i.
Sometimes, it feels almost as though you've lived through things more than once.
It's like you've seen your best friend fall prey to his own misgivings, his own insecurities, over and over. You know it has only happened once, but you can't help but feel as though you've experienced this before—watching someone you hold dear submitting to the darkness which slumbers within their heart.
When you're kept awake at night by fitful dreams of Castle Oblivion and the forgotten girl trapped within it, you wonder just how many times it has happened to you. How many times you have been sealed away in a bone-white silence, doomed to a Rip Van Winkle slumber? How many times you have had your memories picked apart and reassembled by the whim and fancy of some sorrowful witch or some disillusioned idealist?
Even before sleep claims you, even before you fall into dreamless rest, you always remember those wistful blue eyes on a face filled with more sadness than you've ever seen, with your name on her (but who is she?) lips, promising you something. I'll come back for you, she says sometimes, or, I'm sorry.
You want to reach out so badly for those fleeing fingertips, but you can't.
You wonder how many times you've felt the contours of a seashell-charm, sharp against the palm of your hand; how many times you have clutched it for reassurance; how many times it has acted as a beacon when you're lost and alone, when the weight of the world seems too much for you to bear.
How many times—?
It's a fragile thing, memory. Perhaps your time spent within the Naminé's prison has scrambled your thoughts and addled your brain. You can't rely on your recollections, not when they seem so fluid and ever-changing, never remaining constant for long.
Sometimes, you see Kairi in your dreams: she holds you so close, as though she can't bear to let you go, and makes you promise to return. Other times, it's someone else with sorrow in her smile and goodbyes on her lips, telling you she'll never leave you behind.
But leave you behind they both do, in your prison of crystal petals and clamouring voices—voices that never seem to leave you alone.
- - x x x x x - -
ii.
It's like she's rewinding in slow motion—Ven seems so fragile, so breakable, sprawled in that cold chair which is more throne than humble seat. It seems as though he's once again the lost boy she met all those years ago, the very same boy who had looked at her with such trust in his eyes.
She feels like she has let him down, has betrayed him in the worst possible way. I couldn't save you, she says to the slumbering boy. I couldn't save you—I failed you, not only as a comrade, but as a friend.
There's no way for her to forgive herself; how can she? The world as she knows it is tumbling down around her, and nothing is as it seems—Terra is gone, consumed by his own doubts and inner darkness, and Ven has been—
Wait for me, she says as she seals him away – like the witch cursing the prince, she thinks with a shudder – watching as the doors close on his sleeping form. I'll make sure your heart finds its way back to you.
When she leaves, she doesn't look back—she can't, for fear of not being able to carry on.
- - x x x x x - -
iii.
Sometimes, when he sits atop the Clocktower, he remembers—but the memories that come to mind do not involve the familiar faces of Hayner, Pence and Olette.
Those faces surface when he least expects them: he could be gazing into the honey-gold skies of eternal twilight, abandoning the salty-sweet ice-cream that melts sticky-cold to his hands, when he glimpses slivers of a life that never was.
Instead of childish smiles and laughing eyes, he sees tear-stained cheeks and lying faces; instead of homework assignments and Struggle tournaments, he thinks of missions and snap-jawed beasts with their hollow eyes and soundless voices.
He tries time and time again to reach out to these fleeing fragments of memory which linger at the edge of his subconscious, incorporeal as dreams. Sometimes, he sees a man with poison-green eyes who can never meet his stare; other times, he sees a girl, nameless and faceless who remains distant and faraway, a hazy figure seen through smoke-streaked glass.
It's futile, Roxas realises belatedly as he faces the zipper-mouthed, silver-skinned creature whose limbs wriggle like river weeds—all the while, he's been chasing shadows of dreams when the truth was in front of him all along.
- - x x x x x - -
iv.
You're back in your own reality, and it's odd – unsettling, even – to return to the world of the living, away from a hollow world of phantom memories and empty voices. You're away from the stark white silence of your cell—you're back home, surrounded by the sand and the sea, the salt breeze tickling your nose, watching the sun set alongside the girl with coral-bright hair.
"Did you say something?" you ask Kairi, but she only gazes at you with confusion on her face and a question on her lips.
"Never mind," you say, answering her before she can voice the words which teeter on the tip of her tongue.
She worries about you—you can see it in her eyes.
You can't tell her—not yet. You can't tell her about the voices you hear at the back of your mind, the forlorn murmurs of those long gone: you hear all of their hopes and dreams, their fears and fantasies. You know what they wish for: you feel their anger, their regrets, everything—as though their emotions are your own.
Humans are such fragile things, you realise that now—you know it from the boy named Ventus who came to you so long ago, the one who lost his heart and had nowhere to go; you know it from the Nobody whose bitterness suffuses your soul, from the imperfect puppet-girl who nobody remembers, the weight of her decisions keeping you awake at night. You know it from the way the aster-pale witch-princess had shattered the heart of your friend's doppelgänger, destroying him in one fell swoop.
It's a delicate balance, a tentative state of equilibrium you've established between them all, and you can't break it—not now.
- - x x x x x - -
General disclaimers apply. Written for the kh_drabble Secret Santa on LiveJournal.