Title: Cut and Paste
Summary: Namine keeps on drawing, because she can do nothing else.
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Cut and paste.
And she keeps on drawing, even though her hands are tired, and it doesn't matter anyway because he's going to remember, and she's going to have to go on and on and break more and more of the memories because she can't have him remember, and he does anyway.
Snip and glue.
Sora's memories run away with him, and she runs along too. Pick apart the seams and sew them back together, but with blond instead of red, with a pale blue over sapphire, and a simple white dress, no purple.
The little internal flinch within him as she locks the memory into place with her pencils and her own power, and he's is off again, jumping into another memory where there is crimson hair instead of pale gold, peach skin instead of pale cream, and she struggles to keep up, fingers flying across the paper as she builds and builds, first creating a Destiny Islands without Kairi, and then an entire system of worlds as Kairi comes up again and again and again…
Because if she can rub out all traces of Kairi's existence, then maybe Namine can be the one who's real.
Break and fix.
And again and again and again…. and she wonders if that's what existing is about, leaving hundreds, thousands of little imprints, large and small, on the lives around them. And she contemplates, how much she will have to draw, how long and hard she will have to work to be able to finish the job, to make Namine the one who exists and not Kairi. And then she decides that she won't think about it anymore, because the sheer magnitude of it makes her head hurt and it is easier to focus on one thing at a time, one step at a time.
So she will start here with the brown-haired boy, so that even if she doesn't accomplish anything else, at least she, and not Kairi, will be real to him.
Sever and fuse.
…Drawing, erasing, reworking, replacing the image with her own pale self inside his memories, and she finds that she's not enough to stop up all the gaps, the little holes and runs where reality leaks through to show how things really were. Even as she smears over those openings with her fingers, leaving smudges of color over her fingertips, it's not enough, not nearly enough to keep the forgotten smiles and friendship and memories of short, red hair from showing. Carefully cutting threads, ties, hugs, years of affection, and coming back to find that they've reknit and needing to cut them all over again, start over from the beginning until she thinks she might fly apart from frustration…
Snap and weld.
She doesn't have to sleep, because she's a Nobody, but she does get tired, and her hands ache because she has been drawing all night and all day and still there are fragments of Kairi, of red hair and sapphire eyes peeking through his memories and they haunt her in her dreams when she tries to sleep. She was supposed to make Kairi become Namine for Sora, except now maybe it's Namine becoming Kairi and she sleeps and dreams of being a redhead, dreams of playing on the beaches that she has never been to and running with two boys she doesn't know, not really. She dreams of soft sand with Sora on one side and Riku on the other, and these aren't Namine's memories- and she knows that.
But sometimes it's nice to pretend.
But in the end, she always wakes up gasping and looking for the mirror to make sure blond is still blond and not red.
Because she isn't Kairi, and no matter how much she may envy the other girl's existence, she still wanted to be herself. And when she wakes up in the mornings, she is still Namine, and not Kairi, but sometimes, she herself isn't all that sure of that.
Erase and bind.
And she couldn't do it after all, because in the end, she is only a pale shadow of her bright and vibrant other and sometimes she wonders if she is so drab only because Kairi is so bright and has taken whatever vitality Namine might have had for herself. Because her own presence isn't enough to hold the memories together and they begin to fall apart along with him right before her eyes. And it hurts because even though she is a Nobody and has accepted that, this was still proof that she could not be enough of a person to keep him, proof that her other is so much more than she could ever be. And she is tired, so tired, of snappingbreakingbindingrewritingcuttingerasing and of building her fragile lies.
And so, in the end, she does the only thing she can, and unsnaps the edges holding the memories she created for him together and lets them drift away into the wind so that he can remember for himself. Remember, and forget her, because in the end, she is not Kairi, and the holes left by Kairi's absence can't be filled with Namine.
She doesn't know whether she should be thankful because that is the hard proof that she had her own self, her own person, or bitter because it is also proof of how little she was as a Nobody, when compared to Kairi.
But it had felt so good to pretend, even for a little bit, to indulge in the dream that she could copy and paste her own image over the little redhead, instead of it being the other way around. That she could have been the one who was real, even if it was only for Sora.
But she could not even have that, and so her pencils lay still in her hands, her sketchbook flipped open to a blank page on her lap. A picture that would never be started- or finished.
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A/N: This is the product of the famed lightening bolt of inspiration striking at the most inopportune time possible. Except in my case, it was more like a bulldozer that ran me over. And then backed up.
Lots of fragments, lots of run-ons. It's supposed to be like that, I swear.
Reviews are godly. :D