A/N: Your Matinee Idol here again! It feels like I've been gone forever, but I've just been quite busy doing Photography and musical stuff (oh-god-we-close-this-weekend-AHHHH) that I didn't have much time to write anything that wasn't school work or NaNos. (I don't even have 8,000 yet; it's pretty pathetic.)

This was written for Lunamaria's "Fields of Hope" challenge. It's Sorminé, again, because the ending of COM still makes me all woeful for them and they're seriously one of the sweetest things I've ever seen.

So enjoy! Review if you're so inclined. Feedback's great whether it's good or bad. Telling me what I can work on is very much encouraged.

BEYOND THE VEIL.

"One day it will be our light, the light that brings us together.
I'll be forgotten, but not lost.
Because I believe in you, and you believe in me."

Sora sleeps and sleeps just to dream. Naminé keeps watch over him, a lonely little light in the broad space of the pod room. She lives her life in orbit around him, not daring to leave him floating on the dream-sea unless there's an emergency, something that's urgent and somehow more important than he is. But whenever she's there, she makes sure that he's safe, along with all his promises and fears and lies and the real memories he's asked her to put back together.

She takes away the false links, which feel like plastic underneath her hands. The real links are so much stronger. They're made to last for a lifetime, she thinks so, so softly, in case someone could hear her thinking and come to disturb the unknown quiet.

She draws and draws because the only other thing she can do is watch and think about him. Her hands become stained with colored graphite, and her wrists ache after she's finished another chapter, another few days of his life. She feels like she's making a book, writing down his story again like Jiminy. Only this time she's making sure nothing can ever be erased.

She watches him sleep beneath the cold veil of the pod. He sleeps so deeply, lost in the seas of his paper-winged dreams.

She prays for him, makes little songs to go along with the melody of prayer. In his dreams he is on a lonely field, nobody by his side and so many miles to go.

Sometimes when he's dreaming he'll laugh. It's such a strange sound that the pod doesn't understand it, flashes a mild yellow warning to her. But she knows this is nothing to worry about. She watches him again, hoping that it will happen once more.

And when it does, she's sort of happy too. It's strange to hear a real laugh. Hers are always fake and high, her smiles always stretch her lips and feel almost painful to do. But his are real, just the way everything about him is real, and she can't help but feel like maybe his "feelings" she made him have could maybe be real too someday.

In her own dreams she can reach beyond the veil of the pod, hold his hand, wrap her pale arms around him. She can listen to him breathing, feel the heart behind his chest beating hot and slow. They walk beneath a wintered sky when she closes her eyes, hand-in-hand, going wherever they want to go together.

She knows that when he wakes up it will be impossible for him to remember her. She's erasing herself and everything she started in his memories. And she still believes that she loves him, because it's him and he's more real than anyone she's ever met.

But when she sleeps, she believes in him and he believes in her as they walk through the fields of hope, beyond the veil of everything they've ever known.

---

FIN.