She never finished it, you know. The picture.
It was a strange one, but she had a way of making strange things come out beautiful. It was just pencil, with a bit of shading and a massive circle of completely-erased space. There were buildings, or big squares that looked like them, and a girl.
The girl's mouth was parted, looking something like shock. Her hair and shirt were blown back, and she was just slightly leaning forward, one leg slightly bent behind her as if she had just shifted her weight off of it. She must have been moving forward, then—she was facing the erased circle.
The shading was messy, just scribbled guidelines. Well, not scribbled—she never scribbled anything. Quick notes that would be messy scrawl with anyone else were beautifully abstract with her, the path of letters distinct and at the same time blended. Doodles were tiny masterpieces, ornate faces decorating the margins of her paper.
Anyway. The shading. Quick guidelines, as messy as she got, they showed that the lighting was so harsh it was almost extreme. The light parts—the girl's nose, her cheek, the front of her body and crown of her head—must have been caused by whatever the erased circle was.
Light, Axel said. It must have been light.
I guess I understand. We've always shared a feeling of being alone, empty, confused, in the dark. We always knew, in some part of us, that there was someone out there that would be our light for us. So we waited.
She was so patient. So very patient, with that mild smile on her face and the gentle laughter in her eyes at the best of times. At the worst, she turned away, holding the bad inside herself so she didn't have to show it.
I think she worried that we would be worried about her. Strange, that—the frailest one of our group, tiny and pale and thin, was the one who cared for us all the most. When Sora and Kairi fought, she helped them put their pride aside. When Zexion and Demyx stumbled around each other, trying to figure out how to say what they needed to, she gave both a gentle nudge in the right direction. When Riku came back, and even Sora was a little awkward around him, she still smiled gently—even though she didn't know him—and offered him a seat beside her at lunch. When I met Axel, she kissed me on the cheek and helped me get ready for the first date.
Date is such a strange word. It was less of a date, and more of a mutual lunch—Axel owed it to me, since we met when he crashed into me and made me drop my lunch tray. That was the one day a month that the school actually had decent food, too. At the lunch, we fumbled over our words, tentative and awkward. Then I thought of her, and my heart rate slowed. I gave Axel a slight smile, and he paused with a chip halfway to his mouth, then smiled back.
She had that effect on people; she'd calm them, with a soft word or a brush of fingertips on their shoulder. She and I got along from the second we met, and everyone thought we'd end up together. When I met Axel, and the ending up with her didn't happen, the assumption changed to thinking she'd meet her light soon after.
She didn't, though. Axel and I went on, and Sora and Riku went on, and Kairi found a guy from the high school across town, and Zexion and Demyx found their words. She didn't find anything.
Then we graduated, and went to college. We all stuck together, even then—went to a big city, where there were lots of schools, and majored in what we wanted. She went for visual arts—not a big surprise, that—and quickly blew everyone away.
She became a mild celebrity in the art community within a year. Her pieces were all over the local restaurants and galleries, and she was making enough to be able to move out of the dorms and into a tiny studio apartment in a decent part of town.
We should have seen it coming, though. Even though she was successful, she got quieter, more reserved. Her smiles showed less often, her gentle touches given sparingly. She wasn't cold, just... distracted.
Like I said, should have seen it coming. Especially when, at a ceremony to honor certain local artists (of which she was one), everyone had a date except for her.
And I mean everyone.
She joked about it leaving her free to wander around and talk as she pleased. We smiled, but the fact that she was joking in the first place was our biggest clue.
Namine didn't joke. She smiled, she laughed, she sometimes even teased, but she didn't joke.
That was it, I guess. She disappeared into her studio, and no one heard for her for a week. Our only reassurance was the fact that none of her professors called to see if she was alright—that meant she was going to class.
It ended up that she was drawing, drawing like her life depended on it. And it might have, really. Pastels, paint, watercolor, pencil, it didn't matter, as long as she could make marks with it. Paper, cloth, canvas, wood... Hell, even her walls were covered by the time Namine was done.
Kairi was the one to find her. Too worried to let it go, she finally fished the spare key out of the emergency hiding place only she and I knew about and let herself into the apartment.
Namine was sitting at her easel, slumped against a canvas. Even though she was stiff and pale, there was a look of contentment on her face that no one had seen in a long time. Kairi shook her shoulder, called her name, took her pulse, called the ambulance, and then called me.
It didn't really shock anyone. We'd been hoping and praying we were wrong, denying the signs every way were turned, but we'd known that she'd do it.
What surprised us all, though, was the canvas. I didn't learn about it until the funeral. Sora walked up to me, eyes bloodshot and puffy from crying. Riku looked about the same, and I knew I wasn't much better. If I'd been the type to cry out the pain I felt, I'd have drowned in my own tears a long time ago. As it was, I simply clung to Axel's hand, and Sora's when he reached for me.
"You know," said Sora quietly after a long, comforting pause, "There was an unfinished canvas in her studio."
That got all of our attention. I didn't know how I could have missed the fact, but as Sora talked, I knew I'd never seen the piece he was talking about. He described it as best he could, explaining the skyline and the nonexistent ground and the sharp lighting, and then stopped. We all stopped, considering.
Namine was not a hasty or half-way sort of person. She would have rather left a blank canvas than an unfinished piece in her studio, and it was unlikely that she would have started a new piece on a sudden whim as she was dying.
We guessed that she had planned it all out. Taken the pills, calculated the time she'd had, and let her pencil rove as she felt the life leave; she would have just calculated wrong. All the same, to have an unfinished canvas from Namine was strange and alien. Namine always finished every one of her works, down to the tiny, initialed 'N.N.' in the corner. She never allowed anyone to see an uncompleted piece, going so far as to erase doodles she didn't like when someone asked to see her paper in class.
I saw the canvas a week later, when Axel, Sora, Riku and I were inventorying her apartment. The place was beautiful, even with the morbidity—the walls were covered with great sweeps of rainbow color, more brilliant than anything we'd ever seen. The canvases were massive, saturated with hues that surpassed the definition of intensity. Everywhere, there was brightness, color, shades of every imaginable sort, and so much light. The windows were all wide open, and the sunshine poured into the room like tangible gold.
And then there was this piece, a rectangular canvas with pencil marks arched across the surface.
Definitely undone. I stared at it, wondering. That one spot, completely bare of marks, with just the tiniest of etches in the surface to betray the erasing that had occurred. I lifted it from the ground, held it up. The sun pushed through the canvas, making the white spot and girl's face glow.
"Light," Axel said from behind me, oh so softly. I looked at him, and then back at the drawing.
"Light," I echoed, and I knew. I knew what she'd needed, what she hadn't gotten, what she'd spent so long waiting for.
"Namine," I whispered, staring at the penciled girl's face. "Did you find your light?"