From Chains to Strings

A dream is a birth by sleep. Dreams are fabricated, parallel dimensions that somehow disappear from your memory once you wake up. Dreams often come about as a result of deep emotion, of great feelings. Be it fear, sadness, hate, or love, dreams are undoubtedly linked to one's cherished memories. The ones that wish to hold onto those dreamt memories - which are not quite so false, but not quite so real, either - are the ones that are the least chained by them, and will never fulfill their wish as a result.

Our subconsious remembers what we cherish most. Oftentimes we do not know what we cherish ourselves, much less the cherished memories of others. Seeing such a thing - a general term, of course, but one that has value in this context - requires understanding in the most pervasive sense. Of who? That depends.

Knowing what you cherish is another, much more improbable thing. To know, you must consciously understand, and that requires a much higher degree of self knowledge, a fountain's worth of self enlightenment. And unfortunately, there are no tools to help you reach that level of proficiency.

Except for me.

I have been called manipulative, and for good reason.

I have the power to alter one's memories. But not without repercussions. I cannot delete memories. No matter how much I change a scene or image, the original will always be intact, lying behind my fabrications and wishes. Similar to different layers of a painting, if I had to guess.

If I could alter my own memories, I suppose I could verify the answer - After all, what is reality but your own conception of it? - but unfortunately, I cannot. Since the day I came into being, I have had no memories. That should be all and well if you're a newborn baby, but I found myself fully capable of speech, full ranged motion, and senses when I opened my eyes. I had already conceived concepts such as marriage, birth, death, and living, without knowing how I came upon them in the first place. To put it shortly, I was born as a shallow encyclopedia instead of as an empty diary or journal.

But even so...

...I can make other people live a dream.

From what I don't have, I imagine. I imagine a lot of things - this time 'things' mean nothing of concrete value - to make up for my deficiencies. For having time to reflect, I improve on what I do best: drawing.

I'm a blank slate, an empty shell, but with a few tools in hand, I can turn my imagination into creations. If the imagination I'm speaking of is my own, of course.

And having said that, it's not. An obvious answer.

The one I can change the memories of is the one I am closest with, despite me never having met him. He has what I don't have. As such, I have felt terribly magnetic to him.

Which isn't surprising, since everything I dreamed about was not mine, but rather, his.

His childhood, his growing pains, his learning, his friends, his life.

A life that could fill my thin notebook entirely with color in a matter of seconds.

I can create, I can break. But there are exceptions. As I've said before, I cannot destroy a memory. Nor can I create a new one. The explanation for destroying is simple and already given, but creating a new memory requires something deep and ingrained, something I do not have.

But he does.

It isn't that hard to guess correctly.

When I realized what I lacked, I resorted to the only solution I could think of. Instead of me only seeing him, I decided, I would make it so that he could only see me.

So I drew.

And drew.

And drew.

I started out small. First just giving him an inkling that perhaps he's forgotten something. Then piquing his interest by presenting him with an unknown object - one he knows, of course, but just doesn't realize it.

Eventually, I had created for him a chain of memories, a cat's cradle of messy alterations of the truth. My gift to him was nothing but assuaged lies.

It quickly got to the point when he remembered nothing but me and that promise. He changed. He forgot about his friends, his learning, his growing pains, his childhood, his life. And it was all because of me.

I looked at my drawings, and they were pictures I could recognize, but nothing that I knew. He viewed these scenes exactly the opposite. Everything became inverted. Or so it seemed.

And that's when she told me that I was doing my part, correctly.

But everything felt so wrong.

I knew then that I was nothing but a tool. They said I had powers, a wicked talent for manipulation. They were wrong. They were hypocrites. They said I couldn't feel emotions. They fed me lies.

Just like how I did to him.

And for the first time, I understood what it was like to feel guilt. To feel loneliness. To feel fear. To feel one of the greatest sins of all.

Envy.

I wanted what he had. I had nothing. I couldn't create anything, I couldn't claim anything. I didn't even know if my identity was mine. Was I a part of him? I knew for certain that he wasn't a part of me. What I did know was that he had everything I wanted.

But knowing all of that wasn't going to change anything. Never would I get what I wanted for simply knowing.

I heard and saw all but one of them leave the room. The remaining one told me something I never thought would have been staged for me.

Only I was able to act.

I got up on my feet and began to run. Running was never an easy thing for me, but running in sandals was even more difficult. Mentally, though, running was something I did not think I ever experienced. I did not think I had anywhere to run to. My memories were nonexistent. My existence was not possibly mine. Sleep was not an option if it would only remind me of what I lacked. I was trapped in a cage, just like a dove.

But I was only trapping myself.

Instead of taking initiative on my own for obtaining what I wanted, I tried to borrow another's.

Then, I met him. I met him on stage, in one of the worlds he came to forget in compensation of me. He was living the memory I gave him.

And here I was, coming to throw it away. Throw away something that never truly belonged to either of us.

Doing so wasn't a hard task. My presence itself was enough to shatter the fake vision I created. Before I knew it, he and I were back at the castle, meeting each other for the first time, but what he probably thought was for a countless time.

When I saw him with my own eyes, I wanted to feel him. I wanted to feel what I longed for the most. But doing so would have led to just more than immoral complications. He was there, right in front of me. I couldn't let my loneliness and envy take over me again.

And then, the catalyst for that reaction to happen again appeared. She was looming before me, and mouthed foul words in my direction that my pencils would never write. Quick as lightning, she took out her knives and aimed them at him. Without meaning to, I had jumped in between them, thrusting my arms out as though that would do anything.

Growling, she knocked me away, and all I could see was darkness.

When I came to, I found myself staring into someone else's eyes. My reaction need not be readily described. I got up and looked around to see for any traces of that woman. He told me she faded away.

I took a breath. As little that I knew about death, the death of one of those reapers constituted to his description. Knowing that my time was short before I got recaptured, I stepped forward, and with my own voice, I told him the truth.

He looked at me, puzzled. I heard him tell me that he did not think so. Was that because of the memories?

No, that would just be insulting him. He protected me, not because of his memories, but rather because he was himself.

With my own eyes, I saw him give me a smile. That smile, one that I saw many times, was real. It didn't change at all. He didn't change at all. It was I who changed him.

And then, I figured it all out.

I didn't have to create.

All I had to do was change.

And I did.

I look back inside the pod, and see him floating gracefully there. He looks as though he is submerged in water, and mentally, he is. His memories are undergoing change as of this moment, and are reverting back to their original forms. His eyes are gently closed and his expression blank. It isn't hard for me to imagine the experience as one of dreaming.

Soon enough, he would remember everything. The truth about the promise he made, and everything else he forgot in the process of me forcing him to remember me and my petty lies.

But I hope that he does remember those written memories. After all, it was he who told me that even if he forgets, he'll always remember, deep inside his subconscious, at least.

Actually, I know that he will remember.

This memory strings us together.

A/N: I apologize for the strange transitions and changing of tense used in the first half. I was indecisive, and things didn't flow as smoothly as I would have liked it to have been. And don't mind the absences of R. Riku and that pink haired fellow.