kh_drabble | [118] "If He Were to Ask"

*pets community* Don't go quiet...

Challenge: [118] Misery Loves Company
Title: If He Were to Ask
Word Count: 311
Rating: PG
Notes: Namine-centric, sorta. From CoM to post KHII.

Sora is already on the fifth floor when Axel places his palms on either side of Naminé's drawing and squints down at her.

"Why are you doing this?" he asks, not to be mocking or as a joke, but out of actual curiousity. Naminé grips her crayon for a moment and it smudges the edge of Sora's smile.

She looks up through fallen hair and watches Axel's eyes continue, as if they are speaking. Why are you tearing apart this boy's memories? Why are you ruining everything he is when he's what you've been waiting for, they ask.

Naminé swallows and makes up a pretend answer, like the picture in front of her.

"I'm afraid," she says.

Riku is the next to ask her; afterwards, when Sora is sleeping.

"They made me," she tells him.

DiZ asks her out of lack of conversation, but she already has a reply ready for him: "I didn't understand my powers."

Reunited in blood and bone, she answers Kairi, "He hurt me." Kairi nods into the mirror, hugs her own arms tightly, and thinks of pretty things to calm her beating heart, pretty things that are neither pink nor blossoms.

Roxas asks with his eyes sometimes but Naminé isn't sure whether he's asking Why about Sora or about himself.

At night when Kairi is dreaming and won't notice if Naminé creeps away to be alone in her mind and heart, she sometimes asks herself. She tells herself it doesn't matter because she fixed everything and Sora never blamed her anyway. Sora.

He never asks her. She's never been more thankful. Because, for him, she would tell the truth. It sits, waiting, in the darkest part of her thoughts and regrets, beating with her heart away from where Kairi or Riku or anyone can hear it. Just Sora, if he were to ask.

"I wanted company."