Just Pretending

Riku doesn't like it when she draws Kairi.

Or at least he doesn't like it when she draws them together, him and her, on some place distant and pretty and made up of eye-smarting colors, colors she can see but not replicate, just pathetic imitations of—of herself, really.

It means almost nothing.

So she doesn't draw Kairi. And for the most part, they don't talk about her either. It's not hard, really, because she doesn't see Riku that much and if she weren't watching Sora than he'd probably not come back at all. Not for her, anyways, he might've if she were more like—

But.

The doors are all closed and the key is sleeping, so Riku walks in the darkness of glaring white halls with his nasty blade and Naminé sits and draws and draws and tries to make herself a heart. She folds the paper into the right shape and colors it all red and pink and presses it to her chest and waits—and waits—

But there isn't anything beating.

Riku finds her like that, breathing slow, her eyes shut and the edges of her imitation wrinkled and torn, rubbing faint dusts of color against her dress. They don't stay, though, and when she brushes them off the color leaves her cheeks as well.

"That's wrong," Riku says. She looks at him silently. He bends and tries to pry the heart away from her—but she won't, she won't let go, because this is hers and—and oh, it's broken.

Naminé looks at the boy who ripped up her heart and almost—she remembers the ghost of a feeling, so strongly that her throat closes up and her eyes drip a little and Riku's not even looking at her, he's turning the paper inside out and scrawling something ugly and ripe in the center, shading it with purple and black and when he thrusts it her he says, "That's what a real heart looks like. It's a muscle. See, there are four chambers."

She doesn't see. Her teeth ache. After a minute Riku sighs and crumples it up, so then there's just nothing. "Sorry," he says, and she thinks he does mean it, by the way his shoulders fall forwards and how he looks at Sora.

The part of her that isn't dead understands why he's angry, even if he doesn't himself. He doesn't get the girl he tried to protect and is constantly reminded by that fact when he hangs around her shadow.