c r a y o n - m a r k s .
oneshot .
( naminé × riku × kairi )
dedicated to constance greene .
& - - - »
She remembered the first time he stood in her doorway since their relocation to Twilight Town's mansion, an awkward splash of color within miles of metallic silvers and whites.
The thought of knocking left him unfazed; he gripped the doorknob firmly and twisted it open before Naminé's eyes could rise from her paper to the intruder at the entrance. There was an uncomfortable frown twitching on his lips when he met her bemused stare, and his skin seemed to crawl beneath the foreign black cloak he had received only hours ago. He incessantly ripped his gaze away from hers as quickly as it landed, as if afraid that she would burn him if he stared for too long, and his eyes fluttered around the Memory Witch's room from corner-to-corner; wall-to-wall; visibly searching for something that he didn't believe she had the answer to. The ashen prison walls around him seemed to consume the light in his face, but his eyes were left unscathed -- she was sure she could taste the ocean air just by gazing into their aquamarine depths. At every angle that he turned his head, she saw a new shade of the sea; blues and greens meshed in a color that she only wished she could imitate with her inexpensive crayons and sketchbooks.
Displeased with his investigation, he took a step forward once, twice, again and again until he was standing just a few inches away from the girl, arms skeptically crossed at his chest. She didn't falter; she only gazed deeper into his eyes, absorbing the color into her memory. "I want know how Sora's doing," He sputtered, determination slicing through the profound silence that had settled in on the pair, "DiZ told me to see you."
At the time, she hadn't needed a better reason than that -- she didn't think there could be one.
She blinked away from his grave stare, offering him no more than a quiet nod before ushering him out the door and down the hall. They walked in a brooding sort of silence while she navigated through the maze-like mansion, slow enough so that he might remember the way, but fast enough so not to irritate him more than he already seemed. Because there was no pitter-patting heartbeat echoing in her ears as she turned each corner, she only heard their footsteps and the seconds ticking by like monotonous thuds until they passed Sora's anthropoid companions ( sleeping as soundly as said boy was ), and entered a room just as colorless as her own.
Naminé left Riku standing by her flower-like recovery pod, watching his friend rest obliviously inside. When she sat back down in her chair, she immediately tried in vain to recreate the mystifying color of his eyes.
She first chose an obvious shade within her plethora of crayons: sea green. Naminé drew squiggles and circles across a page in her sketchbook, nearly dyeing the paper its minty hue with different pressures and angles before the crayon snapped from mistreatment, smudging her doodles and clattering to the floor. But the color was too green -- so she disregarded the broken crayon and searched for her aquamarine, carefully smearing it into her previous work of art. Although the finished product held a resemblance to his eyes, it failed to capture the same radiance and intensity; with a dissatisfied frown, she ripped the page from her notebook and crumpled it in her hands.
& - - - »
She was surprised when he came back the next day.
He didn't need her to unlock the room that Sora slept in, and she was certain he hadn't forgotten the way already; he could have easily walked just a few doors down and left her to her work. But Riku pulled the door open ( because knocking was still not on his agenda ) so quietly that she wondered if he were just an apparition, a preoccupied frown drowning on his lips. She carefully placed her crayons down and murmured tranquilly to the teen, "Would you like me to take you to see Sora again?"
He shook his head and walked further into her room, toward the other side of the long table that she relentlessly worked at. "I already went there."
Then why are you here? She urged herself to say, though kept her lips tightly locked while he sat in the chair opposite of her.
Regardless, she really did like his company, as subtle as it was; he and DiZ rarely came to visit her, if only because they believed that her single job was to finish what she had started. But the distance between them on the lengthy desk was uncomforting nonetheless -- especially as his eyes dug into her skull, tempting her to look upwards and see what his matchless gaze was casting in her direction.
She hastily began to scribble on a new sheet of paper, drawing whatever came to her mind first and attempting not to think about the boy who was embarrassingly staring her down. But the effort was useless -- with a peach crayon, she began to outline his form on her sketchbook, and as she covered it in a sloppy black cloak, she thought she heard him inhale deeply ( almost serenely ) across the room. A light shade of rose prickled her face; she blinked nervously and seized the periwinkle crayon, quickly covering her drawing's head with layered silver hair. Naminé stared down at the sketch, face distorted as she realized what was missing: his eyes.
She gradually pulled her head up, sneaking a wary glance at the suddenly quiet teen, but the ocean waves of his irises were disappointingly blocked by two closed eyelids. A frown tugged at the corners of her lips, and she contemplated a way to get him to look at her again -- but he stopped her by abruptly speaking, rich tones slipping from his vocals like honey:
"You know, you smell like her."
Naminé nearly choked, and immediately dragged her gaze back to the paper under her hands.
It would look better without eyes, she decided.
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He started making trips to her room everyday ( after supposedly visiting his sleeping friend ), only to rest at the end of the table farthest from her. He would simply close his eyes and breathe, as if whatever scent he had previously mentioned were vital to his life. They didn't talk much, nor did they need to -- but Naminé began to wonder if he ever got bored. It would be easy enough to stand and leave if he grew uninterested in waiting for conversation to strike, but the question plagued her mind until she forced herself to ask him.
"Riku," She whispered across the room one day, a curious smile pressed onto her lips, "Would you like to draw?"
The teen didn't answer, nor had he been particularly excited when she stood and passed him a meager amount of colored wax sticks, delicately pushing a piece of paper in front of his hands. He stared at the crayons like they were diseased, a frown enveloping his mouth as he quietly declared, "I don't know what to draw."
"Draw what's on your mind," She wisely suggested while she sat back in her chair and picked up a crayon to sketch another line of silver hair.
At first, he refused to touch the childish materials spread out in front of him, eyes cautiously caught on the cheap canvas as if actually drawing would make him look too juvenile or vulnerable. Ten minutes passed by; a tentative hand finally reached toward the apricot crayon, gloved fingers clasping around its papered middle before he slowly dragged it to the white sheet. He made a sluggish oval, the edges slightly jagged while his hand -- perceptibly untrained in art -- trembled color onto the paper. Next was a bloody shade of red, which he carefully applied to the upper portion of his elliptical masterpiece, turning his stationery to the left and to the right so that he created layers of vigilantly cropped hair. Two sapphire drops of crystallized liquid hid partially under a few stray bangs, vivid against their pallid background. His last mark was perhaps the most beautiful; with a pinkish shade, Riku drew a small semicircle-smile, factitious lips dabbed with rosy wax lip gloss.
Naminé stared at the chicken scratch from across the table, gaze only wavering if his bothered to lift and stare critically at her own. It might have looked like a five-year-old had doodled in Riku's place, but each crayon-mark was caressed with tender passion; and that made it more stunning than anything the artist in the room could have drawn. She almost wished she could gather up his picture and save it for herself -- after all, she reasoned, it was an image of her other half. She longed to learn something from it; absorb the fervor that he put in his drawing like a heart that she never would have. But before she could begin to reach toward his paper, he sliced it in half with one long tear.
Naminé gaped at him, indigo eyes widening like saucers. He folded the halves onto each other, and tore it again -- and again -- and again -- until all that was left was a pile of colored paper cradled in his palms.
It wasn't some peculiar, morbid display of his hatred for the character in the drawing; his eyes, too expressive for his own good, only shone of love and heartache and she wished she could find a way to cure them. But they glimmered with anguish so long as he still thought of the girl he couldn't have, and Naminé almost hungered to contain the power to tamper with his memories -- at least he would then have someone who would always adore him back.
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He was obsessed.
While his frequent visits were still standard, Riku added a new ritual to their time together: he began to heed her suggestion and draw whatever was on his mind, which happened to always be Kairi. As the days went by, he drew her in different ways -- sometimes she was sad, or happy, or angry; sometimes she played with her friends in the ocean and built sandcastles on the shore, or sat alone on an unusually shaped tree with a Paopu fruit clutched tightly in her grasp. It was like he was illustrating a story that Naminé was engrossed in, but they all ended in the same way: ripped to pieces in Riku's hands, fluttering in his palms as they shook and he stared.
Naminé always drew Riku, but they weren't mutilated in the same way; her images simply lacked eyes, for fear of flawing his sketches. If Nobodies couldn't feel or understand emotions, the eyes she gave him would be just as fake as the memories she had planted in Sora's mind.
Sometimes, though, she would draw herself with Riku -- they would smile or hold hands or hug or even kiss, but she never let him see.
Every passing day, it seemed, he would sit a little closer to her and the supply of colors; but it never increased their conversations or interaction. She was able to get a better look at his drawings before he shred them in his hands, and each paper seemed more loving than the last, as if he wanted to preserve the girl's face in his mind with crayon-marks.
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One day, he kissed her.
She had dropped a yellow crayon; it rolled from her grasp and pattered to the ground near where Riku sat. He instinctively bent down to fetch it for her, having played 'crayon retriever' numerous times over the past few weeks, but as she reached to take it back from him, his fingers curled around hers, the coloring stick stuck between their palms. She offered him a confused gaze, and within moments, his lips were on hers.
A rush of sickness swirled in her head, jumbling her faux-emotions while her chest burned with emptiness.
"You smell like her," he mumbled incoherently into her lips, seeming to speak without knowing while his eyes closed and the ocean disappeared again, "You smell like her."
She moved her hands over his chest and felt his heart pounding with ecstasy -- because he had a heart, and he had emotions, and he was in love. She thought she might have felt grief for not being able to truly share it with him, but her stomach still churned from his touch and his kiss, seeming to send her thoughts in frenzy while she murmured his name into his ear. Through fleeting kisses down her neck, he drunkenly responded:
"Kairi."
She heard him; she felt the name in his breath, hot against the skin on her collar.
KairiKairiKairi.
But she didn't correct him or turn away; she only let him believe that he was with the girl he loved, and she tried to convince herself that she wasn't just the shadow of that person.
She told herself she wasn't jealous, because she didn't know what jealousy felt like.
But after he kissed her and he left, he stopped visiting. He didn't walk in without knocking and he didn't draw pictures of her Somebody and he didn't pick up her crayons when they fell on the floor -- he didn't even look at her during the seldom times that they crossed paths in the mansion's hallways, and she found herself missing the ocean.
If she had a heart, she imagined this was what it would feel like to be heartbroken.
She began to take the pictures she'd drawn of them together and slash the golden locks atop her head with crimson, merging the colors like she had when she tried to mimic Riku's eyes until it became an orangey mess of crayon-marks -- because now it was just RikuKairi, not RikuNaminé.
She supposed it never had been.
& - - - ×
author's note ----
. . . oh my goodness, is this an update from Tatikara? I think it is.
Eh. I'm not too happy with the way this came out. It seems all rushed and museless.
I had a lot of plans for it, but they died halfway through. Urgh.
I guess it's better than nothing though, right?
I fail. The end.
& I don't own Kingdom Hearts. kthx.