A/N: This is an author-artist collab for the KH Worlds Connected Big Bang event on Tumblr with the ever-awesome Kett, who can be found (and praised) on both Tumblr (xxcastingshadows) and Instagram (kett_draws). I highly recommend taking a trip on over to Kett's Tumblr to see the cover art for this fic in its full-sized glory.
I am unrepentant AkuRoku and SoRiku garbage so I decided to try something different for this event. A first person introspective from Xion's POV is how it manifested. Kett was a good sport in letting me come up with a concept, and provided feedback and suggestions that ended up getting incorporated in later drafts. Much fun, very teamwork. Go us.
I first saw you and it was August. My hair was too long and yours was two shades of the same sun-kissed white-blonde. You stood front and center on the first day of art class and spoke like you'd never been unsure of yourself.
One after another, words flowed from your mouth, introductions and instructions, and I was spellbound. Art was an elective, the whim of a high school senior with little sense of her own identity and even less a definite career path. But quite suddenly, it washed over me, the desire to succeed more than anything. Three years content as a wallflower, but that August I wanted to be noticed. Needed your eyes on me.
It was September when I first noticed my blushing response to your smiles, generosities freely offered that reflected satisfaction with your students' creative progress. You drew beaches and oceans in between class periods and spoke about the coastal village where you grew up dreaming of bigger things, of towns with art galleries and cities home to people who appreciated pursuits more cultured than Struggle tournaments. I learned these things and more during your office hours that overlapped my assigned lunch-time, and you didn't mind talking over food in the faculty break room, or sketching childhood memories in front of a captive audience. One person. Two eyes. I wanted to know everything about you.
I wondered at the tightness in my chest in the final days of September, but couldn't identify it. Not yet. Not in the first hours of October when the days got shorter and my hair itched when pulled back at the nape of my neck. Before long, it was the middle of Autumn and everything felt a little off. I still didn't know why.
My best friend got a boyfriend during the first week of November. In an act of single-minded defiance, he didn't keep quiet about it, and the whole senior class soon buzzed with rumors. News like this matters in high school. Art lessons were our refuge, since you wouldn't stand for the comments, the harsh, murmured slurs that caused me to flinch even if Roxas himself didn't. Eyes down, he just kept drawing, kept coloring, the subjects mostly still life. They were mundane things made meaningful in the way they were so lovingly framed—the town's bronze-alloy clocktower, vivid crimson of summer sunsets, passenger trains bound for the beach, and popsicle sticks playing host to half-melted, salty-sweet ice cream. You offered him smiles while others jeered and whispered, and I found myself wondering about something, something, something still on the precipice of my own self-awareness.
The fourth week of November offered answers about Axel: images of good-natured green irises, tresses of red, and a dash of purple reminiscent of Roxas' art class sunsets. Axel came with rapid-fire jokes about everything, a fondness for bear hugs, and no shortage of knowing smiles, but my eyes stayed mostly on Roxas and the flush that colored his pale skin every time Axel looked at him. November's last days were crisply cool but I recognized that look, since it brought me back to September and you. While Axel and Roxas discussed futures and goals after they escaped our small town, about life after high school and community college, I considered university and you in the faculty break room, eyes on your sketchbook forming silent stories from flowing lines in blue ballpoint.
At the end of November with impending finals and three weeks of winter holiday starting in December, I decided to register for a Spring art class. I didn't want whatever this was to end. Not yet.
For Fall's final art project, I turned Roxas' clocktower into a castle and named it Oblivion. Its walls were all seashells, the foundation and frame both fashioned out of my latest obsession, which was keys. Skeleton, pin tumbler, lever lock, double-sided, and Zeiss: each one was erroneous. There was nothing in my project to unlock. My grade came out the day after Christmas, your comments one elegant cursive compliment after another, but I knew something was missing. Still incomplete. In the final hours of the year, I was afraid to take the ghost of an answer that'd haunted me since September and give it more tangible life.
Instead, I revisited Fall semester, studied every remnant of subjective memory for some sort of alternative, then journeyed further, back to June and July before you came into my life. And I wasn't exactly satisfied last summer but I wasn't so shy as I was in August, as red-faced and eager for each lunch period as September, October, November, not so self-aware as I'd become in December.
By January, I knew.
I spent my first moments of the New Year at a beach, waves lapping gently, the water crystalline and frozen in rivulets closest to shore. A crowd of town residents had taken the train along with us, but Axel and Roxas and I were a world unto ourselves, at least until they kissed at the stroke of midnight and suddenly an ocean's distance separated the three of us. As people cheered and rang in the first seconds of the new year, I fleetingly wished I'd been born a boy so you might look at me like Roxas looked at Axel and Axel looked back at him. I still thought I wanted your eyes on me, just needed to be recognized as something, something, something. Special, maybe.
It was January, still my winter holiday, and I wasn't sure of anything—except that my hair was too long, and it'd never be blonde. I could do something about only one of those things, the world seemed full of opportunities, and in light of Roxas' newfound confidence, maybe I felt a little braver myself. I returned to school in last week of January with a fringe of hair just above my shoulders, six inches less than I'd left with.
On the first day of my last semester in high school, you smiled that same friendly smile and I looked back with more confidence than I could've imagined last August. Our new focus was on gestures and posture, a transition from still life to the study of human movement. I tucked a strand of hair behind one ear, reached for my sketchpad, and tried to absorb every detail of your lecture.
I learned just how difficult it was to confine three-dimensions and lifelike expressions onto a single flat sheet. Your teaching approach was both trial-and-error and learn-as-you-go, but the direction I was heading felt no better than stick figures. My wrist was tense, fingers clenching the pencil between them, and no great number of your gentle reminders to relax ever felt like they truly sank in. Not through the end of January or the first week of February. By the second, I was presented with another, more pressing matter.
Roxas arrived in class with a black eye on Valentine's. It wasn't as much of a surprise as it might've been had the school not been buzzing about it for hours by then. Between your lecture on facial features and our usual half hour sketch time, I tried to get his side of the story.
But Roxas just shrugged, his explanation a supplemental brush-off, no mention made of Seifer. This was followed by a grin made subtly grotesque by purples and blues coloring freshly bruised skin—dichromatic shades on the left side of his nose that I reproduced time and again with pencil and pen in the privacy of my bedroom on evenings and weekends. I was transfixed. And wondering.
What would you do for love? It was a question I started asking myself. Would you be brave and outright ignore everyone else's idea of normal? Would you play deaf to the comments, or go further? Would you defend yourself in front of others, regardless of the physical consequences? Would I, for that matter?
I didn't know, at least not in February. I could neither speculate nor come to an answer that seemed satisfactory.
In March, I started studying myself. I scrutinized my hands in class, knuckles blanched tight and bloodless around various drawing instruments. I compared them to Roxas' in brief, clandestine glances as I watched the way he held onto pencils, paintbrushes, and charcoal, grip loose, fingers relaxed, wrist pliant and ready to move where he guided it. I imagined that hand on Axel, wondered if he might falter when the medium was flesh instead of a simple sketchpad. I doubted it. Roxas seemed sure, so comfortable in his own skin, a near stranger to the person he'd been just a year ago. I resolved to be his shadow, abandoning my jerky, hesitant movements as my arm copied each fluid hand-drawn motion, my sketches soon mimicking his with rote precision.
If Roxas noticed, he didn't comment. It was you who said something. First came the praise I'd become accustomed to hearing, then the suggestion that I branch out and sketch something different.
That was when I felt a return of the shyness, found myself looking down under the guise of studying peoples' lower limbs: legs swinging beneath art class stools, ankles alternating one way then the other, sneakered feet pointed, then flexed and pointed again, each student's movements unique. Distinctive.
I learned to draw others in April, got more confident when it came to sketching the underlying shapes that made up arms, torso, face, and legs. And still, I scrutinized, unable to find an answer to why every attempted self-portrait featured the eyes, noses, and lips of others. As graduation approached, I thought I might lose myself. I wondered if you felt it too, in the invisible, inescapable, upcoming separation of mentor and student. I holed up at home during Spring Break and carried a small mirror with me constantly, determined to overcome the block I'd developed when it came to drawing that which I should've known best. I studied even the most minor of details, from the curve of my chin to the way my eyes tapered when the corners of my mouth rose upward while smiling.
Individually, I knew I could draw them, but each feature was still a different universe. It was only when I tried sketching them collectively that the face staring up at me reflected someone I didn't come close to recognizing.
That one week away from you turned into two outside of the requisite hours of art class. I was too vexed by my own stalled progress to focus on anything else during the last weeks of April. By May, avoiding the faculty break room became routine. As Winter officially became Spring, I spent more time at the clocktower with Roxas and Axel, and talk turned to summer and revisiting the beach in between their frequent kissing. High above our bustling little town, with both boys engrossed in themselves, I had moments to think, even to dream of the should'ves and could'ves and might have beens, if only some small facet of our lives had been different—if you had been younger, or I'd been born earlier, if we'd both been different people running into each other under other circumstances.
I experimented with new fashions on those balmy Spring days, traded my go-to jeans for skirts that flowed beneath bare legs and feet over the ledge of the town's bronze-alloy timepiece. It felt somehow appropriate that my hair mimicked this newly adopted, fluttering fabric, and I started to bring my sketchpad along more often. Another new habit.
Roxas and I finished high school in June, a momentary academic reprieve before we moved away to continue our studies. You were there at the ceremony, introduced yourself to my parents and the rest of my visiting relatives. In the thrill of this interim between adolescence and adulthood, I didn't imagine where we'd both be sometime in the future, or that this might be the last day we ever saw one another.
We went to the beach in July just the three of us, Axel and Roxas and me. They swam and made purposefully bad sand castles while I sketched a sampling of my current whims. I drew you too, just a couple times, but I did. You were a part of my life that I didn't want to let go of. Not yet.
I still couldn't sketch myself, had stopped trying months ago. Focusing on everything beyond that seemed to have a calming effect. Maybe I knew something that summer that I hadn't been able to grasp during high school. That summer, I was on the verge but still clueless.
At the end of July we got sent our residence hall roommate assignments, and I was matched with a girl named Selphie. We exchanged a few emails, added each other on Facebook, and got to know one another in a virtual world before meeting in person at school. Our interests were different but we got along well enough, and it was nice to meet someone from outside of Twilight Town. High school already seemed unreal by then. Even before classes, it was distant, like someone else's memory stored in the wrong body. Maybe this made you a dream by extension. Possibly it was just me who was starting to forget—or maybe it was a deliberate omission, others mentally blipping me out of existence to make room for newer impressions.
It was the first day of classes when I initially saw her, another August and my hair was in need of a trim by then, while hers was a shade of wine-red. She sat nearby, just one table over from me, bounded by a boy on each side. Her eyes locked on mine the moment before our first art class lecture, and I remembered three years as a high school wallflower in the span of a single, excruciating second.
But I was no longer the same person who'd tiptoed through high school.
In the short breath before we both turned back to the teacher, she studied me, then blinked, while my gaze remained steady. I was the first to offer a smile, small but genuine. It was over by the end of my second breath, but it was more than enough to work with. Finally, I knew. It all made sense.
I reached for my pen, grip loose, wrist pliant. Content.