White Chain
By: Etern
Characters: Namine and Sora—not as a pairing
Setting: Chain of Memories
Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts and related characters.
In all he remembers of her, there had only ever been white.
She wore a white dress, had a white room, liked to draw on white paper. She liked to sit in a field of white flowers, watching them sway, and cover the white paper in fading colors that always seemed to hold an undercurrent of white. The flowers always seemed to sway towards her.
One by one she would pluck them, hold them up to the white sky above, and study them. "Each flower is different," she would whisper, mostly to herself, but he would always hear her. He just never responded.
She would create a pile of them, of long green stems and soft white petals in the grass before her spread out on her white dress, and then her nimble fingers would go to work.
She was always silent when she worked, the flower all that seemed to exist as she picked it up, gently touched the petals, and began to bend the stem, this way and that. Bend it into shapes that were irregular, meant only to fit for another flower's stem as she strung them together, one by one, always so softly, always so quietly.
Sometimes, when he remembered it, there were no flowers at all, only hands, moving, stringing, tugging each little thing into place until it was a mess of white, one after another.
She made a chain of white flowers, and they seemed to continue on endlessly.
It stretched on and on this chain, and he could only marvel at it.
"How did you do that?" he used to wonder.
She did not look over at him, she did not stop her hands, still tying the delicate stems together in wayward loops, sloppy yet perfect. Binding the flowers together.
"Do what?"
"Chain them together so…fast…Don't you ever get confused?"
All the flowers looked the same to his eyes, they always had only been white. White, white and more white. White that burns into his mind and blinds him to all else.
Her answer had always been the same. In her face, her large eyes had grown sad. "Each flowers different, Sora," she would whisper to him, only whisper, and her words would slide over him with the silk of a flower petal, bathed in white. "Each flower is chained to the next differently. It's…never the same."
And he had always laughed. He had always missed the flash of pain in her eyes, or the way her white hands tightened on the chained stems.
"Whatever you say Namine. You're the expert here."
"Expert?" she always replied, her lips turning into a small, bitter smile. Only in his eyes did he miss the way her eyes filled with tears. "I'm no expert Sora. More than once I have…broken some flowers."
Ripped the white from the stems, crushed the petals into fine dust for the breeze. He watched them blow away, the remains, and thought nothing. He felt nothing; he never asked her why she did it, why after working on the flower chain for so long she simply ended up breaking it, ripping it apart. In his memories, he never seemed to have asked; in his memories, the chain was still perfectly intact.
Poor Sora. He had always watched her stand there, smiling, as the breeze took the flowers away. He had always thought the water on her cheeks was a good thing.
"They're free now," she would whisper, watching the white petals spin away, the green stems lying at her feet. "They're free."
In all he remembers of her there had always been a flower chain, and it had always been around his neck.