kh_drabble | [240 -- ocean] floodgates

Challenge: [240] Ocean
Title: Floodgates
Word Count: 568
Spoilers: For 358/2 Days
Synopsis: The riptides tear through your mind, and the memories of deep, fathomless blue seas and sand-salt-faded skies are gone, leaving you trembling in their wake.
Notes: Something non-Organisation, for once! \o/

Trapped within your protective cocoon of glass-petals and porcelain-leaves, you dream and remember.

They come back to you first in bits and pieces, trickling sluggishly through the cracks of your subconscious, and then before you know it, there’s a torrent of memories sluicing through your mind with the relentless force of a tidal wave. You have no choice but to go where the swirling white-foam eddies take you, have no choice but to be borne forth like a ragdoll by the raging undertow.

For an instant, you glimpse bright blue eyes – so much like yours, only not – the colour of calm, boundless oceans: you see (Sh—?) the faintest trace of a smile which spreads across an achingly familiar face, washing across her features like waves breaking across a pebbled shore. You see dark hair fanned out behind the face with the wistful smile, and reach out to grasp the gloved hands as they plummet from your reach.

(—ion—?) Your fingers scrabble wildly through empty air, wisps of memory fleeing from your urgently-grasping hands like evaporating raindrops and then you’re trapped, trapped within a boiling vortex with no escape. You remember anger, denial, determination—scalding recollections which bite savagely back at you when you try to embrace them. You remember dread and anguish and despondence and finally sorrowful acceptance, sweeping across your heart and washing away the hurt. (Shioioshiosh—?)

(Shio—?)

You remember soft golden hair (Nami—?) the colour of sun-warmed sand on the beach, remember pale cheeks and pink lips and small fingernails like little seashells, chewed ragged with worry. You remember white lace which brings to mind drying salt pans, recall heavily textured fabric which slips through your fingertips (—miné—?) when you reach out in vain for an anchor against the clinging throes of sleep which threaten to drag you into their depths.

(Naminamaminaminé—?)

Even now, it is an effort to remember. You can no longer hold on, and the name slips from your mind like an eel, wriggling and writhing and struggling against your arms. For a fleeting instant, you see flecks of tears, catch fleeting sight of a quick, brittle smile from between interlocked fingers, before the image becomes obscured by a thousand ripples from a thousand crystal droplets, spreading out across your eyes.

The riptides tear through your mind, and the memories of deep, fathomless blue seas and sand-salt-faded skies are gone, leaving you trembling in their wake.

Last of all, you remember dark auburn-red hair (K-kair—), remember a swatch of fabric the colour of Atlantean sea-corals. You remember seashell charms, hard and knobbly against the palm of your hand, remember seaweed and kelp bracelets which link you together with—with—

With what?

It’s on the tip of your tongue (Kai—); your mind stirs like a sleeper in the dark as you fight furiously against the tide of memories (—airi—) which threatens to bowl you over and leave you gasping in its aftermath.

You see a dimpled crescent smile, whisper a secret promise into the spiral shell of an ear (—ai—), hear the mellifluous chime of a giddy, carefree laugh.

When you reach out to embrace the memory, it doesn’t escape, does not dissolve into a thousand bubbles which will stream painfully away from your reach. It stays in place, so solid and present and existent, and you remember.

Kairi.

[240 -- ocean] floodgates

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