Title: A Great Mistake, To Think All Witches Wicked [Riku, Namine]
Rating/Warnings: G
Summary: Riku and Namine make their choices while Sora sleeps in the pod.
AN: Written for Shiritori. Some Riku and Namine, for some reason, I’m never sure why.
A Great Mistake, To Think All Witches Wicked
“I am the Witch of the North.”
“Oh, gracious!” cried Dorothy; “are you a real witch?”
“Yes, indeed;” answered the little woman, “But I am a good witch and the people love me.”
“But I thought all witches were wicked,” said the girl, who was half frightened at facing a real witch.
“Oh no; that is a great mistake.”
—L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Pleasurable wasn’t exactly what Riku would call staying in the Old Mansion, but it beat Castle Oblivion by a long shot. Riku had been a tense mess the entire time they were moving Sora, Donald, and Goofy’s pods to Twilight Town, unable to draw a full breath until everything was hooked back up and Riku could see Sora’s heartbeat fluttering regularly on the monitoring screen again. No one bothered them in the Mansion, there wasn’t a danger of being lost in an unsolvable maze of rooms behind every doorway, and DiZ often left them for days at a time, off doing who knew what. Riku even had a room of his own here.
Not that he spent any time in it. Whenever he was in the mansion overnight, he always ended up in the chair attached to Sora’s pod, slumped against its unforgiving curves, watching the status screen for hours on end, until it seemed like he even saw it with his eyes closed.
“Do you regret your choice?” Namine asked, starting a conversation in the middle as usual. Namine was basically terrible at pretending to be a real person, which Riku couldn’t fault her for given the sum of her life experiences. She appeared silently and stood too close, her voice soft and even no matter what they were talking about, as emotionless as wind rustling leaves. When Riku looked up from the pod’s monitor, Namine was watching him intently, her pale blue eyes still as water. “It’s not too late.”
“For what?” Riku asked, voice hoarse from a night’s worth of silence. He swallowed, wincing at the dryness of his throat.
“To rest.” Namine tilted her head. “Watching him won’t wake him faster. He doesn’t know that you’re here.”
“I already made my choice,” Riku reminded, rubbing his face with one hand. He didn’t regret it, even as stretched thin as he felt after weeks of watching uselessly; the idea of leaving Sora alone in DiZ’s hands made Riku feel more and more uneasy day by day, although he wasn’t sure why.
“I don’t understand.” A faint frown appeared on Namine’s face. All of her expressions were faint, and none of them reached her eyes.
Riku dropped his gaze back to the monitor. “Do you know the story of Sleeping Beauty?”
“Of course not.”
“It’s about a princess cursed into an enchanted sleep by a witch.” Riku paused, an apology hovering on his tongue, but Namine didn’t react. “There’s lots of different versions, but in the oldest one, the princess’s knight is away doing tasks to prove his worth for her.”
Namine considered this. “Does it have a happy ending?”
“Sometimes.”
Riku didn’t think much of the conversation, just one of many he’d had with Namine before she drifted off as quietly as she’d showed up. But a few weeks later, he came into the mansion’s library to find Namine sitting with a thick volume of fairy tales in front of her.
“They’re silly,” Namine commented without looking up at Riku.
“They are a bit,” Riku admitted, coming close enough to see that Namine was reading Cinderella, the illustration on the page the fairy godmother turning the pumpkin into a coach. “They’re for children.”
“I like the drawings.” Namine looked up and for the first time, Riku felt as if there was the start of a person behind her eyes. “What’s the difference between a fairy and a witch? They both do magic.”
“Whether they do good or bad things, I guess.”
“Is that all?” Namine pressed. “What if they don’t know whether the things they do are bad or good?”
“I don’t know,” Riku said, wishing suddenly to be free of the conversation, free of the responsibility of explaining right and wrong to a Nobody. He left without getting the book he’d come in for, left the library, left the mansion, left Twilight Town, but he still saw the green line of Sora’s heartbeat when he closed his eyes, painted on the back of his eyelids from familiarity.
He felt bad for his sharpness when he eventually returned, but not bad enough to find Namine purposefully. Instead he found the volume of fairy tales sitting on the seat of the pod monitoring station. Sitting down, Riku balanced the heavy book against the monitor screen and opened it, paging past the first few stories to find Sleeping Beauty.
“Once upon a time,” he read out loud, “there was a king and queen who were so sorry that they had no children that it cannot be expressed.”
He felt silly reading out loud, reading quietly at first, but gained confidence after a few sentences. At least it drowned out the faint hum of the pod. He’d read to Sora all the time when they were little, and even though Namine had said Sora didn’t know they were there, Riku thought that if any noises seeped into Sora’s dreams that it would be more pleasant to listen to him than that constant machined drone.
“After supper, right away, the lord almoner married them in the castle chapel and the lady of honor drew the curtains,” Riku finished eventually. “They had very little sleep that night; the princess, certainly, had little occasion.”
“They’re nicer read out loud,” Namine said from the floor beside Riku’s seat. He hadn’t heard her come in, but she was sitting down there now, legs tucked underneath herself, head bent over her sketchbook. She was drawing Sora, Riku saw, looking away when he recognized the brown of his hair against the faint lavender strokes that made up the pod.
“I can read another one,” Riku offered, even though he’d been planning to anyway. “Is there one you liked?”
“Cinderella, please,” Namine requested. “The pumpkin is my favorite part, and the mice and lizards.”
“All right,” Riku agreed. He found the page, but paused. “How do you know what a lizard is? Have you ever seen one?”
“From Sora’s memories.” The scratch of Namine’s crayons against the paper was only a little softer than her voice. “You used to catch them between your hands and watch them change from green to brown.”
Riku had to clear his throat to start reading. “Once there was a gentleman who married, for his second wife, the proudest and most haughty woman that was ever seen. She had two daughters of her own…”
Riku reached the end without interruption, thumbing the corner of the book thoughtfully.
“Cinderella doesn’t forgive her sisters in every version,” Riku commented. As a child, he’d found the sanitized ending unsatisfying to his black-and-white sense of justice. “In the original story, she heats iron shoes on their feet and makes them dance until they die.”
When he got no response, Riku looked down to see that Namine had stopped drawing, hand still. She was staring unblinkingly at Sora’s pod.
“Namine?” he asked.
“The monitor,” she said. Puzzled, Riku shut the book and looked, but all the readings seemed the same as ever to him, the slow flutter of Sora’s heart, a few percent extra of memory, perhaps. “It’s stopped now. He was remembering.”
“What does that mean?” Riku asked, fists curling in frustration.
Namine looked up, her mirror gaze unreadable. “Perhaps his heart can hear your voice, even in such a deep sleep.”
“Do you think it will help?” Riku demanded, sitting up straighter. He’d read every book in the library if it would wake Sora up even one minute sooner.
“I have no idea.” Namine looked back down to the drawing in her lap, hair falling from her shoulders to hide her face. “I’m sorry.”
You should be, Riku thought, but it was too cruel to say, even if DiZ was right and Namine didn’t have feelings to be hurt. He got up, shaking off that thought as he walked up to the library, mulling over what had made that situation different than all the times he had sat so close and talked with Namine or DiZ, all the times he’d talked to Sora himself out of loneliness or fear.
Maybe it was the familiarity of the stories, Riku reasoned, grasping at straws but still better than at thin air. Some of his earliest memories were of either Sora’s mother reading those fairy tales to them at bedtime, or Riku reading them to Sora with a flashlight after light’s out. Riku skimmed the dusty shelves, looking for the hole the book fit into, and then scanning the faded spines nearby, searching for something else that might be familiar to Sora. It was too much to ask, a wonder even a few of the fairy tales had been mostly the same, and Riku left the library empty-handed.
Riku had returned to the Destiny Islands several times already, but this was the first time he’d turned thief while there, slipping into Sora’s bedroom like a shadow, trying to think of nothing but his task as he knelt by the cluttered bookshelf. Shifting Sora’s knickknacks to the side, Riku pulled three of the most well-worn books, then shifted around the rest so that it looked like nothing was missing. It wasn’t hard, given Sora’s clutter.
“I never thought I would miss that,” Riku chuckled to himself mirthlessly as he stood. He tucked the books safely in his biggest pocket and went out the same was as he’d come, latching the window behind him with a tiny Aero.
Namine was in the room when Riku returned, and shifted as if to get out of the chair next to the monitor, but Riku waved at her to sit back down. She watched with interest as Riku sat on the floor, cross-legged, and pulled one of the books out of his pocket.
“You can stay if you want,” he said. The binding of the paperback was loose from overuse, and Riku had to be careful that the first few pages didn’t peel off in his hand as he turned them. “There are witches in it.”
“Good witches?” Namine wanted to know. “Or bad?”
Riku didn’t feel much like smiling, exactly, but the corner of his mouth turned up on its own. He hoped that Sora would hear that he was trying, if anything. “Both kinds.”
