(no subject)
At first he hates her.
He hates the sad (repentant) way that she speaks and how she never makes a whisper of a noise when she enters a room. He hates how she fades into white and how her eyes are always downcast but he feels them on his back as he leaves.
He hates her like he hates himself, so intensely that it makes him sick.
-----
There is something similar to him in her: the part that is desperate from having too many people to fix.
She looks up from a drawing and she tells him that Sora’s memories are there, but sometimes memories twist, and fade during the course of his life. He glowers at her from the shadows when she says that some memories are so deeply buried and blurred that she has to guess the smaller details.
She is honest, and that’s a little bit harder to hate. Though not by much.
----
He notices that some of her crayons are more worn than others. Radiant yellow, used to scrawl out warm sunny days on the beach, has been whittled down to an inch. Deep blue, which strokes into existence the seaborne horizon, is even smaller.
He is silent when he notices that the stark black is hardly a stub, and she refuses to admit that it’s because she’s started to fix memories of him.
For the first time, he tells her what he’s thinking.
“Sora and Kairi might forgive, but I can’t forget.”
Deep down, he thinks she understands.
----
He’s made it his business to always be in the room whenever she has her crayons moving, though lately it’s less because he doesn’t trust her and more that he’s just curious.
She’s drawing a lush scene of green and yellow beside the sea now and if he closes his eyes, he can feel the sand shifting between his toes and smell the crisp ocean air. The hard, sterile white rooms of the mansion fade away and cease to matter in the presence of his own nostalgia and it’s delightful.
When he opens his eyes, he remembers that the culmination of their mistakes is sleeping in the next room.
He feels awful.
----
She brings a finished drawing to Diz for approval. The man gives one curt, hurried nod as if he has better things to do and leaves the two of them to their own devices. She hesitates, and walks back to her chair, sandals flapping until she sets herself down. She makes three precise marks at different parts of the picture and by then he is already on his feet and standing over her shoulder.
He spends one glance over the paper before his fears are quieted, brushing gloved fingers over conspicuous strokes. Three brightly colored figures are perched up on a familiarly shaped tree trunk, set against an unusually brilliant (for crayons, that is) island backdrop. Three carefully drawn u’s dot the space below their eyes.
“I don’t know if they were smiling,” She tries to mimic the expression and fails, “But I want them to be.”
Her blue eyes gaze up knowingly as he shadows his way back to his usual spot against the far wall. This is why he can’t hate her but wishes desperately he could; He and Namine are the same. Two pawns by the wayside clinging to scraps of hope too fragile for guilty hands.
Her voice feels empty.
Everything they do does.