a girl by any other name.
Four seasons in a year. But still, he ran out of time. (Namora)
Author's note: Written for Chelmin.
SPRING //
Sora smiles at her when she takes her seat beside him. It's a tentative quirk of the lips and she sees the raw effort he puts into it, so she attempts a smile of her own and returns it.
"You're new?" he questions, head tilted at an angle, body leaning in so his hair very nearly brushes her face. His voice alone suggests he's just hit the halfway mark towards being an adult and he's painfully aware of it.
"Yes. I'll only be here for a year, though," is her soft reply, and she breaks eye contact to reach into her small white-pink-yellow bag. From it, she pulls out a set of coloured markers and a little notebook that's littered with disconnected prose, stark rainbow doodles and intermittent dog ears.
"You like art?" Sora asks, backing away a little, expression calculating, as she flips to a semi-empty page, grabs a marker and poises it over a white patch of paper.
She sort of gives him a calm nod and says, "So, what's your favourite colour?"
- - -
SUMMER //
"I'm Sora, by the way," Sora decides to tell her one day, seventy-three days down the road; sixty-eight days of sitting beside her in the box-like classroom.
Naminé's gaze flickers upward and away from her simple-yet-girlish sketch of a red ladybug and she looks at Sora solemnly.
"I know," she murmurs, and goes back to drawing.
"We skipped introductions the first time," Sora explains, like he wants to make that clear.
"The teacher's attendance sheet helped with that," Naminé replies evenly, tracing little antennae.
"Still," Sora insists slowly. "I think I really like you. So I thought I should introduce myself to you, y'know, in person."
Naminé tears her eyes away from black polka-dots and scarlet wings and stares at Sora unblinkingly, a crease marking its way across her forehead.
Sora grins a little, tips his chair back on two legs, places his hands behind his head and looks toward the whiteboard again.
Eventually, Naminé sighs and looks back down at her lonely creation, picks out a light blue marker and colours in the sky.
"I'm Naminé," she whispers to the inked insect, "by the way. And maybe you should stay away from me."
- - -
AUTUMN //
"Where've you been, Naminé? You weren't in school all week!" Sora cries as Naminé returns on a chilly Friday in October. He's caught her by the East Wing lockers and he wants to talk to her.
She looks tired and unkempt and it seems as though she's forgotten all about her little notebook and her markers because it's not in her now-faded white-pink-yellow bag, which Sora can see is half-zipped and almost empty.
"Were you sick?" he babbles, peering into her face.
Naminé shrugs half-heartedly and looks away quickly, keen to avoid Sora's blue eyes that seem to be glazed with concern. There are dark circles under her own eyes. And if she's to bother looking, she'll find them under Sora's as well. But she doesn't look, so she doesn't see.
"Yes, I've been sick," she says falteringly. "Quite sick."
Sora backpedals a bit and thinks to himself for a moment while Naminé continues cleaning out her tiny locker.
She finishes in a few minutes and swings the door shut carefully. And then Sora is suddenly leaning into her and bringing a hand slowly up to her golden hair and Naminé's breath catches in her throat painfully.
Sora pulls back again and waves his hand in front of her face. There's a red-brown leaf in his fingers.
"Got stuck," he explains, gesturing to her hair in emphasis. "Maple, I think." He laughs a little and tosses the leaf to the floor, tucks a stray blonde strand of hair behind her ear and runs a finger down the side of her pale cheek.
And then, the bell rings with shrill discord.
"Oh. Darn," Sora mutters, reeling back, fingers suddenly curled tight. He sighs. "I'll see you in class then," he says. And he jogs away towards his own locker—all the way at West Wing—turning back once to wave cheerfully.
Naminé's heart slows down a notch as she stands there, still frozen.
And then she bends down low and picks up the crisp maple leaf and tenderly sticks it in her pocket.
- - -
WINTER //
Sora smiles down at the slab in the ground. And he keeps on smiling like there's nothing wrong at all. Except there are a lot of tears in his eyes and he's standing three inches deep in snow and his fingers are gripping onto Naminé's little doodle-ridden notebook like he's never ever going to let it go.
"I want you to have this when it's my time to go."
In Sora's head are little snippets of dialogue that he no longer knows when and why they were even uttered, all swirling messily in a whorl in various colours, mostly different shades of blue. And white-pink-yellow.
"Where will you be going?"
He giggles quietly to himself, tries to wipe his tears away but in the end doesn't even have the strength to bother. And to think he believed she was lying to him when she told him yes, I'll only be here for a year, though.
"Oh. Just somewhere you won't be able to follow, Sora."
He giggles again, averts his eyes from the brown earth of the freshly-covered grave and scuffs his feet against the dirty, slushy snow he's standing in.
"Y'know? I think… I think I loved you," he tells the bare tombstone truthfully. "Guess this confession's just a little too late, huh?" he chokes, his sad smile wavering a little.
Sooner rather than later, he backs away, hugs the little notebook to his chest tightly, and gazes at the engraved words on the granite through blurry vision for the very last time.
HERE LIES
NAMINÉ GAINSBOROUGH
Departed at fifteen.
May she rest in peace,
Never to be forgotten.
Author's note: Very first Sora/Naminé fic ever. Not a pairing I'm used to. But I reckon they'd be cute together in Kingdom Hearts.