A/N: Written for tunasaladsonnet over at LJ, for kh_drabble's 2008 Secret Santa project (:
Colour Schema
She's walking when she finds it. Walking, just walking, little white slippers padding mechanically on taintless floors, and the slippery nobodies sliding, undulating, in and out of swashed walls, noiselessly. And she's just walking, putting one foot before another, not looking before her, not looking behind her, hands clasped, stained fingers flicking at each other, engaged in a mini war of their own – the only unstill things in this sanitized wonderland. She wonders if she's tipped the scale – her walking, her fidgeting – but it is all without purpose, so it does not matter – and then her feet catch on something. An incongruity. How rare, this tiny, thick lump under her sole. Almost painful.
Namine shifts. Bends. She picks it up, rolls it about within her fingers. She counts every rounded, resolute edge as the thing turns over in her palm. Her gaze roves over every little puncture in red. One to six. She closes her fist.
Back in her room she sprawls on her front and the object slides from her restless hands. Four. Its minute clatter scares her, almost. But she lifts it up, lets it fall, again. Six. And then she lets herself smile. There's a memory in her mind – three children in a hut, the rain whipping outside, a torn-in-places snakes-and-ladders sheet splayed across the damp floor, and…
Yes. Dice.
And like a child grubbing for cracked shells on the beach she shifts her weight from one elbow to another, pushing her hair back at intervals, knees knocking against the chilly floor, crayon in one hand, dice in the other, paper spread out below her like a world…
Three.
She fills the palm tree leaves in with violent red.
One.
The sand with blue.
Five.
The sky in wide, swirling purple.
Six.
His hair in scratchy pink.
Five again. Then two. Three. Two again. Six. Six. One. Four. Five...
The crayons lose themselves in vivid smatterings across the paper. And Namine is lost, hopelessly lost, in her little game. She doesn't hear the steps of booted feet until they are near, so near – until her paper is whisked out from under her fingers to land lightly in the trespassing gloved hands of another.
"So we've an artist in our midst..."
Namine makes a sweep for her picture on tip-toes but he holds it easily out of reach. It takes only another moment of hesitation before she bends to pick up the dice from the floor and holds it out to Luxord, imploringly. It's a trade she demands, despite the seeming subservience of her gesture. But the sides of his mouth stretch in an ironic manner at the motion,
"Then you must know what it means to be a small goddess of an even smaller world."
Her outstretched arm falls back against her side curiously.
"What I don't understand, white-noised ingénue, is your persistence in filling out your tiny universe by chance," he continues lightly. "Volatile, uncontrollable, unchecked… the play is irresistible, of course. But your creation is… your own."
And suddenly Namine is unafraid.
"They – and you're one of them – tell me I have a power…" She watches his gaze laugh, unnerved because she's all too used to it by now. And now she has something of his and it's because it's small enough that she has utmost power over it. For a change. "But I don't feel that I do. It's only when I roll a dice and take a chance that things change, and differences happen."
There is a low, deep-throated, almost inaudible chuckle somewhere in the back of Luxord's throat. He spreads the paper before his gaze again with two fingertips. For one moment that surreal island, an inverted world-that-never-was, glares out of the flimsy white medium. Then Luxord rolls it up, holds it out. She takes it cautiously.
"Namine, Namine… you don't seem to realize the full potential in the words you have just said."
"And beautiful things come out of chance." The words come almost unconsciously. Another memory rises in her mind – that of a female visitor who arrives by meteor shower and makes her home in sand.
"Show me what else you've got." Luxord sits, and there's more than indifferent amusement in his golden eyes. She watches the short plummet of black among the white barrenness - incredible protrusion, welcome abomination… It's a gamble she takes when she holds the colours to her heart and nods, unwaveringly, at his "Come, show me."