kh_drabble | Challenge Post

[136] Endurance
Title: Any Color but White
Word Count: 504
Warnings: Spoilers
Notes: I just squeaked this in under the word limit. This is the first drabble I've actually finished. It's so much harder than it looks to make every word count.

Namine sometimes wishes there were any color besides white in the room set aside for her-- white is so sad, so cold and empty. She fills her pictures with colour in compensation. She dares not ask to be given any more than what she has.

She knows, after all, that she is still prisoner. She's only been moved to a larger cage with a more beautiful view. She can beat her wings now, but wonders if it is crueler to be allowed that much when she knows she will never fly. Slowly she's earning her freedom. Her hand aches, but the drawings roll out of her emptying sketchbook and cover the walls, the floor and the table.

She's earning her freedom, but not to fly. Her reward (so DiZ has said) will be completeness-- reunion with the Other she has never known. She is afraid, but she remembers Sora's smile, and Sora's eyes, and Kairi's smile in his memory, and she perseveres, for the sake of giving back what was taken.

DiZ comes by to watch her every few days, but if he notices the tears on her cheeks when every movement of her overworked hand is agony, he says nothing. Riku is the one who slides the pencil out of her hand gently, uncurls her cramped, stiff fingers while she bites back whimpers of pain, and massages some of the ache out as his fingertips glow green with healing magic.

In Twilight Town the sun never rises far into the sky. From her single vantage point at the table, Namine can watch it ride slowly across the horizon, like the clockwork trains. The shadows crawl across the floor like long fingers, as the day drags on, and finally swallow the room in darkness; then she can put her pencils aside and rest (she has no fear of the dark, after all) until the day dawns through the curtains. And she picks up her sketchbook once more and draws, and draws, until darkness comes again.

She draws even when pain lances through her wrist and Riku does not come to take away the pain, because every stroke of pencil on paper is a step towards her release, and Sora's.

Someday she will see Sora again, smiling at her-- or whatever remains of her-- with an honesty that isn't twisted out of lies and false memories. Someday Sora will smile again at Kairi, the one he should have been fighting to protect all along, and Namine will put aside her secret wish that the memories could have been real, and sublimate it into joy that all that she made wrong has been put right-- and Roxas will be there, too, even if all that remains of him is a distant glint in Sora's eyes, twin to the one in Kairi's--

And the shadows crawl across the room, day upon day, and she stands at the window, watching the sunlit clouds, dreaming of Sora, Kairi and Riku together under blue skies.