"Who are you?"
The room was stark white and blinding – it made her eyes water to look around, now that the darkness had receded from her vision and left her disoriented and blinded with confusion and the bright light. It was almost creepy, the way the room was so sterile and simple and white, white little table and white walls with a white floor and a single, white draped window set in the far wall. Leaves of white paper were scattered across the large table, and several other sheets, darkened by the marks of drawings, were posted to the walls at random intervals, adding a small break to the bleach whiteness that threatened to overpower her.
"My name is Naminé."
"How did I get here?"
"I brought you here. I wanted to talk to you."
Two chairs were placed at the table, one on each end. Kairi walked to one, tentatively, with her hand outstretched, and touched the back of it, as if afraid that it might collapse under her fingers and shatter like glass. The whole room seemed frail and weak, as if held together by the thinnest of silver strings, and she feared that even her breath might cause the balance to tip over and the world to fall away.
She sat down, although she wasn't sure why she did it.
"Why did you want to talk to me?"
"I wanted to know what you were like."
Along the table was a single vase, darker than the rest of the decorations in the room. Gentle, wilted crystalline flowers bloomed from the rim of the glass container, glittering before her despite their obvious age and disuse. Briefly she wondered why the flowers had not been changed, and what kind of flowers those might be, but she dismissed the thought.
Further down the table sat a small girl, her hands held in her lap and a gentle smile on her pale, pale face. Her hair was silver-blonde, so thin and barely even there, and her eyes were the clearest of blue, pure and clean like the sky on the islands. Her lips were rosy red and thin, the darkest thing on her, and she looked like a ghost, sitting in her stark white dress with her stark white skin spread smooth over her body.
She looked beautiful.
"Know what I was like?"
"Yes. Everyone wants to know what their other is like, right?"
Her lips didn't move when she spoke, Kairi realized. It was as if there was a connection between them, some kind of link that bound them together and dismissed the need for such trivial things as verbal speech. It felt right to speak this way – she pursed her lips together when she spoke next, testing her theory.
"What do you mean by 'their other?'"
"I'm the other you. You're me, and I'm you. We're just split into two entities."
It made sense – the connection, the gentle, warm feeling of recognition that burned in her chest when she locked eyes with that pretty little phantom across from her. Her other half.
"I'm you."
"Yes. And I'm you."
"How?"
"Don't worry about that right now. I'll explain when the time comes."
The soothing tone of her voice dispelled the worries from Kairi's mind, and she dropped the questions. She had faith that her answers would come to her. She had learned that being patient just rewarded her better than jumping to conclusions and eagerly chasing down the truth – a boy had taught her that before, but she couldn't seem to remember his name right now. How odd.
"I want to ask you a favor."
"Yeah?"
There was something in the girl's voice that made it impossible for her to refuse such a request. She nodded, pulling her mouth into a soft smile of reassurance.
"Tell me about it. Please."
"Tell you about what?"
Naminé smiled, bittersweet and angelic and gorgeous.
"What it's like to have a real life."
"A real life? Don't you have a life here, in this place?"
Chime laughter answered her. "It's hard to call this a life. I live here, yes, but I don't really live. I do as I'm told."
"That's horrible."
"I don't mind it, really. It's what I was meant to do. But I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to live like you, to be in your place. Sometimes I want to know what it's like to have people who really care about me." She paused, her lips pulled down in the smallest of frowns, before she glanced up at Kairi, pleading eyes and pleading face begging to be told, to have the world showed to her. "So, please, just for now, tell me."
Kairi nodded, gentle and smooth, and began to speak, telling of what it was like on the islands, the feeling of the sun on your skin when you walk along the beach and the way the waves splash around your ankles when you stand at just the right spot at just the right time. How the sun lights the ocean up like a mass of shattered sapphires, and how the breeze on the island is just salty enough to make your lips taste of ocean when you walk back home for the night. She explained what it was like to fish, and to ride in a boat; what it was like to sing and to dance with friends; what it was like to have friends (Naminé leaned forward at these words, eager and drinking it all in as if it were the most fascinating and new concept for her). She explained everything and anything that came to her mind, regardless of how trivial it may have seemed at the time, and she spoke for what felt like hours, never really tiring of what she was saying.
Time passed, and as the white in the room faded to a gentle gray, Kairi found herself at a loss, exhaustion finding her and dragging her away from the room and the little girl with the white dress.
When Kairi awoke, she had no recollection of what her dream had been about. A faint memory of white, of a gentle, pale ghost, lingered in the back of her mind, but no details nor names came to her, despite her hardest attempts to retrieve them. She opened her eyes, greeted with the sunlight of morning on the islands, and blinked down, eyes flickering over the blankets stretched over her body. Across her chest rest a single, small note, scribbled on the bottom of a sketch of a sunset (it looked so much like the sunsets on the island), done in the neatest little handwriting, curly and elegant yet simplistic in its means:
Thank you.