Her nights are empty, save for the occasional flash of (sun sky sand) memories that are not hers. When she wakes, it is with the name of the boy with blue eyes on her lips and the sound of the silver haired one's laughter still ringing in her ears, even though she has never met them. So she stops sleeping, fighting the weariness, and draws, draws the sun on the sea, draws the wind in the trees, draws an island she knows as well as her white room (and maybe even more), an island she's never gone to (or has she?).
She draws, and the days go by, always the same, white rooms and blank pages and empty, empty spaces.
Until one day she learns from Marluxia that the blue-eyed boy is in the castle (Sora, Sora, and she repeats his name twice, thrice, and it feels more familiar than even her own), and he's looking for her, and when she is told what to do, she almost, almost, protests, but then she resigns herself and starts erasing, changing his memories, and puts herself in them, and it feels both satisfying and horrible, and he's coming, coming, for her (but it's not really her he's coming for, and she can't even try to pretend otherwise) and she wants to stop, but she's afraid to. And then Axel gives her the occasion, and she tries to help. And maybe it does help, at least a bit, but then as quickly as he's come Sora's gone (not really gone, but certainly not here), and she puts him in his crystal cocoon to sleep.
Riku helps, a bit.
At first he's just there to comfort her when she's too weary, too tired, too scared, a silent and sympathetic presence hovering around the empty spaces, when she's standing in that white room, watching up at brown hair and closed blue eyes, before returning to her sketchpad. She makes him dream, and those dreams actually are those memories she deleted (and it's a sign she's spent too much time near DiZ, that she thinks 'delete' instead of 'erase') and it often hurts to put these back (he won't remember me anymore, he won't love me anymore), but she keeps going, because she was the one to do the damage in the first place, and it's only fair she has to make it better again. She's surprised one day, when she's gathered enough courage to ask Riku details about something (the islands, maybe, probably), to see his eyes, usually so dark, lighten, and she remembers having dreamt of those aqua eyes (but she'd seen them like that, in the replica, after she'd made him believe it was he the true one), and from then on she asks him more, and Sora's dreams become more detailed, and Riku's smiling more often, and she is (almost) as close to happy as she can ever be, and she's feeling useful and not just a burden and everything's fine for the moment, it's all getting better, but now there's one problem-
-she's running out of dreams.