, Naminé. All yours. And y’know why?”
“Why?” she asks, fidgeting with the hood-ties of her white coat - an opposite to what they wear, just like how she is an opposite of them, yet at the same time not - staring into the blackness. She can feel the edge of the parapet beneath her toes, and for an instant, worries about tumbling headfirst into the nothingness awaiting her beneath, but knows with bittersweet clarity that Xigbar would twist space to catch her before she falls - he would not want to have to face the wrath of the Superior if she is lost.
He gazes sidelong at her, that wry half-smile stretching the scar along his cheek. “’Cause you, dove, are Number Zero, our little Princess of Nothing, faithful Keeper of the Long-Gone.”
Blue eyes meet gold, and he chuckles, ruffling the top of her head in an affectionate parody of familiarity; they stand at the battlements of the Castle That Never Was, feeling the deadened wind push against their exposed faces in frigid gusts. She frowns at him, lips pursing into a vaguely disparaging curve, and then-
The illusion dissolves; the endless expanse of black vanishes, and once more she sees curtains rustling in the breeze, the blank drawing-book open on her lap. With deliberate strokes, she writes down the equations she remembers with studious care, and stares at the spot long after she has turned the page, lines of formulae flashing before her eyes every time she blinks.
*
She is nervous whenever it is his turn to supervise her.
Whilst Xemnas has already tired of her as a novelty, the other members are still regularly assigned to look after her, to ensure that she does not get lost wandering the castle, that she does not drift out of bounds and into the Dark City, that she does not get herself in trouble with some of the more intolerant and irascible members. The first time she makes the mistake of asking Xaldin too many questions, he only spears her with the most scathing of glares, and ignores her for the remainder of the evening.
Circumstance finds them in the library one day, the lancer engrossed in a thick volume of physics and aerodynamics which boasts obscenely small print, cramped across an age-spotted page. She doodles aimlessly in one of her sketchpads, unwilling to engage the man in conversation, for fear of having another lecture directed her way; when she looks at him, though, she cannot help but suppress a laugh: seeing the strapping lancer scrawling crabbed mathematical formulae along the tiny margins of a page and scowling at the tome with half-moon eyeglasses perched on the bridge of his nose is too much for her to take, and when a hiccup of laughter escapes her before she can stop it, he glances up, the spectacles slipping downwards by degrees.
“And what do you find so entertaining, girl?” he asks drily, folding a corner in a messy dog’s-ear. “You should not be laughing, as you have no heart with which to feel any emotion, especially amusement or merriment.”
Naminé glances down, flushing pink, but smiling nonetheless. “It’s just…I didn’t think you would like reading.”
Xaldin snorts irritably, adding more annotations on trajectories and equilibrium calculations with a flourish of his pen. “I appreciate fact and logic,” he says calmly, “but surely even you should be able to distinguish between that and having a fondness for fiction and the literary arts.” He pauses for a beat and rises from his chair, replacing his book on a nearby shelf. “We have no hearts with which to be moved by. Therefore, we cannot be affected by trite, romantic nonsense such as art, poetry, prose, drama-”
“You say this because you were in thrall of them once, weren’t you?” she breaks in softly, before she can think. The lancer halts abruptly, the staccato rhythm of his boot-heels ceasing.
Time hangs suspended between them, and she thinks he will not answer; as he sweeps towards the door, she hears him murmur, almost too low for her to catch. “That may have been.”
Her memories dissolve away; Naminé blinks down at her book, at the three dragon-headed lances she has drawn, bound together by spiked thorns. “And yet, you could never really escape from that enthrallment,” she whispers, turning the page.
*
When she makes that first trip down to his subterranean laboratory to deliver a stack of mission reports, outlines and briefings, as well as meeting transcripts and the odd shopping list filled with impossible items from Zexion, Vexen finds her wandering aimlessly through the corridor, tottering slightly under the staggering pile of paperwork heaped in her arms. She is aware of his presence only when he mutters a softly explosive curse and, with firm fingers resting on her shoulders, steers her towards his private study after relieving her load somewhat.
Naminé is fairly surprised when he invites her to stay, though her suspicions are soon confirmed when he whips out several fresh report-sheets, impatiently motions her to sit down in that rather stiff-backed chair on the other side of his desk and stares at her, absently tapping the tip of his pen against the clipboard pinned beneath his arms.
Scientist and witch blink at one another, both discomfited by the other’s presence.
The first hour he spends hurling rapid-fire questions at her and filling out a skills assessment checklist, a mental health report, a basic comprehension and computation test. After a while, the structured order of his questions slip, and she herself starts to ask him more, more about the nature of who she is and what they are. It is easy to see he relishes this opportunity to share his intellectual findings, and the more she hears from him, the more she finds herself disbelieving what Xigbar, Xaldin and Zexion have told her about him.
His passion for his research far outstrips the coldness of his personality; it is this vibrant fire of knowledge which burns fiercely within him, a fire which can burn ever-fiercer the more it grows.
“Such a fire,” she argues, “will consume you from the inside out and leave you a burnt-out shell.”
Vexen only laughs scathingly at her, the spark of disbelief bright in his eyes. “And I’m guessing you can not only see a person’s past in their memories, but their futures too?” he jeers, a thin-lipped, bitter smirk spreading across his features like an oil slick. “Another little tidbit of information Xemnas didn’t see fit to tell me, I take it.”
“No,” Naminé says calmly, raising her chin as she speaks. “It’s common sense. Intuition. Anyone can see it.”
And that is where they are at odds. “You do not see the beauty of logic and facts,” he says frostily, as he urges her from his darkened laboratory. “Whilst I cannot see what one can gain from obeying gut instinct like a common animal.”
Naminé’s eyes slide to the guttering candles - white, white like almost everything she has ever known - and she reaches forwards to hold a single square of paper to the flame, watching as ash spirals down towards the table. “And look who was right in the end.”
*
He is the first - and one of the few - who does anything to help her.
Perhaps the sight of her wandering around like a lost little street urchin is unbearable to his ordered scientist’s mind, and for that reason, she is wary of him at first. He is, without a doubt, the most physically imposing of all the Organisation members, and when she first crosses paths with him, Naminé cannot help but cringe away from the giant of a man who only regards her with polite detachment. She reasons that she ought to feel grateful towards him, for finding and rescuing her, but at the same time, she is terrified; what if he is as unforthcoming as Xaldin is, and only snipes at her for being too curious?
When she makes the mistake of asking him the first of too many questions, she is afraid he will take offence; however, the gentleness of his response unnerves her, and when he dismisses her, she, too, forces the matter out of her mind, and continues to be a good little witch, keeping out of the way of the Organisation.
Like the others, she expects Lexaeus to forget about her existence: the novelty of a new Nobody - and a child, at that - has long since worn off, and she is more than willing to remain as unobtrusive as possible.
She is taken by surprise, though, when he returns from a mission to some far-flung world, bearing a variety of unusual items which are new not only to her, but to the rest of their number. When she excuses herself from the breakfast table, no-one takes any notice, and she is content to return to her chambers, until she realises she is being followed.
When she turns, Naminé finds herself staring at the impossibly powerfully-built man, who carries a bulging cloth bag; without a word, he proffers the lot, and when he encourages her to take it with a firm nod, she does so, unsure of what to expect. It is only once he returns to the dining room that she takes a peek at the objects within, and finds the little gifts he brought back for her.
Pencils, paper, crayons, reading-books, all plundered from some distant world consumed by the Heartless.
Naminé smiles fondly at the memory, and sits back to appraise the sketch marked out before her, a simple, shaded still-life of one of the worlds described in one of those books, showcasing rugged territories and yawning canyons. He called the world the ‘Pride Lands’, and regaled her with fascinating stories of exotic animals and impressive landforms, and she decides this to be fitting homage to a man as dignified and stalwart as he was.
Landscapes were never really her forte. Perhaps, she muses, Lexaeus would be proud of her improved skill.
*
Unlike the others, he is comparatively conversational, though not to the confusing, obfuscating extent of Xigbar. He is kind and patient enough with her, suffering her presence and occasionally answering the questions she tentatively aims at him, all unruffled calm and concise explanations, despite the fact that he has more important things to attend to.
He is by far the youngest of the founding members, and as such, she feels the most comfortable around him; however, there is one simple fact that she cannot forget, and it is that he is her superior in every sense of the term. Despite his apparent age, they are worlds apart, and Naminé feels this the most when she looks into his eyes - cold, dark and distant as faraway storm-clouds, speaking of hidden depths and an enigmatic mystique.
She tries tentatively to reach out to him, but he only smiles his secret little smile and hands her a book, telling her that perhaps she will find all her answers within those delicate, age-spotted pages.
Naminé bites her lip and carefully detaches a single sheet of paper from the book, before deftly truncating it into a series of smaller squares; her brow furrows in concentration as, with a crease here and a neat pleat there, a figure begins to take shape beneath her fingertips, angular wings rising from the jumble of folds.
Zexion is the one who teaches her a different form of art, showing her that there is more to paper than it merely being a blank canvas to fill in. She remembers a quiet day in the castle as he sits in the lounge and folds her a parade of paper creatures, each more intricate than the last.
“Cranes are a symbol of longevity in many cultures,” he tells her absently as he lines up several ornamental birds on a pile of research notes, not minding the ink which transfers messy smudges of black onto his fingers. “It is said that if a thousand of these paper cranes are folded, your wish - any wish - will come true.”
She stares at him with periwinkle-blue eyes wide with hope, and he chuckles, gathering up a stack of heavy, leather-bound tomes. “Do you really believe that?” she whispers, fingertips tracing the sharp beak of the bird lying in the palm of her hand.
He gazes steadily at her, the shadow of a smile plucking at the corners of his mouth; she is unable to see his expression, for he is half-turned away from her, features shadowed by the fall of his dark hair. “No, I don’t,” is his simple response.
And then he is gone, in a swish of black leather and blooming darkness, abandoning her to the paper menagerie he leaves behind.
*
The only other time she does not even dare to begin to engage her supervisor in conversation is when Saïx comes to watch over her.
He does not invite conversation like Xigbar or Zexion, Demyx or Luxord or even Axel, and only stares stonily at her, following her every movement with indifferent amber eyes.
“Wh-” Her question is cut short when he abruptly turns away, his back as clear a dismissal as any, and she is left staring at the back of his head, wondering what does on in the depths of his mind.
The next time they meet, she simply sits down with the book Zexion loans her and allows herself to be engulfed by the myths and legends which arise from the crinkled pages, and does not even notice when her watcher sets himself stiffly opposite her. He sits straight-backed and stony-faced, denying the comfort of the sofa cushions, legs crossed in that quintessential pose he adopts when the rest of their number converges in the vast meeting-room. “Are you bored?” he inquires stiffly, mechanically, and she wonders who set him up to this.
Probably Xigbar, wanting to see how the second-in-command copes with babysitting and entertaining her.
Naminé shakes her head. “No, I’m fine,” she responds quietly, brushing her fingers across the book open at her lap. “S-some people gave me things to occupy myself with.”
He nods with satisfaction, and lapses back into silence, but she can feel his eyes upon her, curious and oddly befuddled. “Tell me something,” Saïx begins softly, his face like a blank mask, devoid of emotion. “How does it feel to be a child?”
“I…I beg your pardon?”
He clears his throat, and his eyes flash with something approaching despondence. “How does it feel to be…to be young like that?” He pauses, as though uncertain. “I have forgotten.”
Her heart - or rather, if she had one - goes out to him then, and she aches inside at his wistful sorrow; she has heard about the boy who had to grow up before his time, and it is a fate she does not wish on anyone. “It’s…”
She falters. “Let me show you,” she whispers.
She abandons the book and draws for him, watches as he runs his hands over the vivid images and nods to himself, turns to her and murmurs his thanks. When Xaldin arrives to summon them for dinner, he finds Saïx gazing out of the window, toying with a tiny folded paper crane, with Naminé alongside him, straining her eyes to see the constellations he points out.
The lancer turns on his heel and leaves silently, noticed only by Naminé.
In the white-white room in the cold-cold mansion, she draws. She sketches the outlines of constellations and names each star, jots down their associated legends and mythological figures until the sketchpad blurs before her eyes, and she cries, cries for the boy who died too young, for the boy who grew into the man who never reconciled himself with the world.
*
She finds herself oddly fascinated by him, drawn to his dynamic manner like a moth to a vibrant flame; to her, he stands out like a beacon in the night, not because of him striking a chord in her spirit, but because of the curious, enigmatic allure which roils off him. He is one of the few who makes an active effort in keeping her entertained - not that she needs it - and constantly regales her with elaborate tales of far-off worlds, and shows her tricks with smoke and flame, dazzling her with his displays.
He is very much like Xigbar, and acts the part of her co-conspirator, whisking her away to the most secret parts of the castle, and showing her the wonders he discovers tucked away in obscure architraves and cornices. They explore dark passageways and dimly-lit corridors, and he always leads the way with dancing flames cupped in his hand.
They discover a loophole portal to Vexen’s wardrobe, to Lexaeus’s study, to the kitchen pantry and Xemnas’s small, not-so-private meditation chamber at the top of one of the towers; all these no doubt the work of a bored Xigbar, and a cheerful Luxord in the mood of some jovial chicanery.
When they tire of their fearless explorations, Axel instead demonstrates his power to her, makes dancing, leaping flames twist over his palm, shaping them into a cornucopia of shapes: leaping chimaeras which snap fleetingly at her tentative fingers, many-headed hydras which wriggle and writhe around his fingers; he forms fiery blooms and searing spirals with a snap of his fingers and a flick of his wrist, and she can only stare in wonder and make appropriate exclamations of amazement.
“I wish I had power over something that’s concrete,” she tells him almost-wistfully one day. He snorts and shakes his head, extinguishes the fiery puppet-theatre with an indolent sweep of his hands.
“No you don’t.”
“What I have is-”
“What you have can be used to build or break, depending on how your will chooses to direct it.” His smile is bitter, almost forlorn. “What I have can be used for nothing but destruction. Look.”
With that single word, he flicks the spark of flame towards billowing curtains which hang over her window, a single tongue of flame dancing towards the heavy drapes which take away yet another facet of her freedom, the stifling veil which dictates what she sees and cannot see from her seat. In the blink of an eye, the dense fabric is ablaze, and before her eyes unfolds a flickering, gleeful conflagration which inches towards the curtain-rods. For an instant, she wonders how long it will take for her flesh to burn and peel, for the room to transformed into a blackened, charred box, with nothing left within. She wonders how long it will take for her bones to crack and warp in the heat, how long until every bit of her is reduced to cinders scattered to the wind, her existence scoured from the worlds. Naminé squeezes her eyes shut as a wave of heat rolls towards her, pushing the air from her lungs. “Stop.”
As suddenly as it began, the flames are gone, Axel is gone, and the candles before her shiver gently in the wake of her sigh.
She stares at the neatly-aligned waxen tapers which sink lower and lower towards their silvered holders; she leans forwards, the paper rustling slightly beneath her hands, and, one by one, blows them out, sending wisps of smoke towards the pristine frescoed ceiling.
“You were wrong about me. Just like how you were wrong about almost everything.”
*
“We are both artists, you and I,” he tells her earnestly, a rakish grin curling across his lips as he absently entices forth a single warbling note from the strings of his sitar, “except in rather different senses of the term.”
In response to his words, she smiles down at the sheets of paper littered around her elbows, folded into a multitude of delicate creations; still more sketches surround her, stacked neatly into a pile: her efforts to teach her companion the art of proportion are mostly in vain, and whilst some half-hearted scrawls surround the blond man, he glances wistfully, enviously, at the drawings of dancing, silvery fishes and visions of sandy beaches which are laid out before her. “Tell me more,” she adds, before he can bemoan his lack of drawing skill again, blue eyes meeting green. Demyx chuckles and rakes a hand through his gravity-defying hair, ruffling the haphazardly-gelled strands.
“Only if you tell me a bit about yourself, o princess of nowhere,” he responds; there is no malice in his voice, only a hint of curious irony suffusing his tones: they are both aware of who they are, of their shadowed half-existence, and there is no point denying it. “Do you play any instruments?”
Her lips arch into a quizzical curve, and she dips her head, letting pale golden locks obscure her features. “I’m afraid not.”
“Aw, what a shame,” Demyx laments, an approximation of disappointment creeping into his words. “You always struck me as the kind who would be able to play something elegant…like the harp, or the piano, maybe.”
Naminé stares at him, and her mind wanders as he speaks; she allows herself to dream, to imagine, and for a moment, she can just about picture herself seated before an ebony-and-ivory keyboard, summoning forth sweet melodies from the instrument. “Why do you say so?” she queries curiously, as the image dissolves away like droplets of condensation, wiped off a fogged mirror.
For an instant, it seems as though her companion will not answer; he stares back down at the long neck of his sitar, absently plucking the strings, fingers deftly forming familiar chords of some lullaby. “You have the hands of a musician,” he remarks simply, nodding at slender digits paused in the midst of folding a paper butterfly.
Naminé frowns down at them, eyes tracing the contours of translucent-pale skin, taking in the crisscrossed map of pallid veins just underneath; she opens her mouth to speak, but is cut short by the Melodious Nocturne, who speaks as though deep in thought, eyes half closed and a shadow of a smile on his lips. Her brow furrows, and she wonders what he could possibly be thinking; her fingers itch to grasp her pencil, to map out the links of his memories and see what he sees, to understand the things he says, but is drawn away from her own idle musings when he raises his head to look her squarely in the eye, a kindness she has learnt not to expect from Nobodies settling upon his features.
“Not only that,” he says softly, as silence settles between them like falling snowdrifts, “but you have the resilience and determination of a true maestro, too.”
And months later, long after his face has vanished from the halls of the Castle, she remembers the words shared with her in confidence, two nonentities surrounded by the fog of memory, of recollections, of wishful thinking and of melancholy music.
*
She is surprised to discover a card tucked between two sheafs of paper, a single glossy rectangle that slips to her lap before she can stop it.
As she gazes at the weathered card face, Naminé finds herself remembering the meanings and symbolism attributed to every suit and trump, the story behind each recounted to her every time she wins a game of Blackjack.
One-eyed jack, laughing boy, flower Queen, the Black Lady. The suicide king, the man with the axe, the false King of Hearts.
He teaches her about history, and it is only during then - frowning at her fan of cards whilst Luxord chuckles in a rich baritone - that she learns the most: she considers the library out of bounds, not only due to the nature of the texts within, but also the presence of its near-permanent occupants, too deeply immersed in their scientific theories to be able to see much else. Whilst the other members try to teach her about a variety of different things - how to understand the physics of the world, the balance of ecosystems, the socio-economic and political statuses of distant worlds; how to create powerful chemical compounds, to calculate the trajectory of any projectile in motion, to argue philosophy and existentialism - Luxord is the one who teaches her fun and anticipation, teaches her how to look forward to every poker game, every chess match, every round of Hearts.
“What card is this, Luxord?” she asks him one day, holding up the stiff rectangle, emblazoned with a single, ornate design; up to this point, he has rewarded her with snippets of history, richly intriguing, every time she beats him at his own game, and this is the only card he has yet to explain in the entire deck. She is struck by the resemblance between it and the symbol of the Nobodies, and wonders if somehow, they are inextricably linked.
“It’s the death card,” Luxord states simply; his sharp, perceptive gaze does not miss the unbidden shiver which wracks her bare shoulders, and he reaches out to steady her, concern written across his features. “I shouldn’t be imparting such gritty tales of warfare upon ladies such as yourself,” he murmurs, more to himself, as he remembers their established tradition of playing and learning.
“Tell me-” she begins, but is silenced by his gloved finger settling upon her lips.
“I can’t,” he says with a hint of sorrowful amusement. “You’ll have to find out for yourself, dove.”
One year later, Naminé stares forlornly down at the creased card, and tries to summon forth memories of the father she never had, the debonair gambler with the secret smile who taught her all she knew about life and people.
“I still haven’t found out,” she chokes out, hastily flicking away her tears-he would be aghast to see her now, red-eyed and runny-nosed, hiccoughing into her hands. “I’m so sorry.”
*
Bitterness rises underneath her skin, and despite her best efforts, she cannot push away the memories of him, abhorrent and mocking in every way, undermining and second-guessing her every impulse and instinct.
When she closes her eyes, she sees his face - with the capacity for kindness, had he been spared by the Darkness - and hears his voice, lips tickling her ear as he whispers hateful little sweet nothings to her. His honeyed words do not detract from the subtle venom which lingers within the deep timbre of his tones, and when he leans down to her to press a chaste kiss to her forehead, she is half-certain she hears him murmur an anathema which is lost when he reaches forwards to trace a line down her jaw. “Memento mori, little blossom,” he breathes, and then he is gone, in a swirl of petals, lush and fragrant-yet when she grabs a fistful, crushing and bringing them to her nose, Naminé can smell the tang of death, bittersweet and burning the back of her throat.
It is this memory of feigned affection that sickens her the most; she hates herself for obeying him, for blindly heeding his instructions without thinking of defying him. She hates herself for not fighting back when the thorn-lined vines knot around her and shackle her in place on her seat, not thinking of stabbing at the cruel tendrils which prevent her from bolting from the Castle like a cornered animal at the end of its tether. She hates herself for not thinking even once about sabotaging his memories, or at least trying to, and her failures resonate harshly in her mind, long after he is gone.
But most of all, she both hates him and fears him, with every fibre of her being - would hate him, would fear him, were it possible for her to have emotions.
She sweeps fierce strokes of her pencil against the paper, pressing remorselessly against the sheet until something gives way; she draws with a feverish urgency, and blindly sends her crayon-tip across the now-crinkled surface, ignoring the ugly lines which slash across the once-pristine backdrop. It is only the sharp snap that forcibly wrenches her from her fleeting mania; a sudden twinge of pain in the palm of her hand brings her back to the present, and Naminé is no longer confronted by Marluxia’s satisfied smirk. Instead of cold cobalt eyes and lips curved in an almost-affectionate sneer, she only sees a ruined sheet of paper before her eyes, one side adorned by a hastily-sketched rose - all velvety scarlet petals and wicked thorns - and overlaid by thick, dark slashes of graphite, obscuring the image beneath it.
An erratic crisscross of marks swims before her eyes, melting into the red of the velvety petals, irregular blots of colour she almost throws onto the paper; for an instant, she is not in Twilight Town, but back in Castle Oblivion, trembling as Marluxia bends towards her, patting her fondly on the head and crooning his poisonous little valedictions into her ear, reminding her of her own mortality.
Skin crawling, she rips the sheet out with unnecessary force, crumpling it into a tight sphere; it is only once the blood-red rose has vanished from sight that her breathing relaxes, and she loosens her white-knuckled grip on her drawing pad.
*
When she begins to draw the outline of storm-clouds on the upper corner of a fresh page, she is unable to suppress a shiver which runs down her spine, a phantasmagorical sensation of ghostly fingers trailing down her back.
She remembers sugared words and honeyed confidences, remembers playful laughter - high and girlish and exultant - remembers poise and arrogance and impossible measures of self-assurance.
But most of all, Naminé remembers her only female watcher, who wears two faces which detail two stories.
One of them, she exposes to the entire Organisation with aplomb. They know Larxene only as the Savage Nymph, pitiless and ferocious in everything - including name - with a bottomless capacity for cruelty. They know her as the sneering minx who embarks only on the grisliest of missions, the malicious vixen whose preferred occupation is toppling empires and watching worlds crumble in the aftermath of her heinous deeds. They know her as the one who fights with thunder and lightning, harnessing these twin forces of nature and forcing them to do her bidding.
But Naminé knows her as someone else.
Away from the scrutiny of her male cohorts, the Nymph abandons some of her pretences. During unguarded moments when she is too tired to be vindictive, she confesses snippets of her past to Naminé, painting her a desolate picture of the life she once led.
Naminé hears of crops which failed too often, famines which plagued sprawling lands. She hears of being sold for little more than a song, of training long and hard to be an assassin. She hears of heartbreak and despair, hears of loneliness and guilt, hears of childish dreams to be a princess, now eaten away by bitterness; the stories fill her up until she can take no more, and it feels like she will go mad, hearing all the tales of past lives too painful to relive.
When Larxene’s head nods and the sleepy murmur of her voice fades away, Naminé does not bother her - partially because she will be ripped to ribbons for disturbing the woman, but partially out of sympathy.
They are not all that different, after all. They just choose to express themselves in different manners.
This is why she tries not to mind when Larxene returns after a mission gone badly, and is sent to supervise her. Naminé bears the shouting and raging, endures the harsh blows and the stinging slaps, because she knows she will have her throat cut if she speaks out against it. She takes the screamed curses and the hair-pulling, the threats and the maledictions, until the torrent of wild, storm-like fury abates and Larxene is left exhausted and despondent after all this, and just curls up and cries.
In the face of all this, Naminé does not know what to do. So she parrots back to the Nymph stories that the others told her, until the angry tears stop and she is back to her former self, infuriatingly confident and smug in her emotional security.
She is broken, and nobody sees it.
Naminé ignores the warnings Larxene heaps upon her when such incidents pass, and assures the woman she will never tell anybody about her rare moments of fragility.
She simply cannot find it in herself to truly hate her, even after everything she did.
She finishes doodling out expanses of clouds and jagged forks of lightning, and sketches in a pastel-pale rainbow - for hope and optimism - arching out across stormy black skies.
“Somewhere,” she says to nobody in particular, “I hope you found your happy ending.”
*
It feels as though she has come full circle.
She doesn’t want to remember, but yet she is unable to banish him from her mind: the pitiful condemned boy, his existence as fleeting as that of a mayfly’s; she is no better than him, and yet she sits in her chambers and rewrites his memories, just as she rewrote those of his Other.
It’s almost perverse, she thinks, to be playing God over his memories. A single slip of her pencil, a single errant smudge, and entire blocks of memory can be erased or corrupted beyond her control. Without them, what will he be, but even more of an empty shell? A multitude of what-ifs plague her as she bends over the paper and draws, linking sketches together with fine, crosshatched chains, tiny, detailed drawings of what has been, what could be and what will never be, spilling from sheet to sheet.
What if he remembers he forgot?
What if he didn’t understand why they had to do it?
What if she made a mistake, a calculation error somewhere, that resulted in the loss of memories crucial to him?
What if, what if, what if-
There are not many things Naminé wishes for, but at this moment in time, gazing down at a bare page - and surrounded by crumpled sheets and torn-up fragments of paper, littering the floor around her seat like artificial snowflakes - she wishes for another way, where the boy is allowed to just live his life…or whatever it is he lives. However, she knows it can never be; sooner or later, he will have to merge with Sora: that is the most crucial part of DiZ’s machinations. That much she understands, and that is her main motivation behind implanting the false memories in his mind, even as her eyes swim with tears and she draws feverishly into the book, mapping out his fake existence. She treats it as her penance, for unravelling Sora’s memories, and knows this is the price she pays for her meddling; still, nothing can take her mind off the limp, black-cloaked boy who is brought to her by a dishevelled Riku, dumped unceremoniously on the cold, hard floor like so much unwanted cargo.
It is a fate she does not wish on anyone, least of all on the boy who has lost so much.
Naminé closes her eyes and sketches from memory, tracing his features on the paper before her with care; she colours in blue eyes, lips curved in a ghost of a smile, and a shock of unruly blond hair; she draws in black-cloaked figures and a golden sunset, sparkling waters and melting ice-cream. It is only then that she surveys her work, satisfied. Reaching forwards with trembling fingers, she traces the features drawn onto her formerly blank canvas, and remembers Roxas, stoop-shouldered and painfully frail, so far removed from the remorseless fighter he was, just mere hours before his capture.
This is how he should be, she tells herself, detaching the sheet and placing it gently on the table, far from the reach of the wavering candles. She surveys the portrait for several seconds, and it seems as though Roxas is there with her, happy and carefree, as he should be allowed to be.
Just because they are forgotten dregs of forgotten worlds does not mean they are any less human, no matter what DiZ says.
*
When the distant grandfather clock tolls again, she slowly shuts her drawing-book, rising to her feet and placing both pencil and paper-pad on her vacated seat. Everything is ready now, and the pieces are all in place, as Luxord would have said; she casts a final glance around the room, gazes fleetingly at the pictures which adorn the walls, and turns her back to them.
There is nowhere for her to go; the past is gone, slipping through her splayed fingers like fine sand, and there is only the future laid out ahead of her; there is little she can do but march forwards without a backwards glance, and make her way towards wherever fate takes her. To this end, she has to meet Roxas, to throw back the rippling, gauzy curtains of his false memories, and guide him towards his destiny, back to where he belongs.
When she leaves the room, Naminé cannot help but wish in vain.
As a Nobody, she decides, if there is one thing - one thing at all - that she is allowed to wish for, it is for her to be able to alter her own memories without having to face the consequences, the repercussions of meddling with her own mind in such a way.
Everything she does is a lie. Falsehoods are weaved inextricably into her work, and she hates herself for believing the fallacies sketched on white paper before her, filling in the blankness with something which is scarcely better. She is the only one who remembers Xion, erased from the very face of the earth, her very memory dissipating away into nothingness. Perhaps, though, she is the one who got the better side of the deal; Naminé is almost envious of her, because of what she no longer has, what she has ceased to become.
It is better to forget what she does not wish to remember, than to have them haunt her every time she sketches something which reminds her of them.
Better to forget, than to remember at all.
back to index.
wordcount: 7457
rating: PG-13
synopsis: If only she had power over her own memories.
She has no real purpose in the world, other than to right her wrongs.
Loneliness has become her constant companion, and regret weighs heavily on her mind, lingering like a malignant shadow in her dreams and waking nightmares alike. As she sits and sketches seemingly tirelessly in one spiral-bound book after another, sorrow is what she breathes, and remorse is what flows from her fingertips, colouring the paper beneath her hands with each stroke of her pencil.
During the rare moments when Riku stops by to check up on her, he paces around her chamber and comments on the vibrancy of her drawings, running black-gloved hands over every picture, fingertips trailing on the surface of each creamy sheet like skittering spider-legs. “You have a way of bringing them to life,” he tells her; she only nods and offers him a wan smile, understanding that this is his way of expressing his kindness. “It’s almost as though there is something more in your work, something which I have never seen before in any image.”
What she does not tell him is that there is a secret behind the vivid colours and careful crosshatches. Remorse, she finds, is the most potent of pigments, and rises when she least expects it: it appears when she presses a goldenrod crayon to thick white paper, when she concentrates on the intricate details of a stairwell, painstakingly shading in each and every carving and step. Remorse is an emotion she is all-too-familiar with, despite DiZ repeatedly stressing that she is nothing but a Nobody, a shell of a person, incapable of experiencing any feelings. Remorse, she has learnt, is a more powerful forcing factor than any threat and any harsh blow, and is what convinces her to keep working on ensuring that Sora wakes from his slumber.
It is afternoon in Twilight Town, or so the grandfather clock someplace in the mansion dictates.
*
She remembers the first time she meets Xemnas.
He strikes fear in her the same way that the unknown strikes fear on the unwary, the timid of heart. She cannot help but shiver under his unblinking scrutiny, and despite the shadow of an indolent smile which twists his lips into a faint curve, she cannot help but be drawn to his eyes, to the calm, hollow indifference in the depths of his empty gaze.
For hours on end, the Superior of the In-Between only regards her with thoughtful silence over black-gloved fingers laced together, expression unreadable; at first, she bears his curiosity like a weight on her narrow shoulders, never quite daring to directly meet his stare. Once she is unable to bear the silence and forces herself to look up, she is astonished to find the man jotting down notes on the pristine white tablecloth, once-unsullied fabric now marred with his inky scrawls. On a whim, on daring impulse, she leans forwards in her seat, and considers her words carefully before voicing them, unsure of whatever reply may or may not come.
“What do you hope to achieve by observing me like this?” Naminé is only slightly surprised by the boldness in her voice, the fearlessness which she wishes she actually possesses making her question seem all the more blandly forthright; Xemnas pauses momentarily in his scrawling and only blinks at her, resting his chin upon a hand.
“Perhaps we have more in common than most might expect, you and I,” he responds silkily, tapping his temple with the end of his pen. When she frowns with incomprehension, he smiles, a frighteningly alien expression which does not quite fit the contours of his face.
“You are a witch whose powers lie within the dominion of manipulating memories.” The words he utters are crisp and clear, stated with cool, detached efficiency. “And I, on the other hand, am a Nobody of a shell, missing most of my own memories. Draw your conclusions.”
Whilst she puzzles over the elaborateness of his words, the Superior rises to his feet and gives her a final, appraising glance, a smirk ghosting across his features. “Think about it,” he purrs.
And think about it she does; over a year later, she pensively draws the sigil of the Nobodies upon the sketchpad on her lap, an inverted heart with clean holes punched from its corners, spiked thorns jutting out from where its tapering point should have been. Like the imperfect, inverted insignia, she realises, Xemnas was every bit as incomplete, missing not only his heart, but the hollow gaps of buried memories, lost, perhaps, to the world.
*
He does not unnerve her like the rest of the senior Organisation members, but all the same, she is all-too-aware of the danger which lurks within the depths of his lazy drawl, of the sly, cunning glint in his fierce golden eye and the smugly knowing smile he wears every time he speaks.
The Freeshooter is quite unlike the others, and instead of intimidating the living daylights out of her, he engages in endless hours of casual banter - studiously ignoring a fuming Vexen who occasionally stumps by to throw volleys of snide comments at his face. He talks about the weather, about how she finds the place, weaves her countless stories on how he and Saïx got their scars.
She doesn’t know what to believe and what to take with a liberal pinch of salt.
When she doesn’t feel like talking, when she meets his lighthearted chatter with stony silence, he takes her outside - shouting down Xaldin’s grumbled objections and Vexen’s sneering remarks - and shows her how to judge trajectory angles and teaches her the rudiments of physics. He teaches her the basis behind spacetime, behind the Doppler Effect, heaps random, albeit rather useless trivia upon her everytime they cross paths.
But most of all, he shows her the wide, open emptiness of the Dark City, the flickering neon signs and wavering fluorescent lights, the sibilant whisper of lesser Nobodies flitting through the inverse world like wraiths. He shows her the world outside her window, which beats gently against the frosted panes of glass she presses her nose to, aching to break free of her gilded bird-cage; he shows her the starless night skies, the pallid shadow of a moon hanging low in the cloudless void. He shows her distant buildings and flickering screens, screens which seem to project flashes of alien memories into her mind when she focuses long and hard enough, until the streetlamps blur into a haze of pinpricked brightness, burning hot at the back of her eyelids.
“All this’ll be yours someday, Naminé. All yours. And y’know why?”
“Why?” she asks, fidgeting with the hood-ties of her white coat - an opposite to what they wear, just like how she is an opposite of them, yet at the same time not - staring into the blackness. She can feel the edge of the parapet beneath her toes, and for an instant, worries about tumbling headfirst into the nothingness awaiting her beneath, but knows with bittersweet clarity that Xigbar would twist space to catch her before she falls - he would not want to have to face the wrath of the Superior if she is lost.
He gazes sidelong at her, that wry half-smile stretching the scar along his cheek. “’Cause you, dove, are Number Zero, our little Princess of Nothing, faithful Keeper of the Long-Gone.”
Blue eyes meet gold, and he chuckles, ruffling the top of her head in an affectionate parody of familiarity; they stand at the battlements of the Castle That Never Was, feeling the deadened wind push against their exposed faces in frigid gusts. She frowns at him, lips pursing into a vaguely disparaging curve, and then-
The illusion dissolves; the endless expanse of black vanishes, and once more she sees curtains rustling in the breeze, the blank drawing-book open on her lap. With deliberate strokes, she writes down the equations she remembers with studious care, and stares at the spot long after she has turned the page, lines of formulae flashing before her eyes every time she blinks.
*
She is nervous whenever it is his turn to supervise her.
Whilst Xemnas has already tired of her as a novelty, the other members are still regularly assigned to look after her, to ensure that she does not get lost wandering the castle, that she does not drift out of bounds and into the Dark City, that she does not get herself in trouble with some of the more intolerant and irascible members. The first time she makes the mistake of asking Xaldin too many questions, he only spears her with the most scathing of glares, and ignores her for the remainder of the evening.
Circumstance finds them in the library one day, the lancer engrossed in a thick volume of physics and aerodynamics which boasts obscenely small print, cramped across an age-spotted page. She doodles aimlessly in one of her sketchpads, unwilling to engage the man in conversation, for fear of having another lecture directed her way; when she looks at him, though, she cannot help but suppress a laugh: seeing the strapping lancer scrawling crabbed mathematical formulae along the tiny margins of a page and scowling at the tome with half-moon eyeglasses perched on the bridge of his nose is too much for her to take, and when a hiccup of laughter escapes her before she can stop it, he glances up, the spectacles slipping downwards by degrees.
“And what do you find so entertaining, girl?” he asks drily, folding a corner in a messy dog’s-ear. “You should not be laughing, as you have no heart with which to feel any emotion, especially amusement or merriment.”
Naminé glances down, flushing pink, but smiling nonetheless. “It’s just…I didn’t think you would like reading.”
Xaldin snorts irritably, adding more annotations on trajectories and equilibrium calculations with a flourish of his pen. “I appreciate fact and logic,” he says calmly, “but surely even you should be able to distinguish between that and having a fondness for fiction and the literary arts.” He pauses for a beat and rises from his chair, replacing his book on a nearby shelf. “We have no hearts with which to be moved by. Therefore, we cannot be affected by trite, romantic nonsense such as art, poetry, prose, drama-”
“You say this because you were in thrall of them once, weren’t you?” she breaks in softly, before she can think. The lancer halts abruptly, the staccato rhythm of his boot-heels ceasing.
Time hangs suspended between them, and she thinks he will not answer; as he sweeps towards the door, she hears him murmur, almost too low for her to catch. “That may have been.”
Her memories dissolve away; Naminé blinks down at her book, at the three dragon-headed lances she has drawn, bound together by spiked thorns. “And yet, you could never really escape from that enthrallment,” she whispers, turning the page.
*
When she makes that first trip down to his subterranean laboratory to deliver a stack of mission reports, outlines and briefings, as well as meeting transcripts and the odd shopping list filled with impossible items from Zexion, Vexen finds her wandering aimlessly through the corridor, tottering slightly under the staggering pile of paperwork heaped in her arms. She is aware of his presence only when he mutters a softly explosive curse and, with firm fingers resting on her shoulders, steers her towards his private study after relieving her load somewhat.
Naminé is fairly surprised when he invites her to stay, though her suspicions are soon confirmed when he whips out several fresh report-sheets, impatiently motions her to sit down in that rather stiff-backed chair on the other side of his desk and stares at her, absently tapping the tip of his pen against the clipboard pinned beneath his arms.
Scientist and witch blink at one another, both discomfited by the other’s presence.
The first hour he spends hurling rapid-fire questions at her and filling out a skills assessment checklist, a mental health report, a basic comprehension and computation test. After a while, the structured order of his questions slip, and she herself starts to ask him more, more about the nature of who she is and what they are. It is easy to see he relishes this opportunity to share his intellectual findings, and the more she hears from him, the more she finds herself disbelieving what Xigbar, Xaldin and Zexion have told her about him.
His passion for his research far outstrips the coldness of his personality; it is this vibrant fire of knowledge which burns fiercely within him, a fire which can burn ever-fiercer the more it grows.
“Such a fire,” she argues, “will consume you from the inside out and leave you a burnt-out shell.”
Vexen only laughs scathingly at her, the spark of disbelief bright in his eyes. “And I’m guessing you can not only see a person’s past in their memories, but their futures too?” he jeers, a thin-lipped, bitter smirk spreading across his features like an oil slick. “Another little tidbit of information Xemnas didn’t see fit to tell me, I take it.”
“No,” Naminé says calmly, raising her chin as she speaks. “It’s common sense. Intuition. Anyone can see it.”
And that is where they are at odds. “You do not see the beauty of logic and facts,” he says frostily, as he urges her from his darkened laboratory. “Whilst I cannot see what one can gain from obeying gut instinct like a common animal.”
Naminé’s eyes slide to the guttering candles - white, white like almost everything she has ever known - and she reaches forwards to hold a single square of paper to the flame, watching as ash spirals down towards the table. “And look who was right in the end.”
*
He is the first - and one of the few - who does anything to help her.
Perhaps the sight of her wandering around like a lost little street urchin is unbearable to his ordered scientist’s mind, and for that reason, she is wary of him at first. He is, without a doubt, the most physically imposing of all the Organisation members, and when she first crosses paths with him, Naminé cannot help but cringe away from the giant of a man who only regards her with polite detachment. She reasons that she ought to feel grateful towards him, for finding and rescuing her, but at the same time, she is terrified; what if he is as unforthcoming as Xaldin is, and only snipes at her for being too curious?
When she makes the mistake of asking him the first of too many questions, she is afraid he will take offence; however, the gentleness of his response unnerves her, and when he dismisses her, she, too, forces the matter out of her mind, and continues to be a good little witch, keeping out of the way of the Organisation.
Like the others, she expects Lexaeus to forget about her existence: the novelty of a new Nobody - and a child, at that - has long since worn off, and she is more than willing to remain as unobtrusive as possible.
She is taken by surprise, though, when he returns from a mission to some far-flung world, bearing a variety of unusual items which are new not only to her, but to the rest of their number. When she excuses herself from the breakfast table, no-one takes any notice, and she is content to return to her chambers, until she realises she is being followed.
When she turns, Naminé finds herself staring at the impossibly powerfully-built man, who carries a bulging cloth bag; without a word, he proffers the lot, and when he encourages her to take it with a firm nod, she does so, unsure of what to expect. It is only once he returns to the dining room that she takes a peek at the objects within, and finds the little gifts he brought back for her.
Pencils, paper, crayons, reading-books, all plundered from some distant world consumed by the Heartless.
Naminé smiles fondly at the memory, and sits back to appraise the sketch marked out before her, a simple, shaded still-life of one of the worlds described in one of those books, showcasing rugged territories and yawning canyons. He called the world the ‘Pride Lands’, and regaled her with fascinating stories of exotic animals and impressive landforms, and she decides this to be fitting homage to a man as dignified and stalwart as he was.
Landscapes were never really her forte. Perhaps, she muses, Lexaeus would be proud of her improved skill.
*
Unlike the others, he is comparatively conversational, though not to the confusing, obfuscating extent of Xigbar. He is kind and patient enough with her, suffering her presence and occasionally answering the questions she tentatively aims at him, all unruffled calm and concise explanations, despite the fact that he has more important things to attend to.
He is by far the youngest of the founding members, and as such, she feels the most comfortable around him; however, there is one simple fact that she cannot forget, and it is that he is her superior in every sense of the term. Despite his apparent age, they are worlds apart, and Naminé feels this the most when she looks into his eyes - cold, dark and distant as faraway storm-clouds, speaking of hidden depths and an enigmatic mystique.
She tries tentatively to reach out to him, but he only smiles his secret little smile and hands her a book, telling her that perhaps she will find all her answers within those delicate, age-spotted pages.
Naminé bites her lip and carefully detaches a single sheet of paper from the book, before deftly truncating it into a series of smaller squares; her brow furrows in concentration as, with a crease here and a neat pleat there, a figure begins to take shape beneath her fingertips, angular wings rising from the jumble of folds.
Zexion is the one who teaches her a different form of art, showing her that there is more to paper than it merely being a blank canvas to fill in. She remembers a quiet day in the castle as he sits in the lounge and folds her a parade of paper creatures, each more intricate than the last.
“Cranes are a symbol of longevity in many cultures,” he tells her absently as he lines up several ornamental birds on a pile of research notes, not minding the ink which transfers messy smudges of black onto his fingers. “It is said that if a thousand of these paper cranes are folded, your wish - any wish - will come true.”
She stares at him with periwinkle-blue eyes wide with hope, and he chuckles, gathering up a stack of heavy, leather-bound tomes. “Do you really believe that?” she whispers, fingertips tracing the sharp beak of the bird lying in the palm of her hand.
He gazes steadily at her, the shadow of a smile plucking at the corners of his mouth; she is unable to see his expression, for he is half-turned away from her, features shadowed by the fall of his dark hair. “No, I don’t,” is his simple response.
And then he is gone, in a swish of black leather and blooming darkness, abandoning her to the paper menagerie he leaves behind.
*
The only other time she does not even dare to begin to engage her supervisor in conversation is when Saïx comes to watch over her.
He does not invite conversation like Xigbar or Zexion, Demyx or Luxord or even Axel, and only stares stonily at her, following her every movement with indifferent amber eyes.
“Wh-” Her question is cut short when he abruptly turns away, his back as clear a dismissal as any, and she is left staring at the back of his head, wondering what does on in the depths of his mind.
The next time they meet, she simply sits down with the book Zexion loans her and allows herself to be engulfed by the myths and legends which arise from the crinkled pages, and does not even notice when her watcher sets himself stiffly opposite her. He sits straight-backed and stony-faced, denying the comfort of the sofa cushions, legs crossed in that quintessential pose he adopts when the rest of their number converges in the vast meeting-room. “Are you bored?” he inquires stiffly, mechanically, and she wonders who set him up to this.
Probably Xigbar, wanting to see how the second-in-command copes with babysitting and entertaining her.
Naminé shakes her head. “No, I’m fine,” she responds quietly, brushing her fingers across the book open at her lap. “S-some people gave me things to occupy myself with.”
He nods with satisfaction, and lapses back into silence, but she can feel his eyes upon her, curious and oddly befuddled. “Tell me something,” Saïx begins softly, his face like a blank mask, devoid of emotion. “How does it feel to be a child?”
“I…I beg your pardon?”
He clears his throat, and his eyes flash with something approaching despondence. “How does it feel to be…to be young like that?” He pauses, as though uncertain. “I have forgotten.”
Her heart - or rather, if she had one - goes out to him then, and she aches inside at his wistful sorrow; she has heard about the boy who had to grow up before his time, and it is a fate she does not wish on anyone. “It’s…”
She falters. “Let me show you,” she whispers.
She abandons the book and draws for him, watches as he runs his hands over the vivid images and nods to himself, turns to her and murmurs his thanks. When Xaldin arrives to summon them for dinner, he finds Saïx gazing out of the window, toying with a tiny folded paper crane, with Naminé alongside him, straining her eyes to see the constellations he points out.
The lancer turns on his heel and leaves silently, noticed only by Naminé.
In the white-white room in the cold-cold mansion, she draws. She sketches the outlines of constellations and names each star, jots down their associated legends and mythological figures until the sketchpad blurs before her eyes, and she cries, cries for the boy who died too young, for the boy who grew into the man who never reconciled himself with the world.
*
She finds herself oddly fascinated by him, drawn to his dynamic manner like a moth to a vibrant flame; to her, he stands out like a beacon in the night, not because of him striking a chord in her spirit, but because of the curious, enigmatic allure which roils off him. He is one of the few who makes an active effort in keeping her entertained - not that she needs it - and constantly regales her with elaborate tales of far-off worlds, and shows her tricks with smoke and flame, dazzling her with his displays.
He is very much like Xigbar, and acts the part of her co-conspirator, whisking her away to the most secret parts of the castle, and showing her the wonders he discovers tucked away in obscure architraves and cornices. They explore dark passageways and dimly-lit corridors, and he always leads the way with dancing flames cupped in his hand.
They discover a loophole portal to Vexen’s wardrobe, to Lexaeus’s study, to the kitchen pantry and Xemnas’s small, not-so-private meditation chamber at the top of one of the towers; all these no doubt the work of a bored Xigbar, and a cheerful Luxord in the mood of some jovial chicanery.
When they tire of their fearless explorations, Axel instead demonstrates his power to her, makes dancing, leaping flames twist over his palm, shaping them into a cornucopia of shapes: leaping chimaeras which snap fleetingly at her tentative fingers, many-headed hydras which wriggle and writhe around his fingers; he forms fiery blooms and searing spirals with a snap of his fingers and a flick of his wrist, and she can only stare in wonder and make appropriate exclamations of amazement.
“I wish I had power over something that’s concrete,” she tells him almost-wistfully one day. He snorts and shakes his head, extinguishes the fiery puppet-theatre with an indolent sweep of his hands.
“No you don’t.”
“What I have is-”
“What you have can be used to build or break, depending on how your will chooses to direct it.” His smile is bitter, almost forlorn. “What I have can be used for nothing but destruction. Look.”
With that single word, he flicks the spark of flame towards billowing curtains which hang over her window, a single tongue of flame dancing towards the heavy drapes which take away yet another facet of her freedom, the stifling veil which dictates what she sees and cannot see from her seat. In the blink of an eye, the dense fabric is ablaze, and before her eyes unfolds a flickering, gleeful conflagration which inches towards the curtain-rods. For an instant, she wonders how long it will take for her flesh to burn and peel, for the room to transformed into a blackened, charred box, with nothing left within. She wonders how long it will take for her bones to crack and warp in the heat, how long until every bit of her is reduced to cinders scattered to the wind, her existence scoured from the worlds. Naminé squeezes her eyes shut as a wave of heat rolls towards her, pushing the air from her lungs. “Stop.”
As suddenly as it began, the flames are gone, Axel is gone, and the candles before her shiver gently in the wake of her sigh.
She stares at the neatly-aligned waxen tapers which sink lower and lower towards their silvered holders; she leans forwards, the paper rustling slightly beneath her hands, and, one by one, blows them out, sending wisps of smoke towards the pristine frescoed ceiling.
“You were wrong about me. Just like how you were wrong about almost everything.”
*
“We are both artists, you and I,” he tells her earnestly, a rakish grin curling across his lips as he absently entices forth a single warbling note from the strings of his sitar, “except in rather different senses of the term.”
In response to his words, she smiles down at the sheets of paper littered around her elbows, folded into a multitude of delicate creations; still more sketches surround her, stacked neatly into a pile: her efforts to teach her companion the art of proportion are mostly in vain, and whilst some half-hearted scrawls surround the blond man, he glances wistfully, enviously, at the drawings of dancing, silvery fishes and visions of sandy beaches which are laid out before her. “Tell me more,” she adds, before he can bemoan his lack of drawing skill again, blue eyes meeting green. Demyx chuckles and rakes a hand through his gravity-defying hair, ruffling the haphazardly-gelled strands.
“Only if you tell me a bit about yourself, o princess of nowhere,” he responds; there is no malice in his voice, only a hint of curious irony suffusing his tones: they are both aware of who they are, of their shadowed half-existence, and there is no point denying it. “Do you play any instruments?”
Her lips arch into a quizzical curve, and she dips her head, letting pale golden locks obscure her features. “I’m afraid not.”
“Aw, what a shame,” Demyx laments, an approximation of disappointment creeping into his words. “You always struck me as the kind who would be able to play something elegant…like the harp, or the piano, maybe.”
Naminé stares at him, and her mind wanders as he speaks; she allows herself to dream, to imagine, and for a moment, she can just about picture herself seated before an ebony-and-ivory keyboard, summoning forth sweet melodies from the instrument. “Why do you say so?” she queries curiously, as the image dissolves away like droplets of condensation, wiped off a fogged mirror.
For an instant, it seems as though her companion will not answer; he stares back down at the long neck of his sitar, absently plucking the strings, fingers deftly forming familiar chords of some lullaby. “You have the hands of a musician,” he remarks simply, nodding at slender digits paused in the midst of folding a paper butterfly.
Naminé frowns down at them, eyes tracing the contours of translucent-pale skin, taking in the crisscrossed map of pallid veins just underneath; she opens her mouth to speak, but is cut short by the Melodious Nocturne, who speaks as though deep in thought, eyes half closed and a shadow of a smile on his lips. Her brow furrows, and she wonders what he could possibly be thinking; her fingers itch to grasp her pencil, to map out the links of his memories and see what he sees, to understand the things he says, but is drawn away from her own idle musings when he raises his head to look her squarely in the eye, a kindness she has learnt not to expect from Nobodies settling upon his features.
“Not only that,” he says softly, as silence settles between them like falling snowdrifts, “but you have the resilience and determination of a true maestro, too.”
And months later, long after his face has vanished from the halls of the Castle, she remembers the words shared with her in confidence, two nonentities surrounded by the fog of memory, of recollections, of wishful thinking and of melancholy music.
*
She is surprised to discover a card tucked between two sheafs of paper, a single glossy rectangle that slips to her lap before she can stop it.
As she gazes at the weathered card face, Naminé finds herself remembering the meanings and symbolism attributed to every suit and trump, the story behind each recounted to her every time she wins a game of Blackjack.
One-eyed jack, laughing boy, flower Queen, the Black Lady. The suicide king, the man with the axe, the false King of Hearts.
He teaches her about history, and it is only during then - frowning at her fan of cards whilst Luxord chuckles in a rich baritone - that she learns the most: she considers the library out of bounds, not only due to the nature of the texts within, but also the presence of its near-permanent occupants, too deeply immersed in their scientific theories to be able to see much else. Whilst the other members try to teach her about a variety of different things - how to understand the physics of the world, the balance of ecosystems, the socio-economic and political statuses of distant worlds; how to create powerful chemical compounds, to calculate the trajectory of any projectile in motion, to argue philosophy and existentialism - Luxord is the one who teaches her fun and anticipation, teaches her how to look forward to every poker game, every chess match, every round of Hearts.
“What card is this, Luxord?” she asks him one day, holding up the stiff rectangle, emblazoned with a single, ornate design; up to this point, he has rewarded her with snippets of history, richly intriguing, every time she beats him at his own game, and this is the only card he has yet to explain in the entire deck. She is struck by the resemblance between it and the symbol of the Nobodies, and wonders if somehow, they are inextricably linked.
“It’s the death card,” Luxord states simply; his sharp, perceptive gaze does not miss the unbidden shiver which wracks her bare shoulders, and he reaches out to steady her, concern written across his features. “I shouldn’t be imparting such gritty tales of warfare upon ladies such as yourself,” he murmurs, more to himself, as he remembers their established tradition of playing and learning.
“Tell me-” she begins, but is silenced by his gloved finger settling upon her lips.
“I can’t,” he says with a hint of sorrowful amusement. “You’ll have to find out for yourself, dove.”
One year later, Naminé stares forlornly down at the creased card, and tries to summon forth memories of the father she never had, the debonair gambler with the secret smile who taught her all she knew about life and people.
“I still haven’t found out,” she chokes out, hastily flicking away her tears-he would be aghast to see her now, red-eyed and runny-nosed, hiccoughing into her hands. “I’m so sorry.”
*
Bitterness rises underneath her skin, and despite her best efforts, she cannot push away the memories of him, abhorrent and mocking in every way, undermining and second-guessing her every impulse and instinct.
When she closes her eyes, she sees his face - with the capacity for kindness, had he been spared by the Darkness - and hears his voice, lips tickling her ear as he whispers hateful little sweet nothings to her. His honeyed words do not detract from the subtle venom which lingers within the deep timbre of his tones, and when he leans down to her to press a chaste kiss to her forehead, she is half-certain she hears him murmur an anathema which is lost when he reaches forwards to trace a line down her jaw. “Memento mori, little blossom,” he breathes, and then he is gone, in a swirl of petals, lush and fragrant-yet when she grabs a fistful, crushing and bringing them to her nose, Naminé can smell the tang of death, bittersweet and burning the back of her throat.
It is this memory of feigned affection that sickens her the most; she hates herself for obeying him, for blindly heeding his instructions without thinking of defying him. She hates herself for not fighting back when the thorn-lined vines knot around her and shackle her in place on her seat, not thinking of stabbing at the cruel tendrils which prevent her from bolting from the Castle like a cornered animal at the end of its tether. She hates herself for not thinking even once about sabotaging his memories, or at least trying to, and her failures resonate harshly in her mind, long after he is gone.
But most of all, she both hates him and fears him, with every fibre of her being - would hate him, would fear him, were it possible for her to have emotions.
She sweeps fierce strokes of her pencil against the paper, pressing remorselessly against the sheet until something gives way; she draws with a feverish urgency, and blindly sends her crayon-tip across the now-crinkled surface, ignoring the ugly lines which slash across the once-pristine backdrop. It is only the sharp snap that forcibly wrenches her from her fleeting mania; a sudden twinge of pain in the palm of her hand brings her back to the present, and Naminé is no longer confronted by Marluxia’s satisfied smirk. Instead of cold cobalt eyes and lips curved in an almost-affectionate sneer, she only sees a ruined sheet of paper before her eyes, one side adorned by a hastily-sketched rose - all velvety scarlet petals and wicked thorns - and overlaid by thick, dark slashes of graphite, obscuring the image beneath it.
An erratic crisscross of marks swims before her eyes, melting into the red of the velvety petals, irregular blots of colour she almost throws onto the paper; for an instant, she is not in Twilight Town, but back in Castle Oblivion, trembling as Marluxia bends towards her, patting her fondly on the head and crooning his poisonous little valedictions into her ear, reminding her of her own mortality.
Skin crawling, she rips the sheet out with unnecessary force, crumpling it into a tight sphere; it is only once the blood-red rose has vanished from sight that her breathing relaxes, and she loosens her white-knuckled grip on her drawing pad.
*
When she begins to draw the outline of storm-clouds on the upper corner of a fresh page, she is unable to suppress a shiver which runs down her spine, a phantasmagorical sensation of ghostly fingers trailing down her back.
She remembers sugared words and honeyed confidences, remembers playful laughter - high and girlish and exultant - remembers poise and arrogance and impossible measures of self-assurance.
But most of all, Naminé remembers her only female watcher, who wears two faces which detail two stories.
One of them, she exposes to the entire Organisation with aplomb. They know Larxene only as the Savage Nymph, pitiless and ferocious in everything - including name - with a bottomless capacity for cruelty. They know her as the sneering minx who embarks only on the grisliest of missions, the malicious vixen whose preferred occupation is toppling empires and watching worlds crumble in the aftermath of her heinous deeds. They know her as the one who fights with thunder and lightning, harnessing these twin forces of nature and forcing them to do her bidding.
But Naminé knows her as someone else.
Away from the scrutiny of her male cohorts, the Nymph abandons some of her pretences. During unguarded moments when she is too tired to be vindictive, she confesses snippets of her past to Naminé, painting her a desolate picture of the life she once led.
Naminé hears of crops which failed too often, famines which plagued sprawling lands. She hears of being sold for little more than a song, of training long and hard to be an assassin. She hears of heartbreak and despair, hears of loneliness and guilt, hears of childish dreams to be a princess, now eaten away by bitterness; the stories fill her up until she can take no more, and it feels like she will go mad, hearing all the tales of past lives too painful to relive.
When Larxene’s head nods and the sleepy murmur of her voice fades away, Naminé does not bother her - partially because she will be ripped to ribbons for disturbing the woman, but partially out of sympathy.
They are not all that different, after all. They just choose to express themselves in different manners.
This is why she tries not to mind when Larxene returns after a mission gone badly, and is sent to supervise her. Naminé bears the shouting and raging, endures the harsh blows and the stinging slaps, because she knows she will have her throat cut if she speaks out against it. She takes the screamed curses and the hair-pulling, the threats and the maledictions, until the torrent of wild, storm-like fury abates and Larxene is left exhausted and despondent after all this, and just curls up and cries.
In the face of all this, Naminé does not know what to do. So she parrots back to the Nymph stories that the others told her, until the angry tears stop and she is back to her former self, infuriatingly confident and smug in her emotional security.
She is broken, and nobody sees it.
Naminé ignores the warnings Larxene heaps upon her when such incidents pass, and assures the woman she will never tell anybody about her rare moments of fragility.
She simply cannot find it in herself to truly hate her, even after everything she did.
She finishes doodling out expanses of clouds and jagged forks of lightning, and sketches in a pastel-pale rainbow - for hope and optimism - arching out across stormy black skies.
“Somewhere,” she says to nobody in particular, “I hope you found your happy ending.”
*
It feels as though she has come full circle.
She doesn’t want to remember, but yet she is unable to banish him from her mind: the pitiful condemned boy, his existence as fleeting as that of a mayfly’s; she is no better than him, and yet she sits in her chambers and rewrites his memories, just as she rewrote those of his Other.
It’s almost perverse, she thinks, to be playing God over his memories. A single slip of her pencil, a single errant smudge, and entire blocks of memory can be erased or corrupted beyond her control. Without them, what will he be, but even more of an empty shell? A multitude of what-ifs plague her as she bends over the paper and draws, linking sketches together with fine, crosshatched chains, tiny, detailed drawings of what has been, what could be and what will never be, spilling from sheet to sheet.
What if he remembers he forgot?
What if he didn’t understand why they had to do it?
What if she made a mistake, a calculation error somewhere, that resulted in the loss of memories crucial to him?
What if, what if, what if-
There are not many things Naminé wishes for, but at this moment in time, gazing down at a bare page - and surrounded by crumpled sheets and torn-up fragments of paper, littering the floor around her seat like artificial snowflakes - she wishes for another way, where the boy is allowed to just live his life…or whatever it is he lives. However, she knows it can never be; sooner or later, he will have to merge with Sora: that is the most crucial part of DiZ’s machinations. That much she understands, and that is her main motivation behind implanting the false memories in his mind, even as her eyes swim with tears and she draws feverishly into the book, mapping out his fake existence. She treats it as her penance, for unravelling Sora’s memories, and knows this is the price she pays for her meddling; still, nothing can take her mind off the limp, black-cloaked boy who is brought to her by a dishevelled Riku, dumped unceremoniously on the cold, hard floor like so much unwanted cargo.
It is a fate she does not wish on anyone, least of all on the boy who has lost so much.
Naminé closes her eyes and sketches from memory, tracing his features on the paper before her with care; she colours in blue eyes, lips curved in a ghost of a smile, and a shock of unruly blond hair; she draws in black-cloaked figures and a golden sunset, sparkling waters and melting ice-cream. It is only then that she surveys her work, satisfied. Reaching forwards with trembling fingers, she traces the features drawn onto her formerly blank canvas, and remembers Roxas, stoop-shouldered and painfully frail, so far removed from the remorseless fighter he was, just mere hours before his capture.
This is how he should be, she tells herself, detaching the sheet and placing it gently on the table, far from the reach of the wavering candles. She surveys the portrait for several seconds, and it seems as though Roxas is there with her, happy and carefree, as he should be allowed to be.
Just because they are forgotten dregs of forgotten worlds does not mean they are any less human, no matter what DiZ says.
*
When the distant grandfather clock tolls again, she slowly shuts her drawing-book, rising to her feet and placing both pencil and paper-pad on her vacated seat. Everything is ready now, and the pieces are all in place, as Luxord would have said; she casts a final glance around the room, gazes fleetingly at the pictures which adorn the walls, and turns her back to them.
There is nowhere for her to go; the past is gone, slipping through her splayed fingers like fine sand, and there is only the future laid out ahead of her; there is little she can do but march forwards without a backwards glance, and make her way towards wherever fate takes her. To this end, she has to meet Roxas, to throw back the rippling, gauzy curtains of his false memories, and guide him towards his destiny, back to where he belongs.
When she leaves the room, Naminé cannot help but wish in vain.
As a Nobody, she decides, if there is one thing - one thing at all - that she is allowed to wish for, it is for her to be able to alter her own memories without having to face the consequences, the repercussions of meddling with her own mind in such a way.
Everything she does is a lie. Falsehoods are weaved inextricably into her work, and she hates herself for believing the fallacies sketched on white paper before her, filling in the blankness with something which is scarcely better. She is the only one who remembers Xion, erased from the very face of the earth, her very memory dissipating away into nothingness. Perhaps, though, she is the one who got the better side of the deal; Naminé is almost envious of her, because of what she no longer has, what she has ceased to become.
It is better to forget what she does not wish to remember, than to have them haunt her every time she sketches something which reminds her of them.
Better to forget, than to remember at all.
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