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When Kairi wakes up it’s to a girl fixed at the edge of her bed more often than not, more times than she’s comfortable mentioning.
Moonlight flitters in through the large oblong windows of her room to drag across the floor like long swathes of so much sheer voile, bounce light hitting the far wall fuzzy at the edges. It bathes her room a calming, lulling blue she hasn’t seen since she’d left the islands months ago, and Kairi sits up, blearily rubs at her temple. Nudges the back of the girl who’s silhouette cuts through the clouded light like a butter knife and says more like a whine, “You think so loud.”
Naminé turns to her with her fifteen year old face and Sora’s wide eyes, fair hair falling over her shoulder like a swathe of so much sheer voile. “Did I wake you?” she asks, like she doesn’t already know.
“Mm,” Kairi hums with a wave of her hand, deliberate, still sleep slow, “but it’s whatever. What’re you thinking about?”
“Nothing,” she says softly. “Nothing important.”
It’s one of those nights, then. Kairi flops back onto the bed, unceremonious and ungraceful, eyelids already drooping heavy with the mistake of ever opening at all, blinking ersatz blue into honest black. Directs, “You should lie better, if you’re me then you need to lie better,“ more to the ceiling than anything else.
The orange-purple glow diffusing around them isn’t conductive of it, but Kairi passes her hand underneath the leaves anyway, frowns when the shadows on her skin come up too faint. Riku laughs at her, helplessly, a giddy little thing. She tries to kick his shin and he hops away with a light skip and a twirl, enough flair for her to see he’s still a show-off. If he were here Sora would’ve tried to trip him up, probably, but as it stands Kairi lets him go with an eye roll.
“Sorry, sorry, you miss it, right? A real sun.” He says, now from underneath an eave of one of the tower’s lower hanging roofs that overlook this side of Yen Sid’s little floating island. Even from there, the soft light pervades. It tinges his hair a cute pink and idly she thinks they match. “It took me forever to get used to this.”
“‘Forever’,” Kairi scoffs, “as if you stay in one place long enough for that.”
“Okay, you got me.” He says, stuffing his hands into the truly ridiculously oversized pockets of his jacket, a hair’s breadth from truly sheepish.
He’s come to lead her back inside for dinner with a king and a traitor and an old mage, like how a knight calls for his rebelling, too-much-trouble princess, and she should go if only to curtail Lea’s indignation that she’d continued training without him. She should go if only because she hasn’t eaten since breakfast, but she doesn’t feel hungry and it doesn’t feel like dinnertime. A listlessness overtakes her limbs and leaves her unsure of whether it’s a sort of lackadaisical afternoon lethargy or a dead of night type of exhaustion, she wants to sleep.
The wind picks up, pulls a branch drooping towards her and as the leaves get closer the shadow running across her knuckles darkens into something almost natural. Kairi overturns her hand, like she can hold onto it, but in that moment the branch sweeps back up into its place and leaves her grasping orange open palmed at the sky. Something in her aches, but not in a right way, not in a way that makes sense.
“My internal clock is going to hell and I think I’m going crazy.” She says after a beat, and he laughs. She does manage to kick his shin on the way inside.
Static’s a haze over her vision before eyelids even crack open, and when they do the disorentiation is enough to keep her quiet. Over the window are the blinds from her room back in Destiny Islands, fucked up from when Sora had gotten a finger stuck between the vertical slats during a sleepover years and years and years ago and now amongst the identical neat faultless strips of moonlight spilling over her bed one runs jagged across her ankles, as lucent as it is unaware of its imperfection.
Naminé sits at the edge of her bed with the posture of something made out of baked clay air dried, but curiosity tilts her head around like a blooming flower looking for the magic-made man-hidden sun. The blue is deeper than she ever remembered it being at night in her room, which overlooked the downtown street, always permeated by the soft glow of streetlights and shoplights and the occasional car. Unlike Sora and Riku, who both lived on the island outskirts, in little shanty beach houses where every star in the sky laid just outside their bedroom windows.
Through the crack in the blinds is where the illusion ends, and Kairi looks up at every star in the sky with a weird sort of disappointment building in her chest. But at least there’s a moon.
While they share flipsides of a heart that has little to do with the way Naminé’s eyes see through her, unblinking and all knowing and all understanding. However, of what was anyone’s guess. “Are you unhappy here?”
“Do you think that?” Kairi lets her hand fall from the blinds. Sighs into dead air, when she gets no response. “It’s frustrating to have to play catch up when I wasn’t given a chance to race on time in the first place. But I’m not unhappy.”
When she doesn’t humour Naminé’s silence a second time, she gets a reply. “You miss your islands.”
Kairi’s eyes flicker over to her with a blink, only to find her looking at nothing on the far wall. She says, finally, “Is that what everyone thinks? I get a little homesick and people start doubting my resolve?”
All she gets is a head shake, and a judging sort of quiet that leaves Kairi with the dilemma of whether she could come on too defensive. But as she considers opening her mouth, Naminé breaks it with a whisper. “I can’t understand it. With Roxas and I, everything we had to do. If we were given a choice, to stay out of it, I think we—” she bites her lip, wide gaze slides with a drop to the floor.
“It’s not really much of a choice, is it.” Kairi pulls her knees to her chest, and Naminé’s unflinching stare lands on the bed as her legs pass under the rays. “If I don’t, things are gonna get worse. I can help. It’s an issue of duty, probably.”
“Duty,” she echoes, trying the word out in her mouth.
She watches Naminé as her eyes follow the rows of filtered moon falling across her bed and across her arms, crawling across the floor and up the wall, tall thin pillars white light against the dark just about touching the ceiling. Her hands wring themselves in her lap, in her skirt, clench around something that’s maybe a pencil, or a hand. The one bent strip falls short where the ruined slats twisted at an odd angle, blocking out the gap, and that’s where she finally lets her eyes rest.
“She was always so much more like the three of you than any of us.” Naminé says, finally, more to herself than anything. Hands in her lap, stare fixed to that far wall, blinking.
A deep blue she’s never seen before drips off her eyelashes, dragging like the slow pull of the shutter cord, and she leans back against her pillows with a sigh. “Who?”
Naminé smiles at her like the question itself was some sort of great service. “No one you know.”
“So tell me.”
In the haze of that year in which her life had been decided for her Kairi remembers splaying out in the green with Selphie sitting ginger beside her, complaining about grass stains and absentmindedly carding her fingers through the blades looking for surprise wildflowers or maybe an insect to gross her out with. Probably an insect. Sunlight dribbles down through fractures in the canopy in small shards soft at the edges, filtered twice over through the rainy season overcast and through the leaves onto their bare legs pressed too close together for the heat or the sweat. Filling the quiet with talk about school work and clubs and who out of their foster families would they sacrifice in a house fire ( I save my cat, obviously, don’t give me that look — how is that worse than your — ) because Selphie never did well with silence.
“If you leave will I see you again?”
Kairi swallows. “What makes you think I’m leaving?”
“Mamimo, you were always going to leave. Looking out at the ocean like you did when we were fourteen, like you’ve done since you were ten always with the two of them, you always planned on going.”
“I always planned on coming back, too.”
“That,” Selphie says mildly, with a tinny little laugh that throws her head back against the tree bark and makes the light catch on her white teeth, “is not the part of the choice that matters.”
And she doesn’t agree with that, not fully, but the most pressing part of this conversation weighs on her tongue. “Are you angry with me?”
“Maybe.” Selphie smiles at her something that’s real now, a bit too sad. “But maybe I just don’t get it.”
As they sit underneath the tree and Selphie draws patterns onto the back of her hand, tracing the leaves left stencilled there by the afternoon shine, Kairi wonders if the world is really a fair place. She wonders if Selphie would ever understand, because despite all they shared the fundamental differences of their lives lay not in their circumstances. She wonders if Selphie would ever stop trying to be a normal girl, and she wonders if she was just the one who couldn’t be.
And she wonders if she looks long enough hard enough far enough out at the sea and the sky her boys would wash up on shore again, like she did, come back to her without her ever moving a muscle. And she wonders if that would just make her the angriest person alive. And she wonders, Selphie’s hand in her’s and the twice distilled sun barely warming her face, how long it would take her to build a raft.
Riku blinks at her. “Xion?”
“Mhmm, just a name I heard. Was wondering if you recognized it.”
For his part, it looks like he gives it some serious thought. Shrugs, eventually. “Not really. Seems familiar though. From a book, maybe.”
A gasp. “You read? I’m so proud of you.”
“All right, all right, enough. You tell a girl she’s got a knack for firaga and she thinks she’s a genius. Suddenly fifteen years on honour roll don’t matter.”
“You weren’t an honour student out of the womb.”
“You don’t know that.”
Where Naminé sits primly on the edge of her mattress there is no give, no wrinkle in the sheets, an occupancy in theory than actuality, a tenant you never see but always pays rent and you’re told to slide the mail through the slot and leave well enough alone. Tonight there are curtains hanging framing the window’s tall oblong face, sheer voile long and billowing with a breeze Kairi does not feel on her skin, pinhole stars winking in the more-purple-than-orange-red dusk that doesn’t quite fit the image in the flip of her heart but neither of them could ever get the sky right it seems.
“We only ever spoke once,” Naminé speaks into the still air, hands folded in her lap like she doesn’t know what to do with them, “but I watched her a lot. I watched all of you.”
Resting her cheek in the crook of her elbow piled up on top her knees, Kairi hums to show she’s listening. Even if she knows there are things she’s not being told. Naminé looks through the curtains like a ghost through fog, eyes heavy lidded.
“I wouldn’t say we chose what happened to us. Not me, or Sora, or Riku. Or any of you.” Kairi says softly.
“She did.”
Within the point halfway through a blink the walls flash white.
“It wasn’t what she wanted, and it wasn’t happy, but she did.”
Riku and the king take their leave again five hours before Sora all but crashes onto the tower’s front step, smoking gummi ship and bumbling royal guard at his heels and a grand tale on the tip of his tongue that turns into a moan when realisation hits. The two of them are just unlucky like that, she tells him so with a laugh a sliver shy of unkind. Starcrossed in a way they didn’t deserve, but she doesn’t mention that.
Something in her says the three of them won’t see each other again until the culmination of their epic quest. But she didn’t ask, Naminé, did she. Not everyone makes a habit of guessing the ending before the story’s over. Not everyone wants to know.
After, when Yen Sid is done with another lecture and the good fairies with fussing, and Merlin lets her go for the day with sore knuckles bent in a phantom grip for something to hold onto, a hilt, or maybe a pencil. She pulls Sora aside into a little alcove where the perpetually dying sunset light diffuses soft against the walls and there is no shade, she has a hand to his shoulder and a question.
“Sora, do you dream?” She’s not quite sure why she sounds so desperate. “About Roxas?”
A beat. “Do you dream about Roxas?”
“No, dummy, I do about Naminé.”
Two days from now she’d be leaving with Lea to some secluded world that’s meant to help better facilitate their training. She wonders if it has a real sun, real shadows. She wonders if she should cut her hair.
“...Should I be dreaming about Roxas?
“I don’t know.”
“If I’m not, does that mean he’s not okay?”
“I don’t know.” There’s regret, suddenly, for ever bringing it up, a lead weighted sadness that settles in the hollow of her ribs but it’s not her’s. “Maybe he just doesn’t want to talk.”
In his face, a different face a year older but with the same eyes, she sees a reflection of a heartbreak like a half second ripple in the water before he scuffs the ground with his shoe. “All this stuff is so weird, Kairi.”
Her shoulders shake and hunch with a burden Kairi cannot see, and she thinks for a moment maybe she's protecting her. The world has never been kind to girls who know too much for their own good, and Naminé sits with the Atlas weight of her knowledge like one who’s already let it kill her. “She thanked me.”
The day the king arrived to ferry away Riku and Sora off to Yen Sid’s tower, after she’d waved them off from the dock of the play island and after she’d sat on the shore for an hour next to her kicked off sandals, burning the soles of her feet and watching the sunlight flitter in through the palm leaves. When Selphie had found her, running up the beach still in her school uniform, shirt sticking to her back from the exertion of rowing, and Kairi’d held up a thalassa shell she’d dug up out of the sand in front of the worried tilt of her eyebrows and laughed. Selphie’s face had welled up red and splotchy with something unspoken and unshed, and when Kairi looked at her bright eyes she thought about insects in the grass.
“When you go you have to find me. You have to find me and say goodbye,” she tells her, later, voice high and light in the sort of fake-cute way that always embarrassed her, and always delighted Selphie in how much it embarrassed her, “I won’t forgive you if you don’t, Kairi. I won’t.”
Somehow, for inexplicable, inexplainable reasons, Kairi knew she would be here. Something whispers it to her in the fuzz of her vision before she blinks her eyes open and awake and alert as she can be when it feels like her head is splitting itself open a raw spill into her lap. The girl at the edge of her bed doesn’t hide her curiosity as well as Naminé, or at all, craning her neck to look around the room with wide blue eyes, and Kairi wonders why she expected anything different.
The room is exactly as it was when Kairi fell asleep, there are no curtains, and there is no moonlight, but the outline of Xion crinkles, rubbed blurry at the edges bleeding into everything around her like india ink on printer paper. This is different from all the other times, like a glitch, corrupted data breaking through and the bluescreen sputters purple and green and white noise and white, white, white, where the hardware is at the end of it’s life and you need to pray you have a warranty.
“Oh, this is new,” she says, like it’s the first thing she’s ever said, like it’s the first thing she’s said in a long, long time. The words pour out of her mouth with a reverberation that makes Kairi’s head soft. She can feel her mind switching tracks, the fight or flight response of the human brain when confronted with something it should not see, and she forces focus with a prickling at her temple. Xion tilts her head, and her face makes Kairi's heart ache nostalgia for a place it's never been, and can never return to. “Naminé?”
“No,” there’s a smile tugging at her lips even as her vision quadruples, “but I can tell her you said hi.”
She doesn’t look like she knows what to do with that.
Blue eyes. Familiar. She blinks, the static flashes white, and there’s a space between the darkness of the outside and the darkness of her own eyelids where she sees Sora’s face. “Kairi,” Xion says, reverent, and oh, she hates that.
Still, Kairi smiles sweetly. “Me.”
“There’s nothing much here.” She says instead a bit too blunt, hopping off the bed with a light skip and twirl, can’t help the show-off. “Is this your room?”
“Temporarily, sure.”
She rocks back on her heels. “Do you think we could go outside?”
Kairi doesn’t know, has never tried, but she gropes around the bedside table for a rubber band anyway, other hand collecting her hair in a fist. Double loops it at the base of her neck. “Where to?”
“Anywhere but a beach.”
Somehow, inexplicably, she already knew the sky would be exactly as it was when she was awake and that it wasn’t right. Her subconscious always ran out of steam come the outside world. The gardens outside Yen Sid’s tower were suspended a beat too late into a sunset, shimmering prettily in the gloaming tinged a bit too much either which way to count as either part of the day but still not right enough, not red enough. Xion tilts her head up and up, looks at the twinkling stars with a resigned sort of disappointment on her face and Kairi has the sudden impulse to run, find the edge and jump, chase after a sun that wasn’t there to disappear under a nonexistent horizon. On the precipice of true night everything felt a bit too lonely and a bit too bright.
It’s her own head, but Kairi feels helpless suddenly, looking at the trees and the leaves and the orange glow surrounding Xion’s head like a halo. It’s chilly. Absurdly, she wishes she brought a coat.
Xion turns to her with a calculating look, smile skirting the edges of sardonic and sad. “I’m happy I got to meet you.”
“Are you?” She says with a laugh, doubtful. A faint edge of bitter, but that’s not her fault. “I don’t know if I would be, in your place.”
“Ah,” turns to her with little tilt to her head that begets an emotion Kairi can’t identify, “you’ve got a lot in common with someone very dear to me.”
“Naminé?”
Sora. Blink. Riku. Blink. Blonde hair, eyes like Sora’s but not, a face that isn’t Sora’s except just enough. Blink. A face that isn’t Sora’s at all except.
The thought, a poor puppet only made to be used. Blinks the image of Riku away again, and guilt, then. A burning bright room, gravestone flowers standing tall and looming, the birthplace of girls who are only meant to be bled dry. More guilt. An inexplicable amount of guilt, Kairi thinks, even as she has no way of knowing the reasons why.
The smile is genuine, now. “Well yes, obviously. But not just her.” It’s getting hard and a bit painful to keep staring, but she feels like she has to. Like this is the last production of a grand play, she needs to give it the honour of a captive audience.
“Naminé’s got a lot of things she wants to say to you.” Where Xion meets her eyes here the trees flicker in the background. Their shadows nonexistent in the real world here across the ground, long and sprawling and white and thin. “But I don’t think you want to hear most of them.”
“I don’t.” She says, and Kairi swears she feels this world made up as it was stop spinning, she feels the underside of her heart break in two.
If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear it did it happen. If a tree falls in a forest and no one remembers it did it matter. If a tree falls in a forest and she turns away back to her room would Xion still be standing here in the middle of a garden she didn’t recognize wishing for a sunset Kairi’s never seen, that still manages to hollow out her chest with a want that’s not her’s twice over.
Because there are things she wasn’t told, and Kairi doesn’t know the full story. She will never see the full picture. There’s a convoluted plotline in these long neat rows of blaring white across the ground and the dark black shapes of the trees standing against the skyline tall and looming in a way only children in over their heads ever see, that Kairi will never unravel. She will just have to be fine with that even as it feels like Naminé’s guilt cores the apple of her heart and every time she blinks she sees cold marble, a place that somehow calls to mind both birth and final resting.
There was a story and a choice that wasn’t much of a choice. But what Kairi gathers is there was someone left behind, there always is. Blink. Her eyes are the same. Kairi is looking at herself.
Xion bows her head, short hair falling into her face, a dark curtain to bring the show to a close. Her hands open palms to the sky, and her fingers curl like if she stares hard enough there would be something for her to hold onto. “I don’t think this is going to happen again.”
Kairi hums around the heart in her throat, it’s not her’s. “No.”
“I don’t blame you,” she says, near the end, and it’s hard to not look away when a person speaks so frankly to someone who isn’t you.
How could you not, comes unbidden, to the forefront of her mind, to the tip of her tongue. Kairi bites her cheek so hard it bleeds, but it keeps her mouth shut well enough.
When Kairi wakes up it’s to a girl fixed at the edge of her bed. Naminé’s shoulders shake with the weight of a name that reverberates in her skull till Kairi’s head is soft and numb with a memory she cannot place and the taste of rust. Still, she hums, chin tucked into her knees, to show she’s listening.